What are your five favorite books?

[Yessie42]

I am just curious to see who likes what books. I personally think it would be fun to see which books are some of the more popular.

So, just post your five favorite books. If you like a series then just put the series down for ONE book.

My Favorites:
~Twilight Saga by Stephanie Meyer
~The Secret Circle Trilogy by L.J Smith
~Dark Visions Trilogy
~The Key to the Golden Firebird by Maureen Johnson
~The Vampire Academy Series By Richelle Mead

[Pecksie]

I have so many favourites I can't really limit myself to five, so I will list five novels I've read recently (i.e. last year) and which I really enjoyed:

1. Eugene Onegin, by A. S. Pushkin
2. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
3. Cecilia, by Fanny Burney
4. The virgin suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides
5. Don't call it night, by Amos Oz

All of them strongly recommended!

[oopsycandy]

hhmm... favourite five today would be

1.The pure weight of the heart-Antonella Gambotto
2. Neverwhere-Neil Gaiman
3.Vampire chronicles-Anne Rice
4.Fall on your knees-Ann-Marie MacDonald
5.The count of Monte Cristo

[semi-fly]

This is in no way an all-time favorite list but over the last few years I've re-read these books a number of times.

1. Animal Farm by George Orwell
2. On The Road by Jack Kerouac
3. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
4. Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
5. Utopia by Sir Thomas More

[Mag Master 21]

1) The Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
2) East of Eden - Steinbeck
3) The Den of Thieves - James B. Stewart
4) The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald
5) A Farewell to Arms - Hemingway

honorable mentions:
A Confederacy of Dunces - Toole
The Fountainhead - Rand

[Dark Muse]

1. The Fountainhead ~ Ayn Rand
2. The Magus ~ John Fowles
3. The Legend of Nightfall ~ Mickey Zucker Reichert
4. No Exit (if plays count) ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
5. Island of the Blue Dolphins ~ Scott O'Dell

It was hard trying to choose which one for number 5

[zoomy]

The Idiot - Dostoevsky
Madame Bovary - Flaubert
A Hero of Our Time - Lermontov
The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald
The Red and The Black - Stendhal

[amalia1985]

Wuthering Heights- Emily Bronte
Jamaica's Inn- Daphne DuMaurier
The Devils- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Queen Of Spades- Alexander Pushkin
Age Of Innocence-Edith Wharton

[Saladin]

1. The Koran by God (if you are a muslim)
2. The Conference of the Birds by Farid Ad-din Attar (persian sufi poet)
3. The Brothers Karamazov (not surprising) by Dostoevsky
4. Faust by Goethe
5. Hunger by Hamsun

[Dr. Hill]

Crime and Punishment
The Brothers Karamazov
The Idiot
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Frankenstein

[lovetheworld]

1)A Dream of Red Mansion
2)The red and the black
3)Journey to the West
4)Water Margin
5)Romance of the Three Kingdoms

[ALF]

1- Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett
2- Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
3- The picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
4- Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Friedrich Nietzsche
5- Alice in wonderland - Lewis Carrol

[atena_63]

My favorites :
1) Amerka by Kafka
2) The train was on time by Heinrich Boll
3) Farewell to Arms by Hemingway
4) The Catcher in he Rye by Salinger
5) Coloussuus Marousi by Henry Miler

[Mark F.]

Green Hills of Africa by Ernest Hemingway
Journey to the End of the Night by Louis Ferdinand Céline
Notes From the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Hunger by Knut Hamsun
King Lear by William Shakespeare

[LadyWentworth]

Jane Eyre - Bronte
Persuasion - Austen
The Phantom of the Opera - Leroux
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - Lewis
A Tale of Two Cities - Dickens

(The fifth usually switches around with the fourth and sometimes one of those two will be knocked out of the list for Forster's Maurice - it is all based on my mood :))

[Mariamosis]

John Steinbeck- The Grapes of Wrath
Charles Dickens - David Copperfield
George Orwell - 1984
Jules Verne - Journey to the Center of the Earth
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray

[jekan blazer]

5 born on a blue day
4 eragon series
3 golden compas series
2 the "percy jackson and the olympians" series
1 twilight series

[kiki1982]

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë (it has given me more pleasure researching in the last year than any book before!)
The Three Musketeers-trilogy - Alexandre Dumas (so human, waw)
Something by José Saramago, although his books are all fantastic.
Blue Fox - The first book by Björk's text writer Sjón
The Ideal Recepy - (forgot the writer, also Scandinavian) about the quest in Sweden tot the ideal recepy of a traditional Swedish dish/identity.


