# Reading > General Literature >  Ten Favorite Novels

## HMac

Hello, I'm new here and also recently renewed my interest in literature. I would love to hear some recommendations from you pros on the classics. List ten that you think everyone in world should read.

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## nothingman87

My Top 10

_Jude the Obscure_ and _The Return of the Native_ by Thomas Hardy
_The Quiet American_ and _The Power and the Glory_  by Graham Greene
_A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ by James Joyce
_One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest_  by Ken Kesey
_Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_ by Philip K. Dick
_The Catcher in the Rye_ by J.D. Salinger
_Lord of the Flies_ by William Golding
_Great Expectations_ by Charles Dickens
 :Banana:   :Banana:   :Banana:

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## subterranean

Well I cant really tell, the list may be change in times..cause it can happen that when i read it at the first time i dont really like it, but when i read it again it may happen that i'm beginning to like it..
so no list for me

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## Tabac

Ferber: _Giant_ 
Camus: _The Stranger_ 
Dostoyevsky: _Crime and Punishment_ 
Dickens: _Tale of Two Cities_ 
Mishima: _Forbidden Colors_ 
Lee: _To Kill a Mockingbird_ 
Kingsolver: _Poisonwood Bible_ 
St.-Exupery: _The Little Prince_ 
Salinger: _Catcher In the Rye_ 
Steinbeck: _Grapes of Wrath_ 
Maugham: _Of Human Bondage_ 
Boyle: _Tortilla Curtain_ 

Not a Top Ten list, but some books that I have greatly enjoyed which come to mind.

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## HMac

I appreciate the lists and look forward to discussing them with you.

HMac

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## Dunpeal

well... here goes: stuff I think people should read (I'll try and stick to what are _classics_ as much as possible)

- _The Island of Dr. Moreau_  (H.G. Wells)
- _The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ (Robert Louis Stevenson)
- _Dune_ (Frank Herbert) (it's a *sci-fi*  classic, hehe)
- _Rurouni Kenshin_ vol. 1 (Nobuhiro Watsuki)
- _The Golden Compass_ (Philip Pullman)

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## zheng89120

Here are 10 mainstream classics:

- The Catcher in the Rye
- 1984
- Great Expectations
- Wuthering Heights
- Crime and Punishment
- Heart of Darkness
- The Republic
- The Great Gatsby
- War and Peace
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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## atreides

hm..I just didnt get hte Grapes of Wrath, all that anger growing at their maltreatment, throughout the entire book, and you think, yes! now they will finally rebel, and do they? no, its ends like that. lame.

My top 5 (cant remember enough)

Gone with the Wind
Catcher in the Rye
I am David
Lord of the Flies
Heart of Darkness

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## den

I'm really enjoying this topic, and while I agree with most, I'll add a few more _classics_ that haven't been included yet. 

French lit:

by Jean Jacques Rousseau: 
The Social Contract 
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

by Albert Camus: 
Caligula
The Fall 
The Myth of Sisyphus

by Jean-Paul Sartre:
Nausea

English lit:

by Aldous Leonard Huxley: 
Antic Hay
The Perennial Philosophy

Canadian lit:

by Margaret Laurence:
The Stone Angel
The Diviners

by Michael Ondaatje:
The English Patient

by Leonard Cohen:
Beautiful Losers

American lit:

by Paul Bowles:
The Sheltering Sky

by Hunter S. Thompson:
Hell's Angels
Generation of Swine
(ok maybe not `classic' yet but great contemporary American stuff)

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## den

Oh jeeze, and forgot to add: 

Japanese lit:

by Yukio Mishima:
The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea

Chinese lit:
by Lao-tzu
The Art of War 

and:

English lit:

the poetry of Ted Hughes (husband of Sylvia Plath) 

and 

by Sylvia Plath: 
The Bell Jar

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## Capnplank

Uhm, everyone in the world? I'll try to spread the experience of my wee bit of reading out as well-roundedly as I can then. Haven't read as much from around the world as I'd have liked, nor as much from any given genre or style, so here goes... 



Chinua Achebe; Things Fall Apart
African life was not "simple" or "savage" before stumbled upon by the rest of the world, and its rich heritage was irreparably strangled by those trying to "help".

Ralph Ellison; Invisible Man
If you're black and someone's paying attention to you, then you're probably in trouble.

Josepeh Heller; Catch-22
War is ridiculous, life is ridiculous. Have to match the number of missions to get out of there anyways. Oops, it went up again.

Aldous Huxley; Brave New World
The efficient future is loveless; removal of the low points of life make the highs that much less defined.

George Orwell; 1984
The government's a wee bit out of control. Free will was only holding you back, anyways.

Erich Maria Remarque; All Quiet on the Western Front
From the German side of WWI, war wasn't any better, nor were the reasons that the soldiers were fighting it.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Ivan's in a Russian work camp in Siberia, which may or may not be worse than being outside of the work camp.

John Steinbeck; The Moon is Down
A town surrendering to you doesn't necessarily mean that it's easy going from thereon in.

J.R.R. Tolkien; The Lord of the Rings
If you're going to dip into the world of fantasy, you may as well start here. Plus you'd be the only one that hadn't... 

Elie Wiesel; Night
A son recounts he and his father's struggle to survive concentration camps in WWII.

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## simon

Oooh Capnplank, good choice on The Moon is Down, I don't think most people know that Steinbeck wrote a war novel, but it ranks up there with All Quiet... Have you ever read A Midnight Clear? This is also a good work about war in which two sides stage a surrender that goes terribly wrong.Steinbeck also wrote one political farce of types, in which a lowly man in france, I beleive, is momentarily in power of the country.

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## ben

Gogol - Dead Souls
Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita & Pale Fire
Turgenev - Fathers and sons
Zola - Germinal
Zola - The Earth
Kafka - The Trial

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## Monica

my suggestions:

1. The Catcher in the Rye
2. Foucault's Pendulum by Eco
3. Clockwork Orange
4. stories by EA Poe
5. The Master and Margarita
6. 1984
7. Crime and Punishment
8. Ulisses by Joyce (at least one third of the book if you can't stand it)
9. The Trial
10. Lord Jim

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## faith

I can only say that I agree on that I agree on that Catcher in the Rye has to be on that list. I have hardly read any of the other books reguested. Guess I should. Well, but a classic I HAVE read and which is nor yet reguested is Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. That I think every1 should read atleas once in a life time. Oh, and Lord of the Rings is also woth getting trooth (I havent yet finnished it. I have like 100 pages left and have been reading it ever since the first movie was out, and I have problems making myself finnish it, but I think I should.)

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## Tabac

> Ferber: _Giant_ 
> Camus: _The Stranger_ 
> Dostoyevsky: _Crime and Punishment_ 
> Dickens: _Tale of Two Cities_ 
> Mishima: _Forbidden Colors_ 
> Lee: _To Kill a Mockingbird_ 
> Kingsolver: _Poisonwood Bible_ 
> St.-Exupery: _The Little Prince_ 
> Salinger: _Catcher In the Rye_ 
> ...


I should also have suggested Paton: _Cry, the Beloved Country_, which hasn't made any of the other lists either.

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## EAP

Ten *Classic* books 

1. _Earth Abides_ by George Stewart 
2. _To Kill a Mockingbird_ by Harper Lee 
3. _Catch-22_ by Joseph Heller 
4. _Heidi_ by Jonathan Sypri 
5. _I am Legend_ by Richard Matheson 
6. _Tess of D'Ubervilles_ by Thomas Hardy 
7. _Anne of Green Gables_ by Lucy Maud Montgomery 
8. _Hearts in Atlantis_ by Stephen King 
9. _Animal Farm_ by George Orwell 
10. _The Silmarillion_ by Professor Tolkien

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## severian

> My Top 10
> 
> _Jude the Obscure_ and _The Return of the Native_ by Thomas Hardy
> _The Quiet American_ and _The Power and the Glory_  by Graham Greene
> _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ by James Joyce
> _One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest_  by Ken Kesey
> _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_ by Philip K. Dick
> _The Catcher in the Rye_ by J.D. Salinger
> _Lord of the Flies_ by William Golding
> _Great Expectations_ by Charles Dickens



I love every book in your list (that I have read) except for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. For some reason I HATED that book. I cant even put my finger on why I hated it. I like most of Joyce's other works.

It did have a section or two that I really enjoyed, but overall it was a dissapointment for me.

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## eflo

I'm going to list a few books that are by no means a best of the best list, but just books that I have grown to appreciate for what they are. Most of you probably have never heard of the first three!

1. The Book of Daniel, by E.L. Doctorow
2. White Noise, by Don DeLillo
3. Foe, by J.M. Coetzee
4. Alice In Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
5. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
6. Animal Farm, by George Orwell

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## WingedSpirit

The Lover, by MARGUERITE DURAS
The Izu Dancer,by Kawabata Yasunari
Dr. Zhivago, by BORIS PASTERNAK

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## hugo_fan24601

david copper feild by chales dickens
les miserables by victor hugo
hunch back of notra dame by victor hugo
phantom of the opera(forgot the authers name)
come to greif by dick frances
without remorse by tom clancy
rainbow six by tom clancey
jungle book by rudyard kipling
venum factor by diana duan
any of the diskworld novels by terry pratchard ar also good

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## simon

Anyone heard of The Fire of Origins, where the life of one man sums up the entire history of Uganda. I recommend it, definetly on my top ten.

