Ten Favorite Novels

1. Paradise Lost
2. Wuthering Heights
3. Marabu Stork Nightmares - Irvine Welsh
4. 1984
5. Emma - Austen
6. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner - James Hogg
7. The House with the Green Shutters - George douglas Brown
8. Lanark - Alasdair Gray
9. Consider the Lilies - Iain Chrichton Smith
10. The Restraint of Beasts - Magnus Mills

This to not be a definitive list, merely what I decided on while looked round at my bookshelf and thought, omg I loved that book... I cant usually decide. Given enough time I think my list would end up twenty pages long.

I LOVE the Golden Compass. Really wonderful book. The rest of the series is great, too.

1. Sir Gawain & the Green Knight
2. Hamlet
3. King Lear
4. The Sound & the Fury
5. Mere Christianity
6. Crime & Punishment
7. The Grapes of Wrath
8. The Great Gatsby
9. Moby Dick
10. The Nicomachean Ethics

Why lots of you enjoy 1984? I think it's hardly called a classic,it's a boring book anyway.

1. The Iliad, Homer
2. Paradise Lost, John Milton
3. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
4. Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin
5. The Aeneid, Virgil
6. The Divine Comedy, Dante
7. The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova
8. Dracula, Bram Stoker
9. The Time-Traveller's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
10. Sleepyhead, Mark Billingham

A somewhat eclectic mix, and by no means definitive, but still a little glimpse into my reading-psyche all the same :D P.S. I didn't think that 1984 was great, but I didn't think it was boring. Profoundly depressing, maybe.

[QUOTE][/Why lots of you enjoy 1984? I think it's hardly called a classic,it's a boring book anyway.QUOTE]

It is perhaps the most important political novel of the 20th century!

1. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
2. Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
3. Harry Potter series by JK Rowling
4. Notre Dame of Paris by Victor Hugo
5. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
6. The Complete Works of HG Wells
7. The Complete Works of Jules Verne
8. Inherit the Wind by Robert E. Lee and someone else
9. The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald
10. The Metamorphosis by kafka

1.-The pillars of the earth (Ken Follett)
2.-1984 (George Orswell)
3.-Alice in wonderland (Lewis Carroll)
4.-Don Quixote (Cervantes)
5.-I, Robot (Isaac Asimov)
6.-Dune (Frank Herbert)
7.-Edgar Alan Poe's tales and poems
8.-Papillon (Henri Charriere)
9.-Lord of the rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)
10.-The hound of the varkervilles (Arthur Conan Doyle)

The top ten books I've read are...

The Lord of the Rings (we'll count that as one ;-) by J.R.R.Tolkien
The Silmarillian by Tolkien
The Hobbit by Tolkien
The Chronicles of Narnia (we'll call that one too :-D) by C.S.Lewis
The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas
The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
The Mark of the Horse Lord by Rosemary Sutcliff
The Eagle of the Ninth by Sutcliff
The Lantern Bearers by Sutcliff
The Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Here are a few books which I don't think that I have mentioned elsewhere. I am not making claims for them as great literature (although some are) but they are major reading experiences and alter how you look at other novels afterwards. I have stuck to novels.

'Hermanos' by William Herrick. He was a cantankerous but likeable American radical. 'Hermanos' is based on his Spanish Civil War experiences.

'The Fox in The Attic' by Richard Hughes. This was the first in a trilogy but he only completed two. A mixture of roman a clef and clever psychological analysis.

'The Green Isle of The Great Deep' by Neil Gunn. This is a novel about totalitarianism thinly disguised as a fairy tale-like odyssey in a Celtic otherworld.

'A Kind of Loving' by Stan Barstow. He described himself as a fourth rate writer and I can forgive a man so self deprecating a great deal. This is from the social realist school and every page rings true.

'Pincher Martin' One of Golding's odder books but worth reading just to see the range of what literature can try to do.

'Life and Fate' A massive multi dimensional novel by a journalist who followed The Red Army in their pursuit of Hitler's legions.

'August 1914' Not my personal favourite amongst his work but the start of a sequence which as far as I know he has not yet concluded - perhaps never will. But it is a novel wide in scope and understanding.

'The Tomorrow File' by Lawrence Sanders. Just one of those iconoclastic novel which is highly disturbing and once read is not likely to be forgotten.

'The Tin Drum'. One of Grass' responses to the cataclysmic period in which he was young. A tremendous imaginative response to militant nationalism.