I guess there is no room anymore for Pride & Prejudice - Jane Austen (hylarious)?

LadyWentworth, is The Phantom of the Opera better than the musical version? I suppose I don't need to ask... The musical I found so boring that I fell asleep watching it for a first time and that I almost lost interest the second time. I had to force myself to continue...

(Sorry for any Lloyd Webber fans, but I found that music so uninspired. Never heard anything like it! Admittedly the theme was excellent, but not if you keep repeating it over and over... Ok, I heard something else like it: Jesus Christ Superstar. I found that already nothing when I was a teenager...)

[chrismythoi]

dune series, by Herbert
brave new world, Huxley
dead souls, Gogol
crime and punishment, dost
don quixote, cervantes

[dfloyd]

1) The Brothers Karamazov
2) The Great Gatsby
3) Don Quixote
4) The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
5) Uncle Wiggly Goes to Connecticut

[Jeremiah Jazzz]

No order:
1) Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
2) Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
3) Shakespeare's Sonnets by William Shakespeare
4) Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
5) Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
Subjects due to change!

[mona amon]

Jane Eyre
Vilette
Don Quixote
The Bible
Ulysses

(Not in order)

[Sorceress]

Wuthering heights
Sense and sensibility
The Thorn birds
The Scarlett Pimpernel
HP & the Order of the Phoenix

[Allannah]

I finished War and Peace a few weeks ago, and I have to say, it heads any list of my favourite books (:. So,

#1/ War and Peace
#2/ Jane Eyre
#3/ Crime and Punishment or A House of Gentlefolk
#4/ Down and Out in Paris and London or Nineteen Eighty Four or Animal Farm xD
#5/ Either the No1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, The Dream of Scipio, or The Kite Runner.

Urgh five is too little! I have so many more...

[jessw]

1) Twilight Saga -Stephanie Meyer
2) Summer Sisters -Judy Blume
3)Lessons In Heartbreak- Kathy Kelly.
4) The Green Mile- Stephen King.
5)The Other Boleyn Girl-Phillipa Gregory.

[rimbaud]

1.The Brothers Karamazov- Dostoevsky
2.Harry Potter 6 & 7- J. K. Rowling
3.Season in Hell- Rimbaud
4.The Picture of Dorian Gray- Wilde
5.Romeo and Juliet- Shakespeare

and many others cant make my mind

[BloomingRose]

1 - HP and the deathly hallows - by Rowling
2 - Little Men - by Louisa Alcott
3 - An Old-fashioned girl - by Louisa Alcott
4 - Alice in Wonderland - by Lewis Carrol
5 - Tom Sawyer - by Mark Twain

[GX4146]

hmmm...

The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway)
To the Lighthouse (Woolf)
Mansfield Park (Austen)
An American Tragedy (Dreiser)
Vanity Fair (Thackeray)

[phoenix151]

5) The Jungle Book - Kipling
4) One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - Kesey
3) Call Of The Wild - London
2) Clan Of The Cave Bear - Auel
1) Steppenwolf - Hesse

[thomas212]

All time 5 best book is just not possible so i shall give the 5 most impressive of recent read.
Revolutionary road by Richard Yates
Requiem for the East by Andrei makine
Coup de grace by Margueritte Yourcenar
A stranger came to the farm by Mika Waltari
Leo the African by Amin Maalouf

[Adagio]

Favourites at the moment:

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Howards End - E.M.Forster
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
The Road - Cormac McCarthy

That'll change tomorrow.

[PabloQ]

Sure why not:
The Bible
The Octopus by Frank Norris
This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

[pagebypage]

For what it's worth:

Walden by Thoreau
The Tragic Sense of Life by Unamuno
The Trouble With Being Born by EM Cioran
Darkness At Noon by Koestler
Angela's Ashes by McCourt

[Sepulchrave]

Tough...

