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Thread: Male Top 10 favourite books and Female Top 10 favourite books

  1. #1
    Registered User kelby_lake's Avatar
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    Male Top 10 favourite books and Female Top 10 favourite books

    Couldn't really think of a good title.
    Anyhow, I thought it would be interesting to see what sort of books each gender gravitates towards. Do women have different favourite books than men? Or is there a crossover?

    Basically list your gender and the top 10 books you most enjoy. Don't put Ulysses because you think that must top a list- this is what sort of books you like. Then I'll try and compile two lists (one men's top 10, one woman's)- and we can analyse to our heart's content.

    I'll count up on 5th October
    Last edited by kelby_lake; 09-06-2009 at 06:26 AM.

  2. #2
    Original Poster Buh4Bee's Avatar
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    The Catcher in the Rye (just the best)
    Anna Karenina (epic!!)
    The Sun Also Rises
    Pride and Prejudice
    The Great Gatsby
    Lolita (epic)
    The Call of the Wild
    Gone with the Wind (read in highschool and still love it)
    A Street Car Named Desire (haunted me)
    Roots (powerful)
    Angela's Ashes
    Last edited by Buh4Bee; 09-05-2009 at 08:10 PM. Reason: forgot gender

  3. #3
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    Quote Originally Posted by kelby_lake View Post
    Couldn't really think of a good title.
    Anyhow, I thought it would be interesting to see what sort of books each gender gravitates towards. Do women have different favourite books than men? Or is there a crossover?
    "The Top Ten" by Zane contains the top ten lists of 125 leading writers. Each list is shown under the writer's name, so you could add up the choices of women writers and male writers to get some impression of this.

    Like all lists, it is flawed, of course. It includes a few writers I've never heard of who do strange things like picking the Bible!

  4. #4
    Male

    In this order:

    The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
    As I Lay Dying by Faulkner
    Les Miserables by Hugo
    The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner
    Lolita by Nabokov
    Anna Karenina by Tolstoy
    Wuthering Heights by Bronte
    Howards End by Forster
    The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck
    Sons and Lovers by Lawrence

    If the list includes poetry and drama, then:

    The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
    As I Lay Dying by Faulkner
    Les Miserables by Hugo
    The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner
    King Lear by Shakespeare
    Selected poetry of John Keats
    Lolita by Nabokov
    Anna Karenina by Tolstoy
    Othello by Shakespeare
    Wuthering Heights by Bronte
    Last edited by Adagio; 09-05-2009 at 11:03 AM.
    Only an idiot has no grief; only a fool would forget it. What else is there in this world sharp enough to stick to your guts? - Faulkner

  5. #5
    Female

    so far in my life,my favourites are:

    A Confederacy of dunces by J.Kennedy Toole
    Oblomov by Goncharov
    Auto-da-fé by Elias Canetti
    The House of silence by Orhan Pamuk
    To Kill a mockingbird by Harper Lee
    Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez
    Of Mice and men by Steinbeck
    The Good earth by Pearl Buck
    Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins
    Lord of Flies by William Golding

    I think that's it for now.But there is this really wierd thing that my favourite writer is actually Camus but non of his work is on my list.wierd ha?I think i always see sartre and Camus's works as philosophy not exactly literature.Maybe thats why..
    While you live your life, you are in some way an organic whole with all life. But once you start the mental life you pluck the apple.You've severed the connexion between,the apple and the tree:the organic connexion. And if you've got nothing in your life but the mental life, then you yourself are a plucked apple...
    You've fallen off the tree.

  6. #6
    O dark dark dark Barbarous's Avatar
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    great idea, hope we get some interesting results!