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## hugo_fan24601

my top reads at the moment are les miserables and david copperfeild 
les miserables:- this is set in the great setting of the french revolition it has a main plot of jean valjean prisnor 24601 starting a new life after fleaing from parrolle he becomes maror of a town and calls him self monsueire madeline there are also subplots in thsi book my favorate of which is police inspector javert's persuite of 24601

david copperfeild: i have only just starting reading this book but it is a good book as it is writin as if it where an autobiography the first chapter explanes david's early years

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## trismegistus

Books for the whole world to read? In no particular order of importance:

_The Odyssey_
_The Bible_
_Tao-te Ching_
_The Koran_
_Paradise Lost_
_Transformations of Myth Through Time_
"On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" - assuming essays count as books
_King Lear_
_Cry, The Beloved Country_
_Ramayana_

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## atiguhya padma

1) 1984 - Orwell

The book that killed Orwell. Writing away on the island of Jura, a gloom falls upon both Orwell's world and the world of 1984.

2) Brave New World - Huxley

Huxley's portrayal of modern society is arguably more prophetic than Orwell's. This is the world of meaningless consumerism and self-centered hedonism that seems far nearer to what we have now than Orwell's dystopia in my opinion.

3) Jude the Obscure - Hardy

Its hard to believe that this book caused enough storm, for Hardy to vow never to publish a novel again. The finale is distressing and a massive critique of the Victorian moral social system that some would, unbelievably, like to see us return to.

4) Regeneration Trilogy - Barker

For those not familiar with Pat Barker's work, this trilogy is a great unweaving of arguments for the futility of war. I think all three books won prizes, including the Booker.

5) History of Bombing - Lindqvist

Sven Lindqvist is a brilliant writer of history. This book is truly eye-opening. The passages on the bombing of Hamburg are just simply harrowing.

6) Philosophical Works of George Berkeley

Berkeley is a profound critic of common sense reality. His arguments are easy to follow and he has a knack of uncovering the real problems. His greatest failing is the solution he provides to the problem of perception and epistemology.

7) On the Natural History of Destruction - Sebald

Like Lindqvist's book, completely engaging and heart-rending. A testament of man's inhumanity to man, often perpetrated by people who thought they were doing what was right.

8) An Intimate History of Humanity - Zeldin

A great work of social anthropology by the Oxford don, that manages to be both a history of women and a history of modern France at the same time. I loved its conversational style.

9) Reasons and Persons - Parfit

Extremely difficult read, but well worth persevering with. One of the first intelligent attempts to show that we do not have a 'soul' or a 'self' and that the idea of personal identity is misguided. Parfit claims we continuously make our selves up. 

10) Straw Dogs - Gray

Much easier to read than Parfit, and similar direction of argument. Gray and Parfit are surely right: there is no special quality about human beings, we just have more complex brains.

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## mono

You all ought to feel ashamed for forgetting _The Divine Comedy_ by Dante Alighieri. I highly recommend it.

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## atiguhya padma

I guess we'll all burn in hell for that. :Smile:

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## simon

Bring on the fire.

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## trismegistus

> You all ought to feel ashamed for forgetting _The Divine Comedy_ by Dante Alighieri.


Who forgot it? I simply wouldn't put it on a list of ten works that every person in the world should read.

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## EAP

I didnt like _Cry, the beloved Country_ at all. So much so that I didn't even bother finishing it after reading 40-50 pages.

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## trismegistus

> I didnt like _Cry, the beloved Country_ at all. So much so that I didn't even bother finishing it after reading 40-50 pages.


The story isn't all that great, but Paton's prose in that novel is absolutely gorgeous. There are parts of that novel that make me weep.  :Thumbs Up:

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## Tabac

> The story isn't all that great, but Paton's prose in that novel is absolutely gorgeous. There are parts of that novel that make me weep.


I've read the book several times. I can't get past the first page without having tears form.

I thought the story _was_ all that great. The passion of the two men who must have compassion for each other because of the ironic situation in which they find themselves is riveting.

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## 5Parker

This isn't a top ten because, frankly, how could on epossibly read all the books eligible for the best ever? With my knowledge, here are some ones I've gotten a lot out of. 

RAND -- The Fountainhead
MAUGHAM -- Of Human Bondage
FITZGERALD -- This Side of Paradise
BURGESS -- A Clockwork Orange
BRADBURY -- Fahrenheit 451
CHOBSKY -- Perks of Being a Walflower
THOMAS -- Rats Saw God
TOLSTOY -- Anna Karenina
JOYCE -- Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
MOORE -- Lamb
FAULKNER -- As I Lay Dying
DICKENS -- Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities
SHAKESPEARE -- Macbeth
ORWELL -- 1981

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## atiguhya padma

Geez, didn't know 1984 was part of a quartet! :Smile:

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## ajoe

> Geez, didn't know 1984 was part of a quartet!


It's actually a quintet. In 1985, ajoe was born.

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## Hummingbirdtat2

I just finished reading The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. I'm too stunned right now to be able to list ANY book I've ever read, much less 9 more of them; but this one definitely has to make the list. All my lofty college-educated vocabulary has deserted me, and about the best I can do right now is just sit and stare and say "wow" over and over again. Maybe after I've recovered a little I can do better. 

Wow.

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## EAP

Ms. Jackson does that to many people, including Stephen King.

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## Hummingbirdtat2

Good to know I'm not alone! Sheeeesh!

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## simon

Haha glad you liked it, rereading may bring back some of your literary analysis skills and vocabulary prowess.

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## Hummingbirdtat2

Do I detect a tone of smugness? lol.

I'm not entirely sure "liked" would be an appropriate word. Somehow, "wow" still seems to fit the best.

I just got finished watching "The Haunting" again as well. It is an interesting movie when taken separately, but does not have the power or mastery of Jackson by any stretch of the imagination. 

Wow!

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## nocturnus

'Chinese lit:
by Lao-tzu
The Art of War'

Sorry to be pedantic here, and it was probably just a typing mistake...

Lao Tzu wrote the Tao Te Jing whereas Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War. Both great reads, and depending on your inclination (pacifist or military/now business strategist), good food for thought.

Anyway's, back to the topic. Thought I'd add some classic Beat Gen stuff: On the Road-Kerouac (Dharma Bums also great)
Junky-Burroughs (Naked Lunch aswell)

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## Kirsty

Moby Dick.

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## ajoe

You've gotta be kidding! I hate Moby Dick.

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## Kirsty

> You've gotta be kidding! I hate Moby Dick.


I'm sure that others agree with you on this, but I thought it was great!!
I felt many of the passages spoke straight to my soul, it is so honest, melancholy yet self-depricating and yes, I actually thought it was quite funny as well, and a pretty good adventure story. 

I know you are not going to read this but I found a kind of recognition and magic these kinds of passages. 

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such the upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principal to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."  :Brickwall:

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## vango

glad there is one guy who meantioned a chinese book in the list of top ten must read books. and glad there is one are so careful about those chinese ancient authors. and by the way, we chinese often do not take either The Art of War or Tao Te Jing as literary books. one is about military (yes, now business strategy), and the other philosophy.

thanks for all of your suggestions. they will be my literary (esp. english literary) guide.

about chinese literatue, i think two are the best: Dream of the Red Chamber (ancient) and Fortress Besieged (modern)




> 'Chinese lit:
> by Lao-tzu
> The Art of War'
> 
> Sorry to be pedantic here, and it was probably just a typing mistake...
> 
> Lao Tzu wrote the Tao Te Jing whereas Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War. Both great reads, and depending on your inclination (pacifist or military/now business strategist), good food for thought.
> 
> Anyway's, back to the topic. Thought I'd add some classic Beat Gen stuff: On the Road-Kerouac (Dharma Bums also great)
> Junky-Burroughs (Naked Lunch aswell)

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## capricorngurl

Here are my top 11 (too hard to pick 10) books (there's variety of types  :Biggrin:  ) :

Little by Little- Jean Little (most people think it's a children's author or whatever but read it i cried, it's an autobiography of her life in a story format and it's really touching on what she went through)
To kill a mocking bird- Lee
A time to kill- Grisham
The Lady in the Tower- Jean Plaidy
A Painted House- Grisham
Anne of Green Gables- Montgomery
Rilla of Ingleside- Montgomery
Outsiders- S. E. Hinton 
1985- Orwell
The Chrysalids - John Wyndham
Bridge to Terabithia- Paterson

*note that some of "children's" books but even as I grow older (I'm still in school  :Wink:  ) these books continue to touch my heart and well... they're amazing

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## jesse sutton

Since all the standards have been mentioned i'll bring up more asian lit

Hagakure (Book Of The Samurai) - Tsunemoto
Go Rin No Sho (Book Of Five Rings) - Mushashi Miyamoto
Bushido - Inazo Nitobe
The Art Of War - Sun Tzu
The Art Of Peace - Morihei Ueshiba
Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu
The Analects - Confucius
The Dhammapada

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## BSturdy

Some very accessible and enjoyable classics and others, in no particular order and obviously in no way exclusive of the above suggestions. I am no professional but I know a good read:-

Stamboul Train - Graham Greene
20,000 Leauges Under The Sea - Jules Verne
Hard Times - Charles Dickens
Island - Aldous Huxley
The First Circle - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Arthur Daley 'Straight Up' - Paul Ableman
The Periodic Table - Primo Levi
My Place - Sally Morgan
A Clergymans Daughter - George Orwell 
Hello America - J G Ballard
Nadja - Andre Breton
The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test - Tom Wolfe
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Persig

In my view it is facile and inappropriate to attempt a top ten of books - Pushkin's Eugene Onegin and Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea, for example, cannot be compared. The former is mainly aesthetic while the latter is a venture in knowledge.

