The Random Person's Book Club discussion
Top 5 Books on Your Personal Favorites
Ooh, this is fun! Let's see, five favorites are:
1) All The Names
2) Little Infamies
3) Shantaram
4) To Kill A Mockingbird
5) A Canticle for Leibowitz
6) The Stranger
7) The Stupidest Angel
8) The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (Saramago)
9) George Orwell's essays
er, that's more than five, ain't it... sorry ;-)
1) All The Names
2) Little Infamies
3) Shantaram
4) To Kill A Mockingbird
5) A Canticle for Leibowitz
6) The Stranger
7) The Stupidest Angel
8) The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (Saramago)
9) George Orwell's essays
er, that's more than five, ain't it... sorry ;-)

5. Lightning by Dean Koontz: Full of suspense, twists, bad guys, and a feel good ending.
4. Watership Down by Richard Adams: One of the few books I actually read in Junior High. And the first book I was ever sad to be finished with.
3. The Eleventh Hour by Graeme Base: A captivating book that would absorb hours of my time.
2. Holes by Louis Sachar: My all time favorite flip through and pick out any chapter and start reading book.
1. Harold and the Purple Crayon: Simply my favorite book. It just fits me.

My top 5, not necessarily in order:
1. Watership Down
2. The Cat Who Came for Christmas
3. The Glass Castle
4. Love in the Time of Cholera
5. The Birth Of Venus

2. Crime and Punishment
3. The Winter of Our Discontent
4. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
5. Nineteen Eighty Four

1) The Time Traveler's Wife
2) A Soldier of the Great War
3) The World According to Garp
4) The Mercy of Thin Air
5) Memoirs of a Geisha
6) A Tale of Two Cities
7) Sense and Sensibility
8) The Fountainhead
9) The Remains of the Day
10) Bag of Bones

2. Dark Tower Series, Stephen King
3. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
4. Winter's Tale, Mark Helprin
5. The Power of One, Bryce Courtnay

Belly by Lisa Selin Davis
Sweet Dream Baby by Sterling Watson
All God's Children:Inside the Dark & Violent World of Street Families by Rene Denfeld
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Anything by Laurie Notaro and David Sedaris (always guaranteed a laugh!)
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby
As The Crow Flies by Jeffery Archer
Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
1984 by George Orwell

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/...
But off the top of my head - Ulysses (Joyce), Ariel (Plath), History of the World in 10.5 Chapters (Barnes), Foucault's Pendulum (Eco), Oscar & Lucinda (Carey).
Thanks! Maggie
http://www.compulsivereader.com/html

1. Kindred by Octavia Butler
2. Iron Pioneers by Tyler Tichelaar
3. Watership Down
4. On the Road
5. The Bell Jar

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass
The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles
Famous Last Words - Timothy Findley
Who Do You Think You Are? - Alice Munro
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
Property - Valerie Martin

I haven't read Tales from Watership Down, but you've got me interested now. I too think I'll need to go back and re-read the original first.
Of the other books on your list which would you recommend the most?

A Hundred Years of Solitude
Time Traveler's Wife
Watership Down
Phillip Pullman's Dark Materials
I Know This Much is True
You all have great books in your tops. I feel like I'm just biting off of you but these are good.

Snow Country
Confederacy of Dunces
The Good Earth
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wide Sargasso Sea
I have a lot more favorites. They are on my list under "favorites" (duh!)
I will definitely be reading some of everyone else's favs. They all look good.

1 to kill a mockingbird
2 holes
3 jane eyre
4 weslandia
5 my name is asher lev
list is subject to change. my husband has wanted me to read watership down. after seeing how many people love it, i'd better give it a try.


1. "Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch. I was there when it was written."
2. "Touched to the heart, Mrs. March could only stretch out her arms, as if to gather children and grandchildren to herself, and say, with face and voice full of motherly love, gratitude, and humility . . .“Oh, my girls, however long you may live, I never can wish you a greater happiness than this!"
3. "Nelly, I am Heathcliff — he's always, always in my mind — not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself — but as my own being — so, don't talk of our separation again — it is impracticable."
4. "He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey."
5. "It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley."

2. The Stand by Steven King
3. Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
4. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
5. Carter Beats the Devil by a guy whose name I can't remember. But the book is awesome!
The Communist Manifesto.
The Prophet, Gibran Khalil Gibran.
Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, John Steinbeck.
Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, Jose Rizal.
The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler.
Lord of the Flies, William Golding.
....maybe, The Good Earth, Pearl Buck.
The Christian Bible.
The Prophet, Gibran Khalil Gibran.
Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, John Steinbeck.
Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, Jose Rizal.
The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler.
Lord of the Flies, William Golding.
....maybe, The Good Earth, Pearl Buck.
The Christian Bible.

