Give me your top 5

[Cindy87]

Give me your top 5 novels of all time based purely on how much you enjoyed reading them.

Also the last book you read and enjoyed.

Mine, off the top of my head:

1. The End of the Affair
2. This is Life
3. The Bell Jar
4. The Secret History
5. Only Ever Yours

The Paper Lovers

I've read 5 amazing books lately! They were:

1. The Nightingale, Kristin Hannah
2. The Girl with No Name, Diney Costeloe
3. Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens
4. The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett
5. The Beekeeper's Promise, Fiona Valpy

American Psycho
The Patrick O'Brian Jack Aubrey series.
Game of Thrones series (although I nearly kicked it off the list as probably won't get finished)
Stephen King's The Bachman Books (collection of novellas but the Running Man and the Long Walk are superb)
Terry Pratchett. Witches/Watch/Moist based books especially.

Cheating I know but they're the ones I reread the most.

Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
Dune, Frank Herbert
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami

Recent hits:
The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, Stuart Turton
Rivers of London series, Ben Aaronovich

How can anyone choose just 5?
In no particular order...
The Secret History
A Man Called Ove
The God of Small Things
The Book Thief
A Thousand Splendid Suns
...but I could go on all day and if I think too hard there will be many that I've missed.

The most recent - The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. WARNING - if you read this you will inevitably lie awake at 5am wondering about all of your alternate lives.

Oooh this is a tough one. Here's mine in no particular order

A Thousand Splendid Suns
A Prayer For Owen Meaney
Milkman
Days Without End
Choke Chain

I also really want to add Hamnet and the Thursday Murder Club but can't knock any off the above list!! So there's 7 for you

1984
Atonement
Memoirs of a Geisha
The Handmaids Tale
The Testaments

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Rachel’s Holiday - Marian Keyes
Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
My Family and Other Animals - Gerald Durrell
Caught In The Light - Robert Goddard

Is anyone else using this thread for inspiration on what to add to their reading list? Just in case, I also recommend The View From Castle Rock by Alice Munro and Middlesex by Jeffrey Euginides.

Out of Love -VIctoria Clayton
The Magician's Nephew -CS Lewis
The Four-Storey Mistake -Elizabeth Enright
Persuasion -Jane Austen
The Stand -Stephen King

And recent:
A Room Full of Bones-Elly Griffiths

Today's top 5

The Cornish Trilogy (Robertson Davies) bit of a cheat as it's 3 books
Piranesi (Susannah Clark)
The Flounder (Gunter Grass)
The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco)
Fire and Hemlock (Diana Wynne Jones)

May be a different top 5 tomorrow

The Name of the Wind and A Wise Man's Fear (first 2 in the Kingkiller trilogy by Patrick Rothfuss)

The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman

The Harry Potter books

A Suitable Boy

The Lord of the Rings

The Heart's Invisible Furies
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Rebecca
The Book Thief
The Help

Recent: The Light Years

Nicholas Nickleby
Regeneration Trilogy
Cold Christmas (children's book)
Good Morning Midnight
The Woman in White

Books I really enjoyed at the time of reading and made a big impression.

Recently read & enjoyed a lot:-

Black Swan Green

Not definitive and in no order :
the house of sleep :Jonathan coe
secret life of bees: sue monk kidd
lovely bones: alice sebold
the lost lights of st kilda Elisabeth Gifford
the lost man jane harper

Bumping this thread as am sad I missed it when first posted!

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
The Secret History
The Handmaid’s Tale
Love in the Time of Cholera
Memoirs of a Geisha

Piranesi

Honourable mention to the first part of Dracula, which is one of the most gripping things I’ve ever read - but I don’t love the whole novel so not sure whether it counts (no pun intended).

In no particular order -

Precious Bane - Mary Webb
Ferney - James Long
Lambs of God - Marielle Day
Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel
A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini

Last read - The Mirror and the Light.

I have about 10 favourites, so I'll include those not already mentioned above (in no particular order)

1. Stoner - John Williams
2. The Complete Sherlock Holmes
3. Crime & Punishment
4. The Remains of the Day
5. The Kite Runner

Five is too hard but reading what others put makes me think of

The Spanish Bride by Georgette Heyer
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Gift Horses by Betty Singleton
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons - something narsty in the woodshed
August Folly by Angela Thirkell

Ooh, tough one.

1. The Women's Room (Marilyn French)
2. Franny and Zooey (JD Salinger - I've read the thing so many times the spine is practically damaged)
3. Generation X (Douglas Coupland)
4. The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
5. Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee (Meera Syal)

Last book I read and loved: The Shadow Rising by Robert Jordan. Currently rereading Emotionally Weird by Kate Atkinson.

Sophie's World
The Royal Game
The flowers of Hiroshima
Lost Worlds
Prisoners of Geography.