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## Jester

Things fall apart was one of the better books I had to read for class, but also I would recommend Fugitive Pieces by Anne Micheals, the chronicles of Narnia, of course... all short books but really good by C. S. Lewis and if your into short stories, The Pearl by John Steinback (spelling ????)

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## Deep Space Bass

- _Ulysses_ James Joyce: Because if you pay attention, it's a wonderful book. _Portrait_ was good, _Dubliners_ was fun, and _Finnegan's Wake_ was cool, but Ulysses was amazing.
-_The Stranger_ Albert Camus: Probably read this one in high school, but it's certainly worthy.
-_Being and Nothingness_ or _Nausea_ Jean-Paul Sartre: The literary and philosophical pinnacles of a really great French existentialist (Unless you count plays, where _No Exit_ has to be the epitome of his writing).
-_The Idiot_ Fyodor Dostoevsky: Some say _Crime and Punishment_ was his best, while others demand _The Brothers Karamozov_ was his superlative, but I personally found the character of Prince Myshkin to be far too fascinating.
-_The Last and First Men_ Olaf Stapeldon: Yeah, yeah, it's not a classic, but this book was just so amazing in its scope and depth.
-_Critique of Pure Reason_ Immanuel Kant: This isn't literature at all, but straight up philosophy. That being said, I think everyone should read it, because it's truly an amazing treatise on metaphysics.
-_Stages on Life's Way_ or _Repetition_ or _Diary of the Seducer_ Søren Kierkegaard: Kierkegaard was a wonderful author, and since I'm Danish, I needn't bother with dodgy translations. ^_^
-_The Man in the High Castle_ Philip K. Dick: Dick was an amazing author, but this was among his best works, and probably his best novel.
-_Les Miserables_ Victor Hugo: If you don't know why you someone should read this, you obviously have not read it.
-_The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ Douglas Adams: Not a classic, but it's so good. Worth multiple reads.

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## imthefoolonthehill

All the Kings Men
1984
Brave New World
Catcher in the Rye
One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest
A Clockwork Orange
Catch-22
For Whom the Bell Tolls
The Great Gatsby
Frankenstein

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## rocksea

Some of the books which have influenced me and 
which possess the potential to influence you too,,

Jonathan Livingston Seagull ~ Richard Bach and other books by him
Toto-chan ~ Tetsuko Kuroyanagi
Narcissus and Goldmund ~ Herman Hesse and other books by him
A brief history of time ~ Stephen Hawkings
The Prophet ~ Kahlil Gibran
My family and other animals ~ Gerald Durrell and other books by him
Love in the time of Cholera ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez and "
The Alchemist ~ Paul Coehlo
Elephant Song ~ Wilbur Smith
Self ~ Yann Martel

hmmm.. there are only few female authors in the list we've mentioned.. like mary shelly, margaret mitchell, testuko kurayonagi, jean little..

are there some great books by lady authors we have missed??

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## mono

Indeed, rocksea; any of the Brontë and Jane Austen most definitely belong on the list, to name the first few who come to my mind.

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## foggy notion

i'd like to endorse a few already mentioned namely 1984, animal farm, and franz kafka's the trail. and i'd also like to add "the fixer" by bernard malamud as agreat read aswell, "homeage to catalonia" by orwell is also worth a read.

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## subterranean

> Some of the books which have influenced me and 
> which possess the potential to influence you too,,
> 
> 
> Toto-chan ~ Tetsuko Kuroyanagi


I noticed that there are lots of appraisal given to this book and in my country it also become a best seller. Can you please write a little review about it ?  :Smile: ..I mean i read some reviews but most of them (IMO) aim to sell.. :Smile:

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## Aloysius

Gulliver's Travels
David Copperfield
Crime and Punishment
Karamazovy's Brothers
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The Magic Mountain
Absalom, Absalom
A Passage to India
Pastoral Symphony
1984

I don't like Tom Jones so much, though it is chosen in Maugham's Ten Best Novels of the World.

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## subterranean

Ok, my list is (in no particular order):

- Jude the Obscure: Thomas Hardy
- Catch 22: Joseph Heller (O yeah  :Nod: )
- Sophie's World: Jostein Gardner
- Siddharta: Herman Hesse
- 1984: George Orwell
- Animal Farm: George Orwell
- Existentialism is Humanism: Jean Paul Sartre (well I consider this as a book  :Wink:  )
- Ecce Homo: Nietzsche
- Metamorphoses - Ovid
- Stories: Edgar Allan Poe

Note: List is subject to change with/without prior notice  :Biggrin:

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## shortysweetp

brontes
Austen
George Orwell
Thomas Hardy
The Secret Garden
Gulliver's Travels
Canterbury Tales

Beat-
Bukowski
Vonnegut
William Burroughs

I mainly stick to english lit but i also like some american lit. i think i would like to try some french, german, or asian lit.

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## subterranean

You should posted book titlles..not the authors...It is afterall a "top ten must read books" thread  :Wink:

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## shortysweetp

its more than ten but some of them tie
Bronte- Jane Eyre
Villette 
Austen-Pride and Prejudice
Sense and Sensibility
Mansfield Park
Emma
Persuasion
George Orwell-1984
Animal Farm
Thomas Hardy-Return of the Native
The Secret Garden
Gulliver's Travels-Jonathan Swift
Canterbury Tales-Chaucer

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## Molko

The idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
A clockwork orange - Anthony Burgess
1984 - George Orwell
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
The Koran 
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

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## Hope`

My top 10:

1. _Wuthering Heights _  by Emily Bronte
2. _Great Expectations _  by Charles Dickens
3. _Pride & Prejudice _  by Jane Austen
4. _Moll Flanders _  by Daniel Defoe
5. _Lolita_ by Vladimir Nabokov
6. _Tess d'Urbervilles _  by Thomas Hardy
7. _Jane Eyre _  by Charlotte Bronte
8. _A Pair Of Blue Eyes _  by Thomas Hardy
9. _The Scarlett Letter _  by Nathaniel Hawthorne
10. _Paradise Lost _  by John Milton

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## mandy_pal

My top 10:

1) The Wars by Timothy Findley
Absolutely breath-takingly stunning. So emotionally powerful that it'll leave you gasping for air at the end. A must-read for everyone. The story is set in WWI, but it's so much more than a typical war story. As obvious from the title, there's more than one "war" going on.

2) 1984 by George Orwell
3) Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
4) The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
5) The Diviners by Margaret Laurence
6) Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
7) Uncle Tom's Cabin by Henriette Beecher-Stowe
8) Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
9) To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolfe
10) The Outsider by Albert Camus

----------


## JadedMinx

My top 10 "classics" that ppl should read.. 

The outsider (or anything by camus)
After Rain:- William Trevor 
Eugene Onegin 
The Women In White :- Wilkie Colines 
Great Expectations:- Charles Dickens
Anything by Edgar Allen Poe or Beaudelaire
Les Miserables 
Phantom of the Opera - Kay and Leroux
The Three Musketeers 
The Count of Monte Cristo

Also "Scissions" by Tim Winton its about Australian identity, so yeah, not one for everyone but i like it..

----------


## Rachy

I know some of these aren't classics but these are my favourites and some reasons why:
1) Papillon by Henri Charriere because it's an amazing true story that brought me to tears most of the time reading it.
2) Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo due to the love story and although some chapters seemed to inturrupt the story, it was a fantastic read.
3) Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson because I thought the whole concept was great.
4) The Iliad by Homer. I love Greek mythology and thought this was so magical with a great story behind it.
5) Lord of the Rings by Tolkien. My dad got me into this book, I think it's so amazing and one of those books that I've read 4 times and still find stuff in it that I didn't notice the time before.
6) Tale of Two Cities by Dickens was so good and the ending so emotional.
7) Jane Eyre by Bronte. It's not like normal classics and gave you a real sense of the past behind this woman and how she grew to be a woman.
8) Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. I was forced to read this at school and found it so good. The way things were described you could really picture it in your head and the change of narrative was great.
9)Pride and Prejudice by Austen was a great love story that was hard to follow in some parts but I could not read again but a book that will stay with me.
10) Catcher in the Rye by Salinger was really good, it was a quick read for me but it had a lot of hidden meaning and when he's describing his brothers glove it's the only time that you really see emotion, but it really keeps you hooked.