The Great Gatsby
Wuthering Heights
Norwegian Wood
Titus Groan
A Game of Thrones

[Bancini]

The Fountainhead--Rand
The Prince--Machiavelli
The Fall--Camus
1984--Orwell
Tartuffe--Moliere

[Equality72521]

1. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
2. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
3. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
4. Anthem - Ayn Rand
5. The Eyre Affair - Jasper Fforde

[Equality72521]

Favourites at the moment:

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Howards End - E.M.Forster
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
The Road - Cormac McCarthy

That'll change tomorrow.

Ahhh, I am going to see Les Miserables (play) at the Alley Theatre in Houston on April 1st!!! lol

[Adagio]

Ahhh, I am going to see Les Miserables (play) at the Alley Theatre in Houston on April 1st!!! lol
I saw the theatre production on the 23rd of December. It certainly is stunning. Although it doesn't even come close to the greatness of the novel. Have you read Les Miserables?

[sunshine_enl]

In Random order
1.Steinbeck-The Grapes Of Wrath
2.Orwell-1984
3.Winterson-Oranges are not the only Fruit
4.Doctorow-The Book Of Daniel
5.Rhys-The Wide Sargasso Sea

This list could change any given day but these 5 master-pieces are always in my heart.

[five-trey]

1. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
2. Invisible Man - Ralph Waldo Ellison
3. 1984- George Orwell
4. To A God Unknown - Jon Steinbeck
5. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee

[WICKES]

1. Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)

2. Those Barren Leaves (Aldous Huxley)

3. Steppenwolf (Hermann Hesse)

4. Lucky Jim (Kingsley Amis)

5. anything by P G Wodehouse

[Chava]

In no particular order:
1. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
2. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
3. The House at Pooh Corner - A.A. Milne
4. The Great Gatsby - F.S.Fitzgerald
5. Down and Out in London and Paris - Orwell
I like my style variety

[subterranean]

Current non fiction favs:
Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World by Eduardo Galeano
The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad
Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein
On Ugliness by Umberto Eco

[MarkBastable]

Mother Night - Vonnegut
The Deptford Trilogy - Davies
Portnoy's Complaint - Roth
What Ho, Jeeves! - Wodehouse
The Stand - King

[Knetch]

I should probably wait fifty years before answering this question.

1. Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky
2. Magister Ludi, Hesse
3. Slaughter-house 5, Vonnegut
4. The life of Pi, Martel
5. The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas

[Lynne Fees]

Anna Karenina - Tolstoy
Gone With the Wind - Mitchell
Hawaii - Michener
The Scarlet Letter - Hawthorne
Rebecca - duMaurier

However, as I look at other people's lists, I am not sure if these are really my absolute forever favorites. But they are all truly wonderful reading experiences. I don't see many references to Michener on anyone's lists. He always has a long dry spot in the middle of his novels with plenty of description, geography, history, etc. But once you get past it, they are amazing. They are all pretty long, so they're good for long trips if anyone's traveling. I think Margaret Mitchell was pretty much a "one hit wonder" with Gone With the Wind, but it was quite a wonder.

[bounty]

hmmm...in no particular order...

the bounty trilogy
watership down
either the once and future king or le morte d'arthur
maybe the pathfinder by james fenimore cooper or last of the mohicans
hard not to put a tale of two cities..

some pretty close runner-ups: the three musketeers, dracula, to kill a mockingbird, the sea wolf, kidnapped ...i suppose i could go on and on...

[electricpenguin]

Ho hum...

Today my 5 look like this (in no particular order)

Wise Children by Angela Carter
Fall on your Knees by Anne-Marie MacDonald
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Bear vs. Shark by Chris Bachelder
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

Lots of contemporary things there... Having been reading medieval things all day, I am now in a contemporary mood!

EP :D

[Lynne50]

Well, today my favorites are... A Tale of Two Cities
Sons and Lovers
Mill on the Floss
Water for Elephants
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

electricpenguin... I did love Fall on Your Knees. I remember being in the optometrist's office and crying when I got to the end. Of course, everyone just thought I had gotten drops in my eyes.

