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Thread: Your 5 favourite books

  1. #61
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    This is a Lazarene thread I guess and all the better for that. I don't really have a top five books because they are always being jostled by new discoveries and re-readings. I am delighted and astonished to see someone mentioned Hal Clements Mission of Gravity which I read many years ago and found it full of "hard" science and just enough fiction when I was at a phase that needed that. I recommend it to any late teen science-fiction fan. One book which I reckon I would put in a top five would be The Uttermost Part of the Earth by Bridges. I have recently discovered a brilliant American called Jayne Anne Phillips. Would she knock Nostromo or Voss off their perches in my personal pantheon? Maybe. I unhesitatingly draw attention to her.

  2. #62
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    The Iliad
    War and Peace
    The Stars My Destination
    Altered Carbon
    The Great Conversation - a giant essay about education and its merits

  3. #63
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    Hello everyone!!

    The Master of Ballantrae (R. L. Stevenson)
    Adam Bede (George Eliot)
    Macbeth (The Swan of Avon)
    A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
    Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)


  4. #64
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    The Iliad
    The Divine Comedy
    The Oresteia
    Mason and Dixon
    Collected poems of Frost (Library of America)
    'So - this is where we stand. Win all, lose all,
    we have come to this: the crisis of our lives'

  5. #65
    Moby Dick - Herman Melville
    Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
    Collected Stories of Jorge Luis Borges
    Julius Caesar - William Shakespeare
    Essays - Montaigne

    Also in contention:

    The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa
    Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman
    Waiting for Godot- Samuel Beckett
    Dubliners - James Joyce
    Suttree - Cormac McCarthy

    5 more that are deserving:

    Collected Poetry of Rainier Maria Rilke (Trans. Edward Snow)
    The Theban Plays - Sophocles
    To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
    Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad
    Harmonium - Wallace Stevens

    Actually, this is really hard:

    Metamorphoses - Ovid
    The Iliad - Homer
    Lolita - Nabokov
    Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer
    Snow Country - Yasunari Kawabata

    And there's probably 10 more that have a claim as well (I've also tried to keep it to one book per author). Sometimes I find this question easy, but other times, after re-familiarising myself with certain works I find it near impossible to clearly choose 5.
    Vladimir: (sententious.) To every man his little cross. (He sighs.) Till he dies. (Afterthought.) And is forgotten.

  6. #66
    Middlemarch
    Blood Meridian
    Absalom, Absalom
    The Ambassadors
    Moby Dick

  7. #67
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    Quote Originally Posted by Carmilla View Post
    Hello everyone!!

    The Master of Ballantrae (R. L. Stevenson)
    Adam Bede (George Eliot)
    Macbeth (The Swan of Avon)
    A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
    Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)

    carmilla--have you read some of Stevenson's other famous works?

  8. #68
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    Phillips is a notable short story writer Ennison. I notice that theVoice of the oppressed White Man has been banned. What could he have done. By the way if Phillips was a bit more productive she would be more like a candidate for a major accolade than most Drones. But we won't go there again. Like yourself and Pierre I would find it hard to choose just five. But most of the books mentioned in the lists above are very good.

  9. #69
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    Hello bounty!!

    Quote Originally Posted by bounty View Post
    carmilla--have you read some of Stevenson's other famous works?
    Yes, I have. Here are the books I've read by Stevenson:

    The Black Arrow
    Kidnapped
    Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with The Merry Men and other tales
    Treasure Island
    Prince Otto and the Body Snatcher


  10. #70
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    Bleak House Charles Dickens
    Northanger Abbey Jane Austen (although it is being overtaken by Pride and Prejudice, but I don't want to be conventional)
    The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Graham (although my alternative children's classic would be Winter Holiday Arthur Ransome)
    The Importace of Being Earnest Oscar Wilde
    Glass of Blessings Barbara Pym
    Previously JonathanB

    The more I read, the more I shall covet to read. Robert Burton The Anatomy of Melancholy Partion3, Section 1, Member 1, Subsection 1

  11. #71
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    Quote Originally Posted by Carmilla View Post
    Hello bounty!!



    Yes, I have. Here are the books I've read by Stevenson:

    The Black Arrow
    Kidnapped
    Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with The Merry Men and other tales
    Treasure Island
    Prince Otto and the Body Snatcher

    ah, im not familiar with prince otto and the body snatcher, i'll have to keep my eyes peeled.

    there's a sequel to kidnapped I can recommend. its called catriona---very different in feel from kidnapped, but I was glad I read it.

  12. #72
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    Quote Originally Posted by bounty View Post
    ah, im not familiar with prince otto and the body snatcher, i'll have to keep my eyes peeled.

    there's a sequel to kidnapped I can recommend. its called catriona---very different in feel from kidnapped, but I was glad I read it.
    Thanks for the recommendation, though I knew about Catriona already, it's good to know you enjoyed it.

  13. #73
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    That's a very catholic choice Lydgate. I need to try Mitchell. I take it Ubik is Dick's novel. My youngest fellow has been reading a lot of his work recently. I like him myself - just because of his absolutely strange but clever angles on reality

  14. #74
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    if I had to pick just five:

    1. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
    2. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
    3. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
    4. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
    5. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

  15. #75
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    Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
    One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquez
    To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
    Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
    Beloved by Toni Morrison
    “I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”
    -Virginia Woolf

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