----------


## -Io-

One hundred years of solitude - Marquez
Kassandra - Christa Wolf 
Wellen - Eduard von Keyserling
Malina - Ingeborg Bachmann
Dr. Faustus - Thomas Mann
Effi Briest - Theodor Fontane
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf 
Der Prozess - Franz Kafka 
Mutter Courage - Bertolt Brecht 
Demian - Hermann Hesse

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## PeterL

The Enuma Elish (The Gilgamesh Epic), Anon
The Odyssey, Homer
Ulysses, Joyce
Lolita, Nabokov
The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream, Edmondson
Monkey, Wu Cheng en
The Lord of Light, Zelazny
Boat of a Million Years, Anderson
Bored of the Rings, Beard & Kinney

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## lavendar1

_Don't get me started -- just 10? I'll try:_ 

Don Quixote de la Mancha - Cervantes
The Canterbury Tales - Chaucer
Portrait of a Lady - James
Ulysses - Joyce
The Bible


Some of the best classics are collections of short stories:

In Our Time - Hemingway
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Carver (ok, maybe more of a contemporary classic?)

Jane Eyre - Bronte
Middlemarch - Eliot
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Chabon (another 'not-yet' classic, at least by definition, but I bet it will be one day)

That's 10 so I'll quit.

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## Bandini

Excellent! Just registered and put in search term 'Bukowski'. Very impressed with the calibre of books chosen here. My ten could be made up of many of those, but I'll go for:
Post Office - Bukowski
A Clockwork Orange - Burgess
Cannery Row OR Tortilla Flat - Steinbeck (the ultimate feel good books!)
Ask the Dust - John Fante
Love is a Dog from Hell - Bukowski (Poetry - just about any of his collections are mint)
The Butcher Boy - Patrick McCabe (but steel yourself- V. sad)
The Outsider (or L'Etranger) - Camus
Portrait of an Artist... - Joyce (Everyone says Ullyses, but beautiful as it is, its a toughy!)
Homeboy - Seth Morgan
1984 - George Orwell
 :Wink: 

Though if we can have plays it's a whole new ball game! Anything by the the bard, obviously. If you haven't ever got into Shakespeare, or had it destroyed for you at school, take the time to read some. Magic. Can I swear on this site? It's sort of part of my idiolect, but hey, don't want to get hossed off.

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## blp

Vanity Fair - William Thackeray
Blood and Guts in Highschool - Kathy Acker
Lolita - Nabokov
Heart of Darkness - Conrad
Summer Rain - Marguerite Duras
On the Suffering in the World - Arthur Schopenhauer
A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh
Molloy - Samuel Beckett
The Story of the Eye - George Bataille

[and number 1 with a bullet]
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carrol

----------


## rodanho

my recommendation:
shakespeare:hamlet
charles dickens:great expectation& oliver twist
jane austen  :Tongue: ride and prejudice
agatha christie: death on nile & murder on the orient express
thomas hardy:tess
mark twain: tom sauyer
o.henry:short stories

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## Scheherazade

In no particular order:

1. _To Kill A Mockingbird_ by Harper Lee

2. _Catch-22_ by Joseph Heller

3. _The Old Man and The Sea_ by Hemingway

4. _Grapes of Wrath_ by Steinbeck

5. _Lord of the Flies_ and/or _Free Fall_ by Golding

6. _The Crucible_ by Miller

7. _Decameron_ by Boccaccio

8. _The Plague_ by Camus

9. _The Trial_ by Kafka

10. _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ by Wilde


Here are some other books in contension (for me): 

_The Stranger_  by Camus, _Pygmalion_ by Shaw, _Winesburg, Ohio_  by Sherwood Anderson, _Crime and Punishment_  by Dostoevsky, _Pride and Prejudice_  by Austen, _Brave New World_ by Huxley, _Flowers For Algernon_ by Daniel Keyes.

----------


## atiguhya padma

1. Atomised by Michel Houllebecq
2. History of Bombing by Sven Lindqvist
3. Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam
4. Last Orders by Graham Swift
5. Atonement by Ian McEwan
6. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon
7. His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman
8. The Wasp Factory by Ian Banks
9. Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
10. Austerlitz by W G Sebald

Not in any particular order. Liable to change.

----------


## Mark F.

Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemmingway
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
1984 by George Orwell
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
Salem's Lot by Stephen King
The Lord of the Rings by J. R R. Tolkien
One discworld novel by Terry Pratchett

----------


## Mistress Babs

Here are my favorite reads (some I've delved into numerous times), in no particular order:
War and Peace - Leon Tolstoi
His Dark Materials - Phillip Pullman
Bleak House - Chas. Dickens
The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
The Tale of Genji - Murasaki Shikibu
The Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy
Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco

----------


## MaskedBeauty

My top ten reccomendations:

1: Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
2: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
3: The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
4: Anything by William Shakespear
5: Dracula by Bram Stoker
6:  Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
7:  Phantom by Susan Kay
8: Wicked by Gregory MaGuire
9: _The Iliad_ by Homer
10: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

----------


## hotfuss

suggestions:
the odyssey
the big sleep
birdsong  :Thumbs Up:  
trainspotting (nothing to do with trainspotting!!)
1984
lord of the rings 
fight club
medea (euripides' version)
cider with rosie
mrs dalloway
macbeth
the witches/charlie and the chocolate factory  :Tongue: 
wuthering heights

----------


## Pendragon

Well, everyone should read *The Bible.*
Now for a top ten list in no particular order:

1.) Mark Twain--*The Innocents Abroad*
2.) Oscar Wilde--*Portrait of Dorian Grey*
3.) Edgar Alan Poe--*Complete Stories and Poems*
4.) H.P. Lovecraft--*Shadows Over Innsmouth*
5.) H.G. Wells--*War of the Worlds*
6.) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle--*The Sherlock Holmes Cannon*
7.) J.R.R. Tolkien--*The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings Trilogy*
8.) Mark Twain--*The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn*
9.) Lewis Carroll--*Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass*
10.) Roger Zelzany--*The Amber Series*

The above list reflects my own views not those of, etc. etc.  :FRlol:   :FRlol:   :FRlol:

----------


## sir

ten interesting books...no top though...they're all great stuff:

1-o. wilde...the portret of d.g.
2-e. cioran...on the hights of dispair
3-f.m.dostoiewsky...crime and punishment
4-f.m.dostoiewsky...the brothers karamazov 
5-l. tolstoy...war and peace
6-homer... the iliad
7-j.w.goethe...faust
8-v.hugo...les miserables
9-g.flaubert... madame bovary
10-v.nabokov... lolita

...i can't believe i didn't mention shakespeare... and many others...well, "alea jacta est!"

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## PeterL

> 10.) Roger Zelzany--*The Amber Series*
> 
> The above list reflects my own views not those of, etc. etc.


The Lord of Light by Zelzany is vastly better; I would even classify it as great literature.

----------


## subterranean

Add to list: 
Crime and Punishment: Fyodor Dostoevsky
To Kill A Mocking Bird: Harper E. Lee

----------


## Aurora Ariel

(in no particular order)

The Bell Jar-Sylvia Plath(I first read this about a year ago and it's one of my absolute favourite books I've read as a teenager-but it's dark and disturbing-so you have been warned-lol :Smile: )

1984-George Orwell

Animal Farm-George Orwell

Madame Bovary-Gustave Flaubert

War and Peace-Leo Tolstoy

The Odyssey-Homer

Prometheus Bound and Other Plays-Aeschylus

Frankenstein-Mary Shelley(include also her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley's-Collected Works)

Wuthering Heights-Emily Bronte

Great Expectations-Charles Dickens

----------


## strategos

There are far too many good books that I've read that I couldn't possibly come up with a top 10 list that would satisfy me. These are the most readily that spring to mind, ordered by authors' last names:

1. Charles Dickens - Great Expectations
2. Arthur Conan Doyle - The Complete Sherlock Holmes
3. Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo
4. Guy Gavriel Kay - The Lions of Al-Rassan
5. William Golding - Lord of the Flies
6. Daniel Keyes - Flowers For Algernon
7. James A. Michener - Chesapeake
8. J.D. Salinger - Catcher in the Rye
9. Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
10. Connie Willis - Doomsday Book

----------


## Lady19thC

If I had to make a top ten, these would be my recommendations:

1. Jane Eyre-Charlotte Bronte
2. Wuthering Heights-Emily Bronte
3. Great Expectations-Charles Dickens
4. Middlemarch-George Eliot
5. Pride and Prejudice-Jane Austen
6. Anna Karenina-Leo Tolstoy
7. Madame Bovary-Gustave Flaubert
8. Dracula-Bram Stoker
9. Frankenstein-Mary Shelley
10.Tess of the D'Urbervilles-Thomas Hardy

But I would rather make a top 20 list!!  :Wink:

----------


## hellodolly

A CAPOTE READER by Truman Capote, DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather are my faves

----------


## Sarah's_Chanson

1. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
2. Persuasion by Jane Austen
3. Vanity Fair by Wlliam Thackery
4. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (A 1930's book)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
6. Tess of d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy


That's all I think think of for now!