[Lynne50]

Well, today my favorites are... A Tale of Two Cities
Sons and Lovers
Mill on the Floss
Water for Elephants
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

electricpenguin... I did love Fall on Your Knees. I remember being in the optometrist's office and crying when I got to the end. Of course, everyone just thought I had gotten drops in my eyes.



Quote- "The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard, dies young" Welcome Morning by Anne Sexton

[electricpenguin]

electricpenguin... I did love Fall on Your Knees. I remember being in the optometrist's office and crying when I got to the end. Of course, everyone just thought I had gotten drops in my eyes.

Isn't it WONDERFUL?! I've never come across such a beautifully written narrative, before or since. Have you ever listened to Ludovico Einaldi? He's a classical artist - his piece 'Due Tramonti' is what MacDonald's prose would sound like if it were music... I know that's a weird thing to say, I hope you follow my meaning!!!

Have you read anything else by the same author?

[Emmy Castrol]

My five favourite novels (so I don't have to include the Bible):

1. The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence
2. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
3. Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima
4. The Wandering Jew by Stefan Heym
5. Prep by Curtis Sittenfield

[The Comedian]

Walden
Watchmen
Republic
My Antonia
Desert Solitaire

[Lynne50]

See, I knew my list would change after viewing other people's favorites. The comedian posted My Antonia. I really loved Death Comes for the Archbishop. After reading that, I really wanted to visit New Mexico.

[GX4146]

See, I knew my list would change after viewing other people's favorites. The comedian posted My Antonia. I really loved Death Comes for the Archbishop. After reading that, I really wanted to visit New Mexico.

yep death comes great novel

[norman931]

I can't pick just five, but here are some of my favorite novels that I've read more than once:

The Wolves of Memory by George Alec Effinger
Passage by Connie Willis
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis
War in Heaven by Charles Williams

Norm

[1n50mn14]

At this EXACT moment:

The Princes of Tides: Pat Conroy
The Beach: Alex Garland
At Paradise Gate: Jane Smiley
Something Wicked This Way Comes: Ray Bradbury
Anthem: Ayn Rand

[JohiSD]

Anna Karenina - Tolstoy
Lolita - Nabokov
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
1984 - Orwell
Siddhartha - Hesse

[danni.x]

Wuthering Heights- Emily Bronte
Little Women- Louisa May Alcott
Tess of the D'Urbervilles- Thomas Hardy
Jane Eyre- Charlotte Bronte
Great Expectations- Charles Dickens

[Rogers_68]

Fiction:
Underworld - DeLillo
White Noise - DeLillo
The Brothers K - David James Duncan
The Catcher In The Rye - J.D. Salinger
Ulysses - James Joyce

Non-fiction:
The Bible
Across Painted Deserts - Donald Miller
The Ragamuffin Gospel - Brennan Manning
Walking On Water: Reflections On Faith And Art - Madeleine L'Engle
Blue Like Jazz - Donald Miller

[jeanjeni2003]

A Fable - Wm. Faulkner
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Travels with Charley-John Steinbeck
The Last Picture Show - Larry McMurtry
Moving Pictures - Terry Pratchett

_________________________

Those who can't do feel the pain and write about it. - William Faulkner, The Unvanquished

[jeanjeni2003]

Five more favorites:

My Name is Asher Lev - Chaim Potok
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
The Moor's last sigh - Salaman Rushdie
Beowulf - ?

[Dimitra]

At this time and in no particular order:
The Picture of Dorian Gray-Oscar Wilde
Lolita-Vladimir Nabokov
Dune-Frank Herbert
The Unbearable Lightness of Being-Milan Kundera
Wuthering Heights-Emily Brontë

[jakobmuller]

No order really:

Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (just finished it)
Apathy - Paul Neilan (funniest book i've ever read)
A Time to Kill & The Brethren - John Grisham (went through a Grisham phase and those came out to be my favorite two)
Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

Mag Master, i saw it on your list too (sort of); Anyone know if Confederacy of Dunces is an obscure book or what? I've never really heard anything about it, or seen it on lists or whatnot. The guy at a bookstore recommended it to me though and I liked it.