'The Unforgotten Prisoner' by R C Hutchinson. Now this is a really great piece of literature. Although there are chronological infelicities it is a profound and moving book - a pivotal reading experience

'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists' by Robert Tressel. Although this is spoiled by a gullible acceptance of socialism as a panacea for the woes of the workers it is probably the best book in English (Patrick MacGill not excepted) of the proletarian experience.

'Gormenghast' Mervyn Peake. Fantastic story-telling gifts and imagination.

‘The Power and The Glory’ Graham Greene .The quintessential Catholic writer and his exploration of the battle between atheism and faith during the so-called Mexican revolution.

‘The Informer’ by Liam O Flaherty. Sardonic. Barbaric occasionally poetic. A writer who was best on the small scale canvas but this though definitely not great literature could only have been written from the point of view of an ex-British army/IRA point of view. It punches well above its weight..

‘The Taste of Too Much’ by Cliff Hanley A minor comic Scottish masterpiece.

‘The Islander’ by A C Maclean. This is a masterpiece too but sadly out-of-print. If any Scottish publisher reads this, then take it as a plea to get this wonderful novel back into bookshops.

‘The Road’ Cormac McCarthy. There aren’t many American writers better than this fellow on form. Set in a post nuclear holocaust USA.

‘The Channering Worm’ J P McConndach. Morbid Calvinistic Gothic. You would either love it or hate it. More of a linguistic tour de force than a straightforward novel.

OOps forgot to mention that Grossman was the author of 'Life and Fate'

Just noticed that 'Enemy At The Gates' was on television yesterday. It's not a very good film but it is based on real events - the sniper that Jude Law plays was a real person. Grossman's novel deals with similar things but on a huge canvas.... what the best Russian writers have always seemed good at. The best Stalingrad text I've read though was Nekrasov's and he was there as a front line soldier. No novel or film can do anything but give a tiny impression of what massive cruel battles like these really involved. Grossman tries to deal with the big issues and that's why I feel his novel is both ambitious and worth reading. He was one of the most accurate and best of the Soviet era journalists during the war that Stalin and his cronies found necessary to call The Great Patriotic War, acknowledging that the Russians were not fighting for the vision of Marxist atheism that the Bolsheviks had imposed.

PS I should have said that 'The Islander' is the best of Macleans books. He was a highly successful childrens author. He wrote fairly dense traditional adventure stories. He described himself as a 'scribbler'. 'The Islander' is an adult book but any literate teenager would like it. I am always irritated when I discover good books are out-of-print.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, which is on quite a few lists. Read this book years and years ago and it still stays with me.
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, a book I hound everyone to read.
Practical Solitary Magic by Nancy B. Watson, on self-empowerment.
The Pagan Bible by M. Gorham, a book my son found at his college library. I could kiss him a thousand times for checking it out for me.
Just about anything by Taylor Caldwell and Pearl Buck, who know human nature beyond anyone I've ever read.
Fire From Heaven and The Persian Boy by Mary Renault, novels of Alexander the Great.
Ishmael, My Ishmael, Beyond Civilization, and The Story of B by Daniel Quinn, more referals from my son. (kissy, kissy)
Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison, (and a fantastic movie) about the "prison" of poverty.
The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, extremely interesting story of the written word.
The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P. Hall
The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light by Tom Harpur, based on the writings of Alvin Boyd Kuhn.
Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls and The Voice of Bugle Ann by MacKinlay Kantor, two adolescent books I still remember after many long years.

1. Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
2. Clockwork Orange by Burgess
3. Beowulf
4. To Kill A Mockingbird by Lee
5. Pride and Prejudice by Austen
6. Jane Eyre by Bronte
7. Hamlet
8. The Odyssey
9. "Nature and other essays" by Emerson
10. The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne

Some others that didnt make my top ten: The Bell Jar, Twelfth Night, Richard III, Wuthering Heights, The Rise of Silas Lapham, LOTR, and many more:bawling:

Takes all sorts i guess!

Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
The Gunslinger, King
Salinger, The Catcher In the Rye
Ulysses, Joyce
The Illiad, Homer
The Satanic Verses, Rushdie
Midnight's Children, Rushdie
The Moor's Last Sigh, Rushdie

These are the extraordinary books i've read. Going to be cheeky and sneak in an autobiography, Lucky Man by Micheal J Fox:blush:

I surprised no one has Ken Kessey's beautiful One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest on their list :(