----------


## Edmond

the future- "Brave New World"
how the world came to be "Ismael"
Emotional "great expectations"
Thrills "Count of Monti Cristo"
Something about math "Golden Ratio"

----------


## Jay T

1. Finnegans Wake  - James Joyce
2. Woman in the Dunes  - Kobe Abe
3. Confession of a Mask  - Mishima Yukio
4. Blood Meridian  - Cormac McCarthy
5. If On a Winter's Night a Traveler  - Italo Calvino
6. In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust
7. Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life  - Thomas Wolfe
8. Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner
9. Ulysses - James Joyce
10. New Arabian Nights  - Robert Louis Stevenson

----------


## Themis

1. Ödön von Horvath Youth without God
2. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach The Child of the Parish
3. Oscar Wilde Lord Arthur Saviles Crime
4. Goethe Faust
5. Umberto Eco The Name of the Rose
6. Alexandre Dumas Camille
7. Shakespeare Hamlet
8. Aldous Huxley Brave New World
9. Agatha Christie Ten little indians
10. Emil Strauß "Freund Hein"

----------


## Pensive

My Top Ten
1:Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
2:Harry Potter by JK Rowling
3:The mill on the floss by George Eliot
4:Bridge to Terabithia by......(I have forogtten then author's name but the story was very good as I remember)
5:Heidi by Jonathan Sypri 
6:The hobbit by JRK Tolikien
7:Rebecca by Dephne Du Maurier
8:Vanity Fair
9:Ann of the Green Gables (I love Anne Shirley's character. She is such a lovely and a cute girl)
10:Roots by Alex Halley

I love these books and I will always recommend everyone to read these novels. These are great.....atleast in my opinion  :Smile:

----------


## mono

> 4:Bridge to Terabithia by......(I have forogtten then author's name but the story was very good as I remember)


Katherine Paterson wrote this novel, if I remember correctly - one of my favorite fiction stories from childhood.  :Smile:

----------


## B-Mental

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho - ahhh, the possibilities
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - the definition of patience
The Death of Ivan Illyich by Leo Tolstoy - is it too late to change
Don Quixote by Miquel de Cervantes - return to chivalry or insanity...to live
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo - when are you free from your past
The Peoples History of the United States by Howard Zinn - what you didn't learn in school

----------


## chatnoir1311

1. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte ...........
i dont think i must explain why it is a 'must read book'
2. The Anti-christ - Nietzsche .........one of the best critics about the christian religion
3. Anything by E.A.Poe ...........one of the world's best narrators
4. The picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde...........
a timeless study about the youth maniac
5. Les liaisons dangereuses - C. de Laclos..........the best and importanced book of the french literature
6. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen ..... entertaining and funny
7. MacBeth - Shakespeare.........very tragically
8. Julie or the new Heloise - Rousseau .......after 7 months i haven't finished it yet , but i think its a big achievement to write such a boring book ! 
9. Les jeux sont faits - Sartre ..........a great love story, i love this book !
10. The glow - Sandor Marai............poetic and also a little bit sad

----------


## PistisSophia

The Tanakh/The Holy Scriptures
The Koran
Evangeline
A Tale of Two Cities
Pilgrims Progress
Shakespeare - at least a few.....
The Illiad/The Odyssey
The Travels of Marco Polo
The Merck Manual
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

----------


## ArcherSnake

In no particular order:

-I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb ( a must read especially if you are of Italian descendency)
-One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
-The Poisonwood Bible by Barbra Kingsolver
-Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
-The Knight Of Masion Rouge by Alexandre Dumas
-East Of Eden by John Steinbeck
-1984 by George Orwell
-Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
-Fortune's Rocks by Anita Shreve

And my all-time favorite, an honest-to-gosh modern epic that's got it all...

-The Stand by Stephen King

Another must read for Italians is The Birth Of Venus by Sarah Dunant.

----------


## Levenbreech Vor

Science Fiction 
Rank # Book title Author Other information
1 Dune Frank Herbert $
2 Foundation Isaac Asimov $
3 Rendezvous with Rama Arthur C. Clarke $
4 Speaker of the Dead Orson Scott Card
5 Enders Game Orson Scott Card $
6 Otherland Tad Williams !
7 Neuromancer William Gibson
8 Hyperion Dan Simmons
9 2001: A Space Odyssey Arthur C. Clarke $
10 Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams $
11 Fountains of Paradise Arthur C. Clarke
12 Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury
13 Illustrated Man Ray Bradbury
14 Light of the Other Days Arthur C. Clarke
15 Starship Troopers Robert A Heinlein


Fantasy
Rank # Book title Author Other information
1 Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien $
2 A Song of Ice and Fire George R. Martin $
3 The Mists of Avalon Marion Z. Bradley !
4 The Once and Future King T.H. White !
5 The Ancient One T.A. Barron
6 Crystal Cave Mary Stewart $
7 Watership Down Richard Adams


Other (Trashy Thrillers)
Rank Book title Author
1 The Simple Truth David Baldacci
2 The Firm John Grisham
3 Inca Gold Clive Cussler
4 The Pelican Brief John Grisham
5 Atlantis Found Clive Cussler


Historical Fiction
Rank # Book title Author Other information
0 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen
1 To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee
2 A Separate Peace John Knowles
3 Flowers for Algernon Daniel Keyes
4 Number the Stars Lois Lowry
5 Exodus Leon Uris
6 Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens
7 Moby Dick Herman Melville
8 Call of the Wild Jack London
9 Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger
10 Great Expectations Charles Dickens
11 As the Crow Flies Jeffrey Archer !
12 Wish you Well David Baldacci
13 Ivanhoe Sir Walter Scott


Key
! - Very long
$ - Has a series which is good and worth reading

----------


## IrishCanadian

In no particular order:
The old man and the sea -Hemingway
The Dubliners -James Joyce
Death of a salesman -i forgot but i'm sure someone knows who wrote this
Brave new world -Huxley
The Anead -Homer
Poems by W.B Yeats (does this count? I mean his later poems, that is, if this counts)
Kidnapped -Stevenson
Rebecca -Du Morier
The adventures of Sherlock Holmes - I can't remeber anything tonight
Viper's Tangle - Mauriac

This list will probably change for me month by month as I read more... but I love the stuff thats here... I should go back and re-read some of it.

----------


## el01ks

Pride and Prejudice
Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time Series (favourite fantasy - prefered the films of lord of the rings to the books, as in parts it read as some kind of boys' own thing)
The Three Musketeers
The Black Magician Trilogy
Nicholas Nickleby
Richard III
Hamlet
Frankenstein
Paradise Lost
The Faerie Queene

----------


## Matilda

wich is a must-read dickens book? 
I've only read oliver twist, and think i shoulf read another one.




> 4:Bridge to Terabithia by......(I have forogtten then author's name but the story was very good as I remember)


The authors name is Katherine Paterson.
I liked the book as well. I've heard that it has been banned by some groups in america, but i don't understande why, 'cause i dont find it provocative.

----------


## Charles Darnay

1. Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
2. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
3. Candide - Voltaire
4. Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
5. The Three Musketeers - Alexander Dumas
6. The Belgarid/Malloreon - David Eddings
7. Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo
8. Cireno de Bergerac - Rostand (I think, too lazy to check)
9. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
10. Cosette - Laura Kalpakian

----------


## deepishan

Anybody reading "the order of things" by- m.Foucoult

----------


## Aurora Ariel

I thought already did a list like this a few months ago.Yes, I checked and it's actually on page six.It's pretty much the same.But there are so many great books I could add, and keep going on and on, till the list becomes more like a top 50 or more!So I'll just add another a few for you which I've read over the last couple of years.I would suggest you try and read a few of these at least once.


I read my previous list again:

(In no particular order)

The Bell Jar-Sylvia Plath

1984-George Orwell

Animal Farm-George Orwell

Madame Bovary-Gustave Flaubert

War and Peace-Leo Tolstoy

The Odyssey-Homer *also add The Illiad (I actually read that a few months after The Odyssey)

Prometheus Bound and Other Plays-Aeschylus ( must also attempt to read Prometheus Unbound, the lyrical drama, in Four Acts, by Shelley as well, which is actually where my signature comes from).

Frankenstein-Mary Shelley ( also try reading her other later novels such as The Last Man) and Percy Bysshe Shelley's ( my favourite Romantic poet) complete poems.

Wuthering Heights-Emily Bronte

Great Expectations-Charles Dickens


More additions you can add, which missed before:

(In no particular order)

Anna Karenina-Leo Tolstoy

Ulysses- James Joyce

The Waves, Mrs.Dalloway, and Orlando- Virginia Woolf 

The Aspern Papers, and Washington Square- Henry James

Pride And Prejudice, and Mansfield Park- Jane Austen 

Jane Eyre, and The Professor- Charlotte Bronte

Dracula- Bram Stocker

Paradise Lost- John Milton

The Scarlet Letter- Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Picture of Dorian Gray- Oscar Wilde

The Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde- Robert Louis Stevenson

Robinson Crusoe and The Journel of the Plague Year- Daniel Defoe

Oedipus Rex and other plays- Sophocles

Medea and other plays- Euripides

Metamorphoses- Ovid

All works of Shakespeare.My favourites include: The Tempest, Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, A Midsummers Night's Dream, and Romeo and Juliet.


....I could continue all day :Wink: .

*I also really like Edmund Spenser's The Faery Queene which is already mentioned above.