[ksotikoula]

1) Jane Eyre and Villette (my favorite author is Charlotte Bronte and I love both books so much)
2) East of Eden
3) Pride and Prejudice
4) Wuthering Heights
5) 1984

[Don Quixote Jr]

Five is too few favorite books (at least for bookworms like me), but just to be sociable, here are 5 of my current favorite novels:
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellsion
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara

[Don Quixote Jr]

I can safely say "A Confederacy of Dunces" is NOT obscure - it won a Pulitzer Prize.
The back cover of my PB edition (ISBN 0-8021-3020-8) has quotes from reviews published in the NYT Book Review, Newsweek, The Washington Post & Rolling Stone. As Stan Lee would say "Nuff said!"

[aurevoiryouth]

1) a clockwork orange, anthony burgess
2) slaughterhouse-five, kurt vonnegut
3) the catcher in the rye, j.d. salinger
4) the metamorphosis, franz kafka
5) brave new world, aldous huxley

i also really enjoyed the perks of being a wallflower, freakanomics, fahrenheit 451, breakfast of champions, frisco pigeon mambo, and lemony snicket :). i can't make up my mind on the fountainhead. and i love edward gorey but his stuff is in between art and literature.

[danni.x]

Wuthering Heights- Emily Bronte
Little Women- Louisa May Alcott
Tess of the D'Urbervilles- Thomas Hardy
1984- George Orwell
Jane Eyre- Charlotte Bronte

[Stargazer86]

(In no particular order and subject to change frequently)

Hound of the Baskervilles- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Angela's Ashes- Frank McCourt
MacBeth- Shakespeare
Lord of the Rings- Tolkien
The Good Earth- Pearl S. Buck

[crystalmoonshin]

In no particular order:
1. The Bible
2. Dream of the Red Mansions
3. The Picture of Dorian Dray
4. A Tale of Two Cities
5. Kokoro

[LeahAnn]

This list changes frequently, but today I would say:

1. Redeeming Love
2. Persuasion
3. The Chronicles of Narnia
4. A Tale of Two Cities
5. Ethan Frome

[Desolation]

Currently, I'd have to say:

1. Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
2. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
3. Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
4. Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
5. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Or perhaps...Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller)

[stlukesguild]

Quickly... off the top of my head... I would say:

Dante- The Divine Comedy
The Bible- King James Translation
J.L. Borges- Collected Fictions
William Blake- Collected Poetry and Prose
Kafka- Collected Short Stories

[amarna]

Alexei Tolstoy: Anna Karenina
Thomas Bernhard: Old Masters
Flann O'Brien: The Third Policeman
Kenzaburo Oe: The Arrogance of the Dead
Ian McEwan: The Daydreamer

[breathtest]

On The Road - Jack Kerouac
The Birth of Tragedy - Neitzsche
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Idiot - Dostoyevsky
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

[Honest]

My list:
1- The Wuthering Heights
2- Orlando
3- Othello
4- The Merchant of Venice
5- The Kite Runner

[Dr. Hill]

Alexei Tolstoy: Anna Karenina
Leo, you mean?

[amarna]

Leo, you mean?

Oups. :blush: Of course, thanks.

[Tukkanen]

within recent memory:
the heart of a dog - Bulgakov
dr. Zhivago - Pasternak
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Márquez
Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka - Gogol
The grapes of wrath - Steinbeck

[Enamored Reader]

I haven't most of the books above, but I believe my favorite books are just as good:
*Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) - Victor Hugo
*The Sorrows of Young Werther- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
*Don Quixote de la Mancha- Miguel de Cervantes
*Wuthering Heights- Emily Bronte
*Oliver Twist- Charles Dickens

(That's not including plays: Romeo and Juliet and Cyrano de Bergerac...and not including philosophy: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius)

[Helga]

that is a very hard question...
this is my feeling today, in no particular order...
1. The Collector- John Fowles
2. The Joke- Milan Kundera (I love every single one of his books)
3. The Virgin Suicides- Jeffrey Eugenides
4. The last Flower- James Thurber
5. The old man and the sea- Ermest Hemingway

[ariella]

Uhh well some I really like are
-perks of being a wallflower
-Prozac nation ( I don't why I like this so much, the author is pretty self absorbed lol)
-courtney love the real story
-motley crüe the dirt ( not exactly some deep novel but actually was better than I expected & moving)
-The Belljar-sylvia Plath
-will there really be a morning-frances farmer( really good)
-and I don't want to live this life- Deborah spungen

maybe I would have a better, more sophisticated selection instead of having to put rockstar's biographies in but I haven't really read very many deep novels that I would consider favourites in a while.