Pride Prejudice - Jane Austen
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
All four of those I have read numerous times and likely will again (unusual for me). I never tire of them.
My not-so-traditional entries:
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
The Eyre Affair - Jasper Fforde
I have to mention Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling as well... it's a toss up between books 5 & 7 if I can't say a series.

Lord of the rings J.R.R tolkien
and
Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
to that list :D

(in no particular order)
Blindness
The Road
The Ruins
Odd Thomas series
One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest
Farhenheit 451
I Am Legend
Good Omens
Sorry, I did my best :P

Crime and Punishment
The Sound and the Fury
Ulysses
Foucault's Pendulum
if on a winter's night a traveler
if I could add (since I couldn't readily subtract), Immortality, Midnight's Children, and One Hundred Years of Solitude.
As for recently, that's more difficult as I'm lucky if I read one truly amazing book a year. That being said, the recent (and I'm letting recent be five years so I can get the widest sample data) top 5 would be:
Blindness
Too Loud a Solitude
The Plot Against America
A Fine Balance
Hunger
Ooh, thank you, this was fun.

The Gospel According to Larry by Tashjian
The Giver by Lowry
The Harry Potter series
Inkheart by Funke
Warrior Heir/Wizard Heir by Chima
As you can tell, I usually read children's or young adult books, since I am a youth services associate at a public library.

The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao-Junot Diaz
On Photography- susan Sontag
Lucky- Alice Sebold
Unbearable Lightness of Being-Milan Kundera
Mansfield Park-Jane Austen
Geek Love- Katherine Dunn
I have many more, but these are super-duper favorites. :-)


1. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
2. The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
3. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
4. A Pillar of Iron by Taylor Caldewell
5. Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (okay not really book in the traditional sense but I read this over and over an fall into its rhythms.)
Alternates: Joy Luck Club, Ulysses, Interpreter of Maladies, or Great Expectations
Thanks for all the great recommendations!

2. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett (second all time favorite. Try to read every other year.)
3. The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo (changed my life after reading it)
4. Life of Pi by Yann Martel (a true modern fairy tale)
5. Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen Dubner (#5 changes from year-to-year, but this is the best book I've read in 2007 so far)

The Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
Anne of Green Gables - Lucy Maude Montgomery
East of Eden - John Steinbeck
It was really hard for me to choose my favorite Austen and my favorite Steinbeck! So runners-up would be:
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

1. "Tropic of Cancer" - Henry Miller. This book made me fall in love with Art. And wine.
2. "100 Years of Solitude" - GG Marquez. This book will be read for eternity.
3. "The Book of Laughing and Forgetting" - Milan Kundera. I laughed, I forgot, I was moved being belief.
4. "To the Lighthouse" - Virginia Woolf. Perfection.
5. "Giovanni's Room" - James Baldwin. I am not gay, but was so moved by this novel. Every religious idiot/zealot should read this book and maybe. It might knock some sense into them.

Chance
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Catch 22
The Looming Tower
City of Falling Angels

2. Lolita- Vladimir Nabakov
3. Tipping the Velvet- Sarah Waters
4. Still Life With Woodpecker- Tom Robbins
5. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carrol

2. Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
3. My Sergei
4. Tuesdays with Morrie
5. Little Women

1. The Glass Castle: Janette Wells
2. The Red Tent: Anita Diamont
3. The Pact: Jodi Picoult
4. Where the Heart is: Billie Letts
5. The King of Torts: John Grisham

1. A Prayer for the Dying by Stewart O'Nan
- this book haunts me and it's just written so beautifully.
2. The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie King
- I'm not much of a mystery reader, but the characterization just makes this book worth reading over and over.
3. My Life by Lyn Hejinian
4. Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty
5. Bleak House by Charles Dickens

The Time Traveler's Wife (just read it, can't stop talking about it, I LOVED IT)
Remembrance - Jude Deveraux - yes, I like trashy romance novels, get over it, I have, and I still choke up a bit on this one after reading it numerous times.
She's Come Undone
Riot-Shashi Tharoor
The Memoirs of Cleoptra - Margaret George
No particular order!