----------


## Aurora Ariel

Matilda, for Dickens I would recommend Great Expectations ( my personal favourite), Nicholas Nickleby ( I was surprised how much I enjoyed this), A Tale of Two Cities ( read it at least once, and especially if you have studied the French Revolution or interested in those times); others include David Copperfield ( worth reading as the main character is partially modelled on Dickens himself ), and also The Old Curiosity Shop, which is quite a nice, sweet, thrilling, and intriguing read, though often accused of too much sentimentality ( which I kind of agree, in certain parts), but interestingly it was apparently the most popular work by him during his own era.I would suggest you start with The Pickwick Papers ( 1836-37), move on to Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), which he considered his first real attempt at the novel, and then The Old Curiosity Shop ( 1840-41).After this try A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations ( 1860-61).Finally, if you enjoyed any of those you may wish to further extend your Dickens library and include Hard Times (1854), Our Mutal Friend ( 1864-65), Little Dorrit (1855-57), Barnaby Rudge (1841), Martin Chuzzlewit (1843), Bleak House ( 1851-53), and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1869-70), though this last one was left unfinished due to his passing.The well known Christmas Books may also be appropriate for this time of the year.Enjoy reading! :Wink:

----------


## lit_fan!

Hmm...I have to say the other posters made excellent choices, here's my list:

1. Mourning Becomes Electra-Eugene O'Neill
2. 1984-George Orwell
3. A Lost Lady-Willa Cather
4. The Great Gatsby-F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Bridges of Madison County-James Waller
6. Animal Farm-George Orwell
7. The Pearl-John Steinbeck
8. Of Mice and Men-John Steinbeck
9. The Joy-Luck Club-Amy Tan
10. at least one of Moliere's many plays, as old as they are they still seem culturally relevant and very comedic.

----------


## mingdamerciless

well i dont kno if anyone has already said these because i couldnt be bothered to read all the posts (he he) but . . . 

Captain Corelli's mandolin - Louis de Bernieres
Fantastic novel, most people say the first 100 pages are incredibly boring but in my opinion they are the best bit. actually very funny

All Jane Austen - im a sucker for a romance, he he just cant resist. 

and Hardy is just an incredible writer, amazing descriptions. Tess is probably my favourite

The picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
Wilde is at his best here, really makes you think. I found it fascinating

Also a good play to read is Lysistrata -Aristophanes just make sure you find a decent translation.

----------


## simon mason

the myth of Gilgimesh
Siddartha
the complete works of Shakespeare
the poems of Sappho
waiting for Godot
the brothers karamazov 
chop wood carry water
the way of Tao
news from nowhere
Dune

----------


## IrishCanadian

My old list revisited, in no particular order:
King Lear --Shakespear
The Old Man and the Sea --Hemingway
Brave New World --Huxley
The Anead --Homer
Viper's Tangle --Mauriac
The Prince --Machiavelli (don't agree with everything here, but its a vital read i think)
A Grief Observed --Lewis
The Confessions of Saint Augustine
Great Expectations --Dickens
The Dumbwaiter --Pinter

... the list will continue to change for me

----------


## rachel

very good choice and spectrum of books Irish. There are some I have not read but will find copies as soon as I can and give them a whirl.
Hope you have a happy day.

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## Charles Darnay

[QUOTE=IrishCanadian]My old list revisited, in no particular order:
The Anead --Homer

Virgil...... not Homer.

----------


## Charles Darnay

My Choices would have to be:

1. Les Miserables - Hugo
2. A Tale of Two Cities - Dickens
3. Sirens of Titen - Vonnegut
4. Picture of Dorian Gray - Wilde
5. The Inferno - Dante
6. Toilers on the Sea - Hugo
7. Don Quixote - Cervantes
8. The Idiot - Dostoevsky
9. Barnaby Rudge - Dickens
10. Any one of Shakespeare's tragedies (mainly Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear)

----------


## bookgeek

In no particular order:
1. The Great Gatsby -F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. Jane Eyre -Charlotte Bronte
3. Dombey and Son -Charles Dickens
4. Brave New World -Aldous Huxley
5. Catcher in the Rye -J.D. Salinger
6. A Good Man is Hard to Find -Flannery O'Connor
7. Madame Bovary -Gustave Flaubert
8. Crime and Punishment -Fyodor Dostoevsky
9. Of Mice and Men -John Steinbeck
10. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest -Ken Kesey

there's tens more...it's so hard to choose!

----------


## Pensive

> Siddartha


I also found "Siddharta" quite fascinating.  :Biggrin:

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## malwethien

Just 10? Gee..that's tough! Ok lemme try...

Catch-22
Catcher in the Rye
Pride and Prejudice
Clockwork Orange
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell
One Hundred Years of Solitude
An Unbearable Lightness of Being
Like Water for Chocolate
The Harry Potter series (hahahaha)
Sophie's World

just to name a few...

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## non sum

although varied, i find that my list is a bit on the romantic side...

1.the idiot-dostoevsky
2.posession-byatt
3.the complete works of edgar allan poe
4.dracula-stoker
5.the republic-plato
6.childe harold's pilgrimage, don juan,manfred-byron 
7.the inferno-dante
8.the picture of dorian gray-wilde
9.great expectations-dickens
10.the count of monte cristo-dumas

and of course, macbeth, hamlet, othello...where would we be without the great bard?

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## rachel

I really love your selection with the exception of The Idiot. I felt like banging my head into the wall nine times and then actually HURTING myself going thru that one.

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## Erna

> I really love your selection with the exception of The Idiot. I felt like banging my head into the wall nine times and then actually HURTING myself going thru that one.


I'm happy to hear this, because it doesn't seem to depend on me. I'm also fighting to finish this book, but I don't know when I will reach the end...

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## rachel

here is a hug for you and a ticket to a really good show for when you have made it!

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## hera-on-earth

I think Hardy's "Tess of the d'urbervilles" can make good reading if u have tht kind of patience!

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## sdr4jc

Wuthering Heights
A Tale of Two Cities
All the Pretty Horses
Phantom of the Opera


Just to name a few  :Thumbs Up:

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## TodHackett

These are a few of my personal favorites. But I go in for modern/contemporary lit, so these are not "time tested":

-Aldous Huxley, _Brave New World_
-Ken Kesey, _One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest_
-Mary Shelley, _Frankenstein_
-David James Duncan, _The Brothers K_
-Mark Danielewski, _House of Leaves_
-Daniel Boorstin, _The Image_
-Kurt Vonnegut, _Mother Night_ (if I can pick only one by Vonnegut)
-Dante, _Inferno_
-Steinbeck, _The Grapes of Wrath_
-Byron, _Childe Harold's Pilgrimage_

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## Vedrana

These are some of my favourites, but of course there are others. I don't know if plays count, but I put down three. 

Pride and Prejudice- Jane Austen
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall- Anne Bronte
The Catcher in the Rye- JD Salinger
The Importance of Being Ernest- Oscar Wilde
Frankenstein- Mary Shelley
A Doll's House- Henrik Ibsen
Northanger Abbey- Jane Austen
The Crucible- Arthur Miller
The Mayor of Casterbridge- Thomas Hardy
Sons and Lovers- DH Lawrence

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## Night Stalker

Well my top ten change every day. Today its probably (in no order):

Othello-Shakespeare
Mort-Terry Pratchett
The Hobbit- Tolkien
Death of a Salesman (play)- Arther Miller
Great Expectations- Dickens
The Nightingale and the Rose (short story)- Oscar Wilde
Wuthering Heights- Emily (?) Bronte
anything by Edgar Allen Poe
Private Peaceful- Micheal Morpurgo (excellent if you like war books)
Les Miserables- Hugo (the musical of this is also absolutly amazing!)

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## davoarid

1. The Catcher in the Rye -Salinger
2. 1984 -Orwell
3. All Quiet on the Western Front -Remarque
4. We the Living -Rand
5. The Winter of Our Discontent -Steinbeck (which is, strangely, my favorite of all his novels)
6. The Stranger -Camus
7. Candide -Voltaire
8. The Trial -Kafka
9. The Fountainhead -Rand
10. The Man Who Was Thursday -G.K. Chesterton

My favorite plays are Othello, King Lear, and Ibsen's "A Doll's House."

If we included shorter stories, I'd have "Heart of Darkness," "The Time Machine," "Anthem," and "The Old Man and the Sea."

Oh, and if we included super-short stories, I'd have to put J.D. Salingner's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," simply because it contains my favorite sentence in all of literature. But you have to find it for yourself!

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## classicsgirl

1. Anne of Green Gables
2. Little House on the praire 
3. Little Women
4. Pride & Prejudice
5. Emily of New Moon
6. The Secret Garden
7. The Lion The Witch & the Wardrobe
8. Geisha
9. The Root Cellar
10. Double Spell

 :Banana:

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## Pensive

Anne Of Green Gables and Pride And Prejudice, both of them are great novels.

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## ElizabethSewall

Classicsgirl hello and welcome!
I have read most of your favourite books and liked them a lot either.  :Nod:  
I just finished Memoirs of a Geisha and found it exceptional!!!  :Banana:

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## classicsgirl

ElizabethSewall Hi! Yes Geisha was beautifully written, i think the book was alot better then the movie. have u seen the movie? 