[Jassy Melson]

My favorite books in no particular order:
1. Notes From Underground - Dostoevsky
2. The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky
3. Portrait of Jennie - Robert Nathan
4. War and Peace - Tolstoy
5. This Spake Zarathrustra - Nietzsche

[Rores28]

No order

Hamlet
Notes from Underground
Brothers Karamazov
Blood Meridian
1984

[iamnobody]

Letters From a Stoic-Seneca
Meditations-Marcus Aurelius
East of Eden-John Steinbeck
Animal Farm-George Orwell
The Fountainhead-Ayn Rand

[Patrick_Bateman]

The Stranger - Albert Camus
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
A Farewell To Arms - Ernest Hemingway
The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich - William L. Shirer
American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis

[Alexander III]

In no particular order

- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (Byron)
- Les Miserables (Hugo)
-Either/Or (Søren Kierkegaard)
- Oedipus Cycle (Sophocles)
- Lonesome Travler (Kerouac)

[LuggageFan]

hhmm... favourite five today would be

1.The pure weight of the heart-Antonella Gambotto
2. Neverwhere-Neil Gaiman
3.Vampire chronicles-Anne Rice
4.Fall on your knees-Ann-Marie MacDonald
5.The count of Monte Cristo

I have to second Neverwhere as a favorite. Just a PERFECT fantasy story, from beginning to end. :) (Still need to think about the other four, lol.)

[B. Laumness]

I never grow tired of reading:
- Essais - Montaigne
- Flaubert's letters
- Les Fleurs du Mal - Baudelaire
- Nietzsche - Also sprach Zarathustra
- Pascal's Pensées

[Kennedy S.]

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Faust by Goethe

[manarius]

One Hundred Years of Solitude- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ender's Game- Orson Scott Card
Of Mice and Men- John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird- Harper Lee
The King of Attolia- Megan Whalen Turner
Great Expectations- Charles Dickens

I know it's 6, but I just couldn't decide :D

[Patrick_Bateman]

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Faust by Goethe

I am by no means taking the piss but your choices remind me of that scene in High Fidelity

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GIGcWLwSDQ
(Stops becoming relevant at the 1:01 mark)

:D

[DougSlug]

1984 - Orwell
The Stranger - Camus
Walden - Thoreau
Portrait of the Artist - Joyce
Heart of Darkness - Conrad

honorable mention: Fight Club - Palahniuk

[FROADS]

War and Peace-Tolstoy
The Brothers Karamazov-Dostoevsky
Les Miserables-Hugo
Heart of Darkness-Conrad
The Great Gasby-Fitzgerald

[dfloyd]

1. Don Quixote
2. Tristram Shandy
3. Tom Jones
4. Crime and Punishment
5. The Great Gatsby

[twit]

I'm surprised to see so much Rand mentioned in this thread. While she's not my favorite by any stretch, AS and FH were both pretty sick. Anyway...

1. Moby-Dick
2. Anna Karenina
3. Sound and Fury
4. Franny and Zooey
5. Flowers for Algernon

Not in any real order and probably not 100% accurate but those are definitely in my top 10

[Mthuy]

a tough decision, :p , anyway, they are:

#1 Jane Eyre; Villette by Charlotte Bronte
#2 Wuthering height by Emily Bronte
#3 Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
#4 The bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller
#5 North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

and more...