    Male
    1. Finnegans Wake by Joyce
    2.The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Sterne
    3. Moby-Dick by Melville
    4.The Waves by Woolf
    5.Ulysses by Joyce
    6.The Idiot by Dostoevsky
    7.Ficciones by Borges
    8.Les fleurs du mal par Baudelaire
    9.Gargantua et Pantagruel par Rabelais
    10.The Collected poems of Wallace Stevens by Stevens
    If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
    -W.Blake

  7. #7
    somewhere else Helga's Avatar
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    female

    in no particular order

    The Collector by Fowles
    La valse aux adieux by Kundera
    Evgeny Onegin by Pushkin
    Lolita by Nabakov
    Daniel Deronda by Eliot
    Richard II by Shakespeare
    The old man and the sea by Hemingway
    the story of Gilgamesh
    The Idiot by Dostoevsky
    One hundred years of solitude by Marques
    I hope death is joyful, and I hope I'll never return -Frida Khalo

    If I seem insensitive to what you are going through, understand it's the way I am- Mr. Spock

    Personally, I think that the unique and supreme delight lies in the certainty of doing 'evil'–and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil. - Baudelaire

  8. #8
    Registered User Desolation's Avatar
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    Male
    1. The Portable Nietzsche
    2. Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
    3. Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
    4. Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
    5. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
    6. The Complete Works of Arthur Rimbaud
    7. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
    8. Ask the Dust by John Fante
    9. Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller
    10. Hunger by Knut Hamsun

  9. #9
    Registered User kelby_lake's Avatar
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    I'll put mine up. Some interesting choices.

    Female

    (in no order)

    Lolita
    The Great Gatsby
    Brideshead Revisited
    Tender is The Night
    Les Enfants Terribles
    Rebecca
    Giovanni's Room
    The Last Tycoon
    The Good Soldier
    Checkmate (3rd in the Noughts and Crosses trilogy)

  10. #10
    Moon Goddess crystalmoonshin's Avatar
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    Female

    In no particular order:

    Book of Revelations
    Book of Ecclesiastes
    Dream of Red Mansions
    Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
    The Three Musketeers (Dumas)
    Kokoro (Natsume Soseki)
    Thirst for Love (Yukio Mishima)
    A Long Fatal Love Chase (Louisa May Alcott)
    A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
    A Pale View of Hills (Kazuo Ishiguro)
    Vanitas vanitatum, dixit Ecclesiastes, vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas.

    Yo sé quién soy, y sé que puedo ser no sólo los que he dicho. - Don Quixote

  11. #11
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    Male...and it changes all the time, but at the moment I'll go with these:

    Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
    Company by Samuel Beckett
    Chimera by John Barth
    Ulysses by James Joyce
    Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
    Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
    The Recognitions by William Gaddis
    The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
    Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov
    Little, Big by John Crowley

  12. #12
    Asa Nisi Masa mayneverhave's Avatar
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    Male.

    The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner
    In Search of Lost Time - Proust
    Hamlet - Shakespeare
    Henry IV, Part One - Shakespeare
    The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky
    Ulysses - Joyce
    The Divine Comedy - Dante
    The Waste Land - Eliot
    The Tower (collection) - Yeats
    The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald

  13. #13
    Registered User sixsmith's Avatar
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    Male

    10 books i enjoy very much:

    Herzog - Saul Bellow
    Sabbath's Theatre - Philip Roth
    Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
    Suttree - Cormac McCarthy
    The Collected Poems of WB Yeats - Yeats
    A House for Mr Biswas - V.S Naipul
    Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
    The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
    Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
    Disgrace - JM Coetzee
    Last edited by sixsmith; 10-17-2009 at 07:59 AM.

  14. #14
    Original Poster Buh4Bee's Avatar
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    few more:

    The Good Earth
    Trilogy- Lord of the Rings
    The Hobbit

  15. #15
    The Poetic Warrior Dark Muse's Avatar
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    Some of them are pretty solid, some of the other choices are subject to change, but such is at it stands now.

    Catcher in the Rye ~ J.D. Salinger
    Siddhartha ~ Hermann Hesse
    The Magus ~ John Fowles
    The Fountainhead ~ Ayn Rand
    No Exit ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
    The Legend of Nightfall ~Mickey Zucker Reichert
    Island of the Blue Dolphins ~Scott O'Dell
    The Red Tent ~ Anita Diamant
    The Stranger ~ Camus
    Middlesex ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

    Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

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