Pensive i see you share my Liking for Anne of Green Gables! have you read the other Anne novels in the series? :P

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## Pensive

I read the second and third one but then I found Anne's lively character was changing as she was getting older. I would not say that it had gone but I liked her better when she was a child.

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## ajaxon

Well, I don't consider myself a pro by any means, but here are my top ten books.

Life on the Mississippi-Twain
To Kill A Maocking Bird-Lee
Nick Adams Stories-Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls-Hemingway
Jungle Books-Kipling
Dune-Herbert
Brave New World-Huxley
East of Eden-Steinbeck
O Pioneers-Cather
Atlas Shrugged-Rand

Just my two cent's worth

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## Moandor

Just teen books... OK, this is my Top 10:

Master and Margarita - Mihaił Bułhakow
Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Wuthering Heihgts - Emily Bronte
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Count of Monte Christo - Aleksander Dumas
Faraon (Pharaoh) - Bolesław Prus (Prus was the polish writer)
Don Kichote (I can't remember original title) - Miguel the Cervantes Saaverda
Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco
Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
Quo Vadis - Henryk Sienkiewicz (also polish writer)

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## ElizabethSewall

> ElizabethSewall Hi! Yes Geisha was beautifully written, i think the book was alot better then the movie. have u seen the movie?


Hi!! How are you?
Yes I have but I preferred the book, even though the movie was beautiful. But there were too many things left aside. What did you thought?

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## elpidi26

Mark Twain-Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn (I consider these as one book though the 
latter is more important in my opinion)
Aldous Huxley-Brave New World
Fyodor Dostoevsky-The Brothers Karamazov
Mary Shelley-Frankenstein
John Steinbeck-Grapes of Wrath
Harriet Beecher Stowe-Uncle Tom's Cabin
Elie Wiesel-Night (unbelievable)
Homer-Iliad/Odyssey (I know I know. But they're both good)
Oscar Wilde-All his plays, esp., The Importance of Being Earnest
Denis Diderot-Rameau's Nephew

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## Boris239

If we are talking about ten classic works:

1) Dostoevsky "Crime and Pinishment", "Idiot", "Brothers Karamazov"
2)Tolstoy "War and Peace"
3) Shakespeare "Hamlet" and "Macbeth"
4) Goethe "Faust"
5) Gugo "Les Miserables"
6) Kamu "Stranger"
7) Wilde "Portret of Dorian Grey"
8) Bulgakov "Master and Margarita"
9) Greene "Power and Glory"
10) Orwell "1984"

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## Theshizznigg

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Desiree - Anne Marie Selinko
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Lorna Doone - R.D Blackmoore
Tess D'ubervilles - Thomas Hardy
The Monk - Charles Lewis
That Enchantress - Doris Leslie
Me, and Mr. Jeeves - PG Woodehouse
Book of Brave Deeds - Various Authors
The Bible - Various Authors

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## Ryduce

No particular order.....

The Great Gatsby-Fitzgerald
The Grapes of Wrath-Steinbeck
The Sirens of Titan or Cat's Cradle(I couldn't make up my mind)-Vonnegut
Ulysses-Joyce(to ground you in reality)
Light in August-Faulkner
The Old Man and the Sea-Hemingway
The Portrait of Dorian Gray-Wilde
Crime and Punishment-Dostoevsky
To the Lighthouse-Woolf
To Kill a Mockingbird-Lee

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## virtus

I've seen a lot of great lists, but personally I missed Thomas Paine's works, Musil's Mann ohne Eigenshaften and some more of Umberto Eco's works  :Biggrin:

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## Bookworm Cris

I´ve just realized how many good books I must read! Thanks for the sugestions!

Some of my favourites (don´t know if they´re all classics, but I hope you enjoy them):
- Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
- East of Eden - John Steinbeck
- Lord of the Rings - Tolkien
- Foundation Trilogy - Isaac Asimov
- Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
- Exodus - Leon Uris
- The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
- Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
- Illusions - Richard Bach
- The Power of Myth - Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers

I´ve noticed no one mentioned any brazilian author... We have very good authors, and very good books. I have some suggestions of good books I have read and found out that have translations in english:
- The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas) and Dom Casmurro - Machado de Assis (his best novels, and, if available, read his short stories, they are really good and full of fine social irony)
- A Time to Meet (Encontro Marcado) - Fernando Sabino 
- Captains of the Sands (Capitães da Areia) and Sea of Death (Mar Morto) - Jorge Amado (stories of stray-kids and sailors in Bahia, very touching)
- Family Ties (Laços de Família) and Revelations of one world (A descoberta do mundo) - Clarice Lispector (both are short stories, very good - she´s got some good novels, too)
- Time and the Wind (O Tempo e o Vento) and Incident in Antares (Incidente em Antares) - Erico Veríssimo (the first is a trilogy telling a family´s story in the south of Brasil through two centuries, and the second is a very funny story about a strike of the grave-diggers and the awakening of seven recently dead people in protest... imagine...;D)

And, from Portuguese literature, my suggestion is the poetry of Fernando Pessoa, especially with the heteronymous Alberto Caeiro, very good!

Well, you will find out that brazilian literature has not only Paulo Coelho...

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## the appletree

As you'll notice, I am real big on the classics

no order...

steinbeck-of mice and men
stevenson-treasure island
wilde-portait of dorian gray
faulkner-the sound an the fury
dumas-the count of monte cristo

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## Jarndyce

My top 15, in order:
1) Bleak House, Dickens
2) Invisible Man, Ellison
3) Crime and Punishment, Dostoyesvsky
4) Moby Dick, Melville
5) Great Expectations, Dickens
6) For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway
7) One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez
8) A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway
9) Of Human Bondage, Maughm
10) Love in the Time of Cholera, Garcia Marquez
11) Swann's Way, Proust
12) The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway
13) All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque
14) Hard Times, Dickens
15) Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, Murokami

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## ShoutGrace

> As you'll notice, I am real big on the classics


Hey, theres nothing wrong with that! The books are classics for a reason. This is an avenue of life in which I believe conformity is most justified.

Crime and Punishment - Dostoyesvsky

The Idiot - Dostoyevsky

The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoyevsky

The Caine Mutiny - Herman Wouk (thats just sentamentalism)

King Lear - William Shakespeare (it can be considered a book? Thats how I read it)

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Mark Twain

Magister Ludi - Herman Hess

The Zork Chronicles - George Effinger (in all seriousness)

The Confessions of Saint Augustine

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

(The list must be composed of books we've read, right?)

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## Beubeu78

Some of my favourites :

Proust - In Search of Lost Time
Kafka - The Trial
Woolf - Mrs Dalloway
Borges - Collected Fictions
Hemingway - The Sun Also Rises
Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
García Márquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Amado - Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands
Céline - Journey To The End Of The Night
Gide - The Counterfeiters

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## SmokeBellew

My list is short but anyway...

1. Samuel Langorne Clemens (M.T) - Roughing It
2. Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights
3. Jack London - Seawolf/Martin Eden/Smoke Bellew
4. Oscar Wilde - The Picture Of Dorian Gray/The Ballad Of Reading Gaol (poetry)
5. Valerio Massimo Manfredi - ALEXANDER The Ends Of Earth
6. Bruce Lee The Warrior Within (sorry, I forgot the author's name)
7. Yaroslav Gashek - The Adventures Of The Courageous Soldier Shveik (a must read!)
8. Dostoevsky - The Gambler

-------------------------------
Of course tastes are different, some may hate my list.

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## Bookworm Cris

> Some of my favourites :
> Amado - Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands


I´ve read it too, and it´s very good and funny, full of recipes, but it´s not one of my favourites. I prefer Sea of Death (Mar Morto), it made me cry...




> García Márquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude


 Fantastic literature is not what I prefer, but that was good.

Well, it´s better start to read some suggestions of this thread, they are very good indeed...

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## Melskim86

here some of my favourites

a summer - william shakespeare
one hundred years of solitude - gabriel garcia marquez
the ghost - danielle steel
the da vinci code - dan brown
ana karenina - leo tolstoy
les miserables - victor hugo
safo biography - alexander krislov
life is a dream - pedro calderon de la barca
Wuthering Heights - emily bronte
the impostor - jane feather
perfume - patrick suskind
the eight - katherine neville (this one is great)

ummmm and some more i think....

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## Cormeister37

A FAREWEL TO ARMS Ernest Hemingway
WAR AND PEACE Leo Tolstoy
ULYSSES James Joyce
THE PAINTED BIRD Jerzy Kosinski
ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST Ken Kesey
A SEPARATE PEACE John Knowles
THE HOBBIT J.R.R. Tolkien
THE BELL JAR Sylvia Plath
THE CATCHER IN THE RYE J.D. Salinger
FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS Ernest Hemingway

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## Mitopeia

Hi!! In your opinion wich is the 10 "u have to have" list?? This will really help me to complete my libary... Thanks!! Take care

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## grace86

Hola Mitopeia! Bienvenidos a LitNet! I think there is a thread around here somewhere with "must have classics" You might want to look that one up. But I can help out a little bit here if you want...just some suggestions:

1. Don Quixote - Cervantes (I have heard a lot of good things about this one, but have yet to read it myself...it is sitting on the shelf saying read me!!)