Join Me
Tales of a Female Nomad
1984
A tree Grows in Brooklyn
and I could go on I dont think I really have a top 5...to hard to choose

JK Rowling
Like Water for Chocolate
Laura Esquivel
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
Girl With a Pearl Earring
Tracy Chevalier
A Man Without A Country
Kurt Vonnegut
Favorite Guilty Pleasure
Flowers In the Attic (I can't help it! I love that series!!!!)
VC Andrews
Saved too soon whoops....
Les Miserables
Victor Hugo

2. Shantaram
3. The Shipping News
4. The English Patient
5. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

1. East of Eden
2. The Good Earth
3. All Quiet on the Western Front
4. The Fountainhead
5. all the rest: (Fiction) Geek Love, Memoirs of a Geisha, She's Come Undone, The End of Alice, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Harry Potter Series, Little House on the Prairie Series, (and the non-fiction) Random Families, Red China Blues, Double Luck, Jesus Land, Let's Don't Go to the Dogs Tonight, (and the short stories/others) The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy, anything by Roald Dahl, anything by Shirley Jackson, and finally, my number one main man: Charles Bukowski...

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte (Read it first as a girl, it grew up with me and I can still go back to it with interest and enjoyment)
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (A good-time read with a lot to notice by an author I can always count on to be brilliant)
An American Childhood, Annie Dillard (A clear evocation of how a child thinks - how did she channel her younger self? fabulous!)
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard (She always thrills me with her descriptions of the natural world and how she relates to it)
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, JRR Tolkein (I can start with The Hobbit and read all the way through to the last of the Trilogy and be sorry that I'm finished)
I'll stop at five, but there are more.
(I just joined and this is the first time I've posted to a topic. Hope I did it right!)

1. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
2. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
3. The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan
4. Underworld - Don Delillo
5. The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
Other contenders:
> Geek Love - Katherine Dunn
> Everything Is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer
> Random Family - Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
> The Secret History - Donna Tartt
> As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
> No One Belongs Here More Than You - Miranda July
> the Harry Potter books - J.K. Rowling
> Love In the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
> Jitterbug Perfume - Tom Robbins
> Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
> Like Water For Chocolate - Laura Esquivel
> We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver
phew!

* Year of Wonders - Geraldine Brooks
* The Memory Keeper's Daughter - Kim Edwards
* My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult
* Anything written by Lee Child

2)King of wind-Marguerite Henry
3)theif lord
4)city of sparks
5)blubber-judy blume

1. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
2. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zabon
3. The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
4. Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold
5. The Mercy of Thin Air by can't remember the
author. Tied with
5. Chasing The Devil's Tail by David Fulmer
On to my favorite YA and Children books:
1. The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth
Speare
2. Inkspell by Cornelia Funke
3. The Ruby in the Smoke by Philip Pullman
4. Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling(can't pick just
one)
5. New Moon by Stephenie Meyer

1) "Redeeming Love" by Francine Rivers
2) "Fallen Angels" by Patricia Hickman
3) "The Endearment" by Laveryle Spencer
4) "Daybreak" by Belva Plain
5) "Song of the Road" by Dorothy Garlock
My to 5 favorite non-fiction I think would be:
1) Holy Bible
2) "My Funny Dad, Harry" by Karen Zemek
3) "Become a Better You" by Joel Osteen
4) "Beautiful Child" by Torey Hayden
5) "Somebody Else's Kids" by Torey Hayden
This was very hard, I have so many favorites!

1) Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
2) The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
3) In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
4) The Green Mile - Stephen King (love Stephen King, so hard to pick a favorite)
5) The Harry Potter series (probably The Half-Blood Prince if I had to pick one)

1. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
2. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
3. The Prince of Tides - Pat Conroy
4. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
5 (children's) Holes - Louis Sachar

1. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (not that its the best book ever written, I just enjoy the story)
3. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
4. Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
I have several other favorites but I was limited to 5...on my profile you can see the others.
Books mentioned in this topic
The Fellowship of the Ring (other topics)One Hundred Years of Solitude (other topics)
The Alchemist (other topics)
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (other topics)
Pride and Prejudice (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Jane Austen (other topics)Ray Bradbury (other topics)
Harper Lee (other topics)
Jasper Fforde (other topics)
Charlotte Brontë (other topics)
More...
Mine (that I have read in the last few years) would probably be (not necessarily in order):
Time Travelers Wife
Like Water For Chocolate
Poisonwood Bible
Water For Elephants
The Girls
And for Kids and YA Books (that I have read or re-read over the past couple years)
Mr. Pudgins (my favorite of all time)
King of the Lost and Found
The Library Lion
Flotsam
Finnie Walsh
Can't wait to hear everyone else's favorites!