[TheRanger(girl)]

Hi! My 5 favorite books are:
-The Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer (love it!!!)
-Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling
-The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rotfuss
-Ranger's Apprentice by John Flanagan
-The Short second life of Bree Tanner by Stephenie Meyer;)

[ChicagoReader]

No order,
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Siddhartha - Herman Hesse
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

[Badman]

In no order here is a list of books and series that made a great impression on me -

Don Quixote - Cervantes
One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest - Ken Kesey
Junky and Naked Lunch - William S. Burroughs
Short Story Collection - Edgar Allan Poe
Forgotten Realms series - R. A. Salvatore

[Aurora]

No order

Great Expectations
Lolita
Jude the Obscure
Dracula
Of Mice and Men

[Stellar]

I will probably change my mind 5 minutes after I post this.

Tender is the Night
As I Lay Dying
To Kill a Mockingbird
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Titus Groan

[Theunderground]

1) The Analects. Master Confucius.
2) Hamlet. Willy Shakespeare.
3) Ecco Homo. Freddy Nietzsche.
4) Notes from underground. Fyodor Dostoevsky.
5) Tristram Shandy. Laurence Sterne.

[Arcan]

zamyatin - we
borges - the book of sand
dick - do andreoids dream of electric sheep?
meyrink - golem
dante - divine comedy

[Big Dante]

1. George Orwell - 1984
2. Victor Hugo - Les Miserables
3. Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse 5
4. Harper Lee - To Kill A Mockingbird
5. JD Salinger - The Catcher In The Rye

[Gregory Samsa]

"The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" - Haruki Murakami
"2666" - Roberto Bolaño
"The Stranger" - Albert Camus
"Crime and Punishment" - Fyodor Dostoevsky
"Disgrace" - J. M. Coetzee.

[iswarya]

this is really a great forum to share one's views

[iswarya]

my top five would be
The Stranger by Albert Camus
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
The Shining by Stephen King
Sidhartha by Hermann Hesse

[Venerable Bede]

Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
The Iliad by Homer
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Hound of the Baskerville's by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

[Chris 73]

Lavondyss-Robert Holdstock
The Haunting Of Hill House-Shirley Jackson
Something Wicked This Way Comes-Ray Bradbury
Winters Bone-Daniel Woodrell
Hyperion-Dan Simmons

[Brock]

Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Middlemarch - George Eliot
In Memorium - Lord Alfred Tennyson
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

[hampusforev]

The five to make the biggest impression has to be:

Melville - Moby Dick
Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
McCarthy - Blood Meridian
Nabokov - Lolita
Shakespeare - King Lear

[Willard]

Favorite five would be :

The Gates of Fire -Steven Pressfield
Ulysses-James Joyce
Rejoyce-Anthony Burgess
The Life of Samual Johnson-James Boswell
The Hamlet-William Faulkner

[sparkly buttons]

it changes but for the 5 that made the biggest impression:
1) If On A Winter's Night A Traveler- Italo Calvino
2) The Castle-Franz Kafka
3) Villette-Charlotte Bronte
4) Anything by Philip K. Dick
5) middlemarch- George Eliot

[Otokonoko]

Glad to see I'm not the only fickle one who cannot remain faithful to a single list of five. As it stands, I'd say my five favourite are:

1) Night - Elie Wiesel
2) The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
3) The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde (do plays count?)
4) Animal Farm - George Orwell
5) Power Without Glory - Frank Hardy

The first remains the only book of decent length that I have read in one sitting. I was about to buy The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas when I spotted it. I took it home, opened to the first page and was transfixed. I cooked dinner without lifting my eyes from the pages, I sat on the couch and read, I think I read while brushing my teeth. If a book can change a life, that one can.

As for Earnest, well, I reckon it has some of the wittiest lines I have ever read.

[Venerable Bede]

The first remains the only book of decent length that I have read in one sitting. I was about to buy The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas when I spotted it. I took it home, opened to the first page and was transfixed. I cooked dinner without lifting my eyes from the pages, I sat on the couch and read, I think I read while brushing my teeth. If a book can change a life, that one can.

I had a similar experience when reading that book. The book is so fascinating and horrifying at the same time that it forces you to read without stopping.

[victorianfan]

1. A Hero of Our Time by M.Y. Lermontov
2. The Bosnian Chronicle by Ivo Andrić
3. The Brothers Karamazov by F.M. Dostoevsky
4. The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy
5. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

[Paulclem]

The next five I'm going to read.