2. War and Peace - Tolstoy

3. Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky

4. Dr. Zhivago - the author eludes me right now

5. Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon

6. The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

7. The Sotweed Factory - James Barth

8. The Hamlet - William Faulkner (I think LitNet book club reads a lot of his stuff)

9. On the Road - Jack Kerouac

10. Ulysses - James Joyce


This is all I can think of at the moment...provided you can get through these books...they are very rewarding...my daddy helped me with this list. Hope this helps.

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## Mark F.

1 "A Farewell to Arms" by Hemingway
2 "Crime & Punishment" by Dostoevsky
3 "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" by Joyce
4 "Light in August" by Faulkner
5 "1984" by Orwell
6 "The Grapes of Wrath" by Steinbeck
7 "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" by Hunter S. Thompson
8 "The Catcher in the Rye" by Salinger
9 "Factotum" by Bukowski
10 "Metamorphosis" by Kafka

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## bazarov

> 1. Don Quixote - Cervantes (I have heard a lot of good things about this one, but have yet to read it myself...it is sitting on the shelf saying read me!!)
> 
> 2. War and Peace - Tolstoy
> 
> 3. Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky
> 
> 4. Dr. Zhivago - the author eludes me right now


Don Quixote is definitly one of the best book I've ever read!!! Boris Pasternak wrote Dr. Zhivago. Nobody said nothing about Brothers Karamazov  :FRlol:   :FRlol:   :FRlol:  (see July book), for me a much better then CiP, actually the best ever!

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## johnnybgoode

here's a few,To Kill A Mockingbird the author wrote only one book and retired pity,superb plot,Tom Sawyer,I'm still a bit of this boy no matter how hard I try to grow up,The Bible of course and I most reccomend Ecclesiastes,Les Miserables,The Hunchback of Notre Dame,The Old Man and The Sea,Gullivers Travels

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## grace86

Bazarov - 

I posted my top ten somewhere else didn't I? I was going to post it here also, but you beat me to it on the first four when quoting me!!

Oh well...if I already posted it here...here I am posting it:

Don Quixote
War and Peace
Crime and Punishment
Dr. Zhivago
Gravity's Rainbow
The Fountainhead
The Sotweed Factory
The Hamlet
On the Road
Ulysses

I know I posted it somewhere else...cant seem to find the thread at the moment...oh, by the way Bazarov...your enthusiam for Don Quixote made it jump to number one on my books to read for summer list.

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## tennis2622

The Idiot by Dostoevsky
Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
The Tale of Two Cities by Dickens
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas 
The Red and the Black by Stendhal 
Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
The Prince by Nicoolo Machiavelli

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## bazarov

> The Idiot by Dostoevsky
> Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
> The Tale of Two Cities by Dickens
> Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
> The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas 
> The Red and the Black by Stendhal 
> Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
> Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
> Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
> The Prince by Nicoolo Machiavelli


Realism and Russians are your favorites??? Dostoevsky fan???Very good  :FRlol:   :FRlol:  , you're on my buudy list!!  :FRlol: 




> Bazarov - 
> 
> I posted my top ten somewhere else didn't I? I was going to post it here also, but you beat me to it on the first four when quoting me!!
> 
> Oh well...if I already posted it here...here I am posting it:
> 
> Don Quixote
> War and Peace
> Crime and Punishment
> ...


Page 10, post #150 on this thread. About Don Quixote, you won't regret, either you'll laugh to his acts or will be thinking about his great minds and thoughts.

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## Eufrosyne

Jane Eyre- C Bronte
Brave new world- A Huxley
Madame Bovary- G Flaubert
Vanity Fair- W M Thackeray
Farenheit 451- R Bradbury
L´assommoir- E Zola
Waiting for Godot- S Beckett
Sophies world- J Gaarder
Tess of the Durbervilles- T Hardy
The hunchback of Notre Dame- V Hugo

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## Manfred

I've loved some of these selections, despised a few, and agreed with others. Here is my top 10, for better or worse, in no particular order.

1. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
2. 1984, by George Orwell
3. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
4. Elmer Gantry, by Sinclair Lewis
5. The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett
6. The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope
7. Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson
8. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, by Howard Pyle
9. Dracula, by Bram Stoker
10. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote

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## Madhuri

Hi, I would recommend some books by Indian authors.

1. Suitable Boy -- Vikram Seth
2. A Fine Balance -- Rohinton Mistry
3. The Crow Eaters -- Bapsi Sidhwa (Pakistani writer)
4. Difficult Daughters -- Manju Kapur
5. Chokher Bali -- Rabindranath Tagore

-madhuri  :Thumbs Up:

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## Manfred

Just a side note here:
As a general rule, I read novels for entertainment--even the classics. If there is social commentary, or educational import, or spiritual enlightenment contained therein, excellent; all of these things are important, and may be readily soaked in along with the story.
But if it's not entertaining then I feel that it has somehow failed on some level. Without an engaging story, one might as well read a history or philosophy tome.

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## papillon123

I've really enjoyed seeing what others have on their top ten lists.
Although I agree with many of the posted suggestions, I now have
a ton of "must reads" !!! Here are a few more that may or may not have 
been posted before.
Journey to the East - Hermann Hesse
Franny and Zooey - J.D. Salinger
The Keys of the Kingdom - A.J. Cronin
I, Claudius - Robert Graves
Rememberance of Things Past (seven volumes or parts) - Marcel Proust
Main Street - Sinclair Lewis
The Virginian - Owen Wistar
Poetry of WB Yeats and ee cummings

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## literaturerocks

i would highly recommend edgar allen poe's work 
the iliad
the odyssey both homer 
dante's divine comdey dante alighieri
things by hemingway and dickens

even though thats not ten thats just what iwould recommend .. i have not read much yet but im on my way!  :Banana:   :Biggrin:   :Nod:

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## grace86

Ahah, someone must have moved my post that is on page 10. I posted that when Mitopeia started (her?) introduction thread and asked about 10 must read classics. Hmm, that makes sense. Okie dokie, thought I was going crazy for a minute...no, I do not like to repeat myself  :Biggrin:

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## Mitopeia

Thanks for answering!! I will consider alot your lists to make mypersonal "library"!! If u want to discuss about books, poems, or anything else mi e-mail is: [email protected] 
Thanks take care!!  :Smile:

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## _JadeRain_

Some of my favorite books

1. Alice in Wonderland
2. The Crucible
3. Frankenstein
4. Robinson Crusoe
5. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
6. Les Misérables
7. The Jungle Book
8. A Midsummer Night's Dream
9. Catcher in the Rye
10. Jurassic Park

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## Behemoth

Only 10?? Tricky, there's so many books out there which have influenced me. Well, here goes:

1. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini) - without doubt one of the most powerful novels I have ever read, filled with beautiful imagery and language, but also the most horrific acts committed by man's inhumanity to man, and how the bonds we make between friends, lovers etc can be as destructive as they are constructive. 

2. The Diary of Anne Frank

3. Eugene Onegin (Alexander Pushkin) - one of Pushkin's finest, a tale of friendship and betrayal which results in pain and the realisation that our actions cannot always be put right, no matter if we repent. 

4. The Odyssey (Homer) 

5. Paradise Lost (John Milton) 

6. Kitchen (Banana Yoshimoto) - a beautiful little book which deals with people and emotion, specifically grief following the loss of a loved one. Yoshimoto's writing is sensitive and will connect with anyone who has ever suffered the loss of a loved one or friend. 

7. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)

8. Dr Zhivago (Boris Pasternak)

9. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown) - more to be a part of the experience than for anything else, it's a good novel but maybe not in the same league as the other novels mentioned above. 

10. The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov) - Pure brilliance.

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## alshadai

You will not find many European/Russian classics here... I do not really read or study those even though I have tried.
In no particular order!

1._Blindness_, Jose Saramago
2._Wind Up Bird Chronicle_, Haruki Murakami
3._A Personal Matter_, Kenzaburo Oe
4._One Hundred Years of Solitude_, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
5._The Divine Comedy_, Dante.
6._Gravity's Rainbow_, Thomas Pynchon
7._A Confederacy of Dunces_, John Kennedy Toole
8._Don Quixote_, Cervantes
9._The Iliad_, Homer
10._The Bible_. (I am not a Christian but I still recommend this because it is a basis for so much literature!)

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## Scheherazade

Recently I have read _ Watership Down_ by Adams and it took my breath away so I would like to update my list to add this book as well.


> In no particular order:
> 
> 1. _To Kill A Mockingbird_ by Harper Lee
> 
> 2. _Catch-22_ by Joseph Heller
> 
> 3. _Watership Down_ by Richard Adams
> 
> 4. _Grapes of Wrath_ by Steinbeck
> ...

----------


## Charles Darnay

I just finished East of Eden and it has just made my list of essential reads.

----------


## ElizabethBennet

Ten is so small, there's so many to choose from, but I'll try:
(in no particular order)
Pride and Prejudice ~ Jane Austen
Nicholas Nickleby ~ Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities ~ Charles Dickens
King