What are your top 10 favourite books of all time?

[ChocolateConnoisseur]

Here are mine:
10. The Outsiders
9: Heidi
8: Northern Lights
7: Matilda
6: Anne of Green Gables
5: The Queen of Dirt Island- Donal Ryan
4: The Thursday Murder Club
3: Bridget Jones
2: Foster Claire Keegan
1: Small things like these Claire Keegan

A lot of comfort reads in there from when I was a child

Master Of The Game - Syndey Sheldon
Kale and Abel - Jeffrey Archer
Stepping Stones - Maureen Lee
The Sweetest Thing - Emma Blair
Tuppence To Cross The Mersey - Helen Forrester
Francesca's Party - Sheila Flannagan
Circle Of Friends - Maeve Binchy
Forget You Had A Daughter - Sandra Gregory
Hearts Invisible Furies - John Boyne
And.....lastly
The Princess And The Pea - it fascinated me as a child.

Kane and Abel even 🤣

Howard’s End
Saturday
Gone With the Wind
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Remains of the Day
I Capture the Castle
Jane Eyre
Pride and Prejudice
The Year of Pleasures
Memoirs of a Geisha
To Kill a Mockingbird

all books that gripped me at various ages.

when I was little I loved What Katy Did, Heidi, Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie

My Family And Other Animals (plus sequels) - Gerald Durrell
Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
Rachel’s Holiday - Marian Keyes
The Cazalet Chronicles - Elizabeth Jane Howard (ok this is 5 books so cheating slightly here!
Caught In The Light - Robert Goddard
Anne Of Green Gables - Lucy M Montgomery
The Snowman - Raymond Briggs
Ballet Shoes - Noel Streatfeild
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

Quite a diverse collection!

Lark Rise to Candleford, Flora Thompson
The Crimson Petal and the White, Michel Faber
Slammerkin, Emma Donohue
Death on the Nile, Agatha Christie
Dracula, Bran Stoker
Anno Dracula, Kim Newman
The Darling Buds of May, HE Bates
The Night Watch, Sarah Waters
Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K Jerome
Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management (I love it and can sit and read it like a novel)

Not in any particular order:

The Color Purple, Alice Walker
The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
84 Charing Cross Road, Helene Hanff
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Kate Atkinson

1. Aldous Huxley: Crome Yellow
2. Robert Graves: Goodbye to all That
3. Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited
4. Oscar Wilde: Picture of Dorian Gray
5. Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
6. Dickens: David Copperfield
7. Bill Bryson: Short History of Nearly Everything
8. Anthony Burgess: Enderby
9. Virginia Woolf: Orlando
10. P G Wodehouse: Right Ho Jeeves

Love this Placemaking for future reads

in no order…

The Secret History - Donna Tartt
Gaudy Night - Dorothy Sayers
Wise Children - Angela Carter
Morvern Callar - Alan Warner
Good Omens - Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
The Dark is Rising - Susan Cooper
The Children of Green Knowe - Lucy Boston
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf

I cannot possibly rank them. I have 16 on my all time 5 star list, but if I had to only pick 10 I think:

Senor Vivo and the Coco Lord, Louis de Bernieres

Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian

Pereira Maintains, Antonio Tabbuchi

Captains of the Sands, Jorge Amado

Sashenka, Simon Sebag Montefiore

The Idiot, Elif Batuman

Adam Bede, George Eliot

A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles

Frenchman’s Creek, Daphne du Maurier

Persuasion, Jane Austen

Behind the Scenes at the Museum
I Capture the Castle
Rebecca
Jane Eyre
Gone with the Wind
The Little Princess
My Family and other Animals/ Birds Beasts and Relatives
We Need to talk about Kevin
Clouds Amongst the Stars
The Plague and I/ The Egg and I

So many good ones I’d forgotten about!

I’d have to jiggle my list because Rebecca and The Great Gatsby are definitely high up.

In no particular order...
Behind The Scenes At The Museum - Kate Atkinson
Still Life - Sarah Winman
Circe - Madeline Millar
Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (although not sure I can bear to read it again)
The Offing - Benjamin Myers
Great Circle - Maggie Shipstead
The Summer Book - Tove Jansson

And from my childhood...
The Earthsea Trilogy - Ursula K Le Guin

Are you guys all coming up with these lists really quickly or have you thought about them for ages? I've been thinking about my top 10 since I first saw this thread but still can't decide. I thought there might be some that just come straight to mind but actually I'm struggling. I'll keep thinking

@Rae36 mine's pretty much in my head but I record all the books I've read on Goodreads so I looked over the books I'd given a 5 star rating to in case I'd missed anything.

The Darkness is Light Enough - Chris Ferris
The Lord of the Rings (all three parts) - J.R.R. Tolkien
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
The Colour of Magic - Terry Pratchett
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
The Third Policeman - Brian O'Nolan
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
The Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley
The Virgin and the Gypsy - D.H. Lawrence
1984 - George Orwell

Carrie's War by Nina Bawden
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
Middlemarch by George Elliot
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (TBH any of his big four)
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Neopolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante

Also rans:
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
Possession by AS Byatt

Actually I am going to swap Adam Bede for Wuthering Heights. I read it regularly and differently each time.

In no particular order mine are:

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
Just Kids by Patti Smith
The Crow Road by Iain Banks
The Outsider by Albert Camus
I, Claudius by Robert Graves
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

@Rae36 I did exactly the same as @TattiePants - great minds and all that!

The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Secret History
Rebecca
We Need To Talk About Kevin
The Handmaid's Tale
Oryx and Crake
Fingersmith
Night Waking
Emotionally Weird
The Hand That First Held Mine

This is HARD. I agree with many on others lists!!
In no real order, the 10 that came to mind:

I capture the castle - Dodie Smith
Goodnight, Mr Tom - Michelle Magorian
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Neapolitan Quartet - Elena Ferrante

Hamnet - Maggie O Farrell
A confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Cazelet Chronicles - Elizabeth Jane Howard
Circe - Madeline Millar.

could have been so many more!

Possession was an also ran for me too. Used to love it. Also
The Famished Road by Ben Okri.

Oh gosh, how to narrow it down...
To Kill A Mockingbird
One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest
Wuthering Heights
The Song of Achilles
The Handmaid's Tale
Great Expectations
American Gods
Brave New World
The Kite Runner
Klara and the Sun

But ask me again tomorrow and I'll probably come up with a totally different list.

1: News from Tartary by Peter Fleming
2: Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
3: A Little Life by Hanya Yanigihara
4: A Widow For One Year by John Irving
5: Under The Net by Iris Murdoch
6: Larry’s Party by Carol Shields
7: The Amateur Marriage by Ann Tyler
8: The L Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks
9: We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
10: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Attwood

There are so many more! But these are books that have stayed with me, stories I still think about and have read many times and that came into my life at different stages.

Not the best of all time necessarily but those that have a very special place in my heart and save first in a fire!

Watership Down - Richard Adams
The Talisman- Stephen King & Peter Straub
Starlight and Storm- Gaston Rebuffat
A Time of Gifts - Patrick Leigh Fermor
The Man In The High Castle- Philip K Dick
Wolf Hall trilogy - Hilary Mantel
Cat’s Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
From Hell - Alan Moore