[Emil Miller]

The next five I'm going to read.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Hype. - J.K.Rowling

The Da Vinci Code. - Dan Brown

Twighlight. - Stephanie Meyer

Noddy in Toyland - Enid Blyton

Mein Kampf - A.Hitler

[Mr.lucifer]

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Hype. - J.K.Rowling

The Da Vinci Code. - Dan Brown

Twighlight. - Stephanie Meyer

Noddy in Toyland - Enid Blyton

Mein Kampf - A.Hitler

What a coincidence, those are my favorites. Especially Mein Kampf.

[Zerstören]

What a coincidence, those are my favorites. Especially Mein Kampf.

Mine too! Luv those books. Especially Mein Kampf.

Really:

Mika Waltari - Sinuhe egyptiläinen (The Egyptian)
Knut Hamsun - Sult (Hunger)
August Strindberg - Röda rummet (The Red Room, I think in English)
John Fante - Ask The Dust
Hank Bukowski - poetry, novels, short stories, newspaper articles, screenplays

[xShell]

1. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
2. Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes
3. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
4. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
5. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov

[Buh4Bee]

How can you narrow it down to 5?

The Catcher in the Rye- JD Salinger
The Stranger- Camus
Jane Eyre- Bronte
Siddhartha- Hermann Hess
*Watership Down- Adams
The Sun Also Rises- Hemingway

* Doesn't count- juvenile fiction

[Period_Dramas97]

1. The Bible
2. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
3. Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery
4. The Magic Faraway Tree - Enid Blyton
5. What Katy Did At School - Susan Coolidge

Of course, there are a ton more books I'd like to add, but these ones are my top 5 at the moment :)

[irinmisfit92]

1. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
2. 1984 by George Orwell
3. Let The Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist
4. Dracula by Bram Stoker
5. Skin by Ted Dekker

[educatedNreverS]

Lord of the Flies- William Golding
Harry Potter series- Rowling
Hobbit- Jesus Christ
And Then there Were None- agatha Christie
The Picture of Dorian Gray- Oscar Wilde!

[PMLondonderry]

Top 5

1) The Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne (and "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" is my favorite short story. Also by Hawthorne.)
2) Walden and Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
3) The Republic of Plato
4) The Lord of the Rings trilogy by Tolkien
5) Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

I actually had to think long and hard about #2-5 and they are not in any specific order. I have never read anything by Hawthorne that I haven't loved and I love him so much because of his incredibly dark and sinister religious symbolism. He and I would not see eye-to-eye on some things, but his stories have always captivated me. I love him for them.

I am a huge lover of Transcendentalism and, while I claim a particular organized religious faith, I tend to agree with most transcendentalist views regarding organized religion and politics tainting the purity of our souls. Thoreau and Emerson deserve spots in my top 5, but the only reason why Thoreau got it over Emerson is because I am currently reading Walden and I tend to love the books I am currently reading.

The Republic of Plato because, while Plato is so obnoxiously crazy in most of his ideas on what it takes to make a utopia, I can understand why he would believe much of what he believes and nobody in todays world really has the guts to come out and say something so incredibly inhumane the way he does. I respect him for it and understand that some of the things he says, he doesn't believe should actually happen, but what would be necessary to happen if we were all to live in a "utopian" society.

The LOTR doesn't even need explanation. I was going to put A Song of Fire and Ice series next to it, but I decided just to stick with LOTR alone. I read and watch historical/fantasy/war books and movies like other people watch football. I love Beowulf for the same reason and had to kick that off my list as well.

Things Fall Apart is one of the most amazing books I have ever read. I read it for a class at my University for a professor who independently learned numerous African languages and went to Africa to record stories by storytellers in different villages throughout the southern and eastern coast of the continent. His take on this book was amazing and it was truly an incredible read.

[PMLondonderry]

Hobbit- Jesus Christ


:lol:



A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini


I completely forgot about this book. I was so worked up and upset throughout the entire story that I had to set the book down and go out and do things before continuing it. Such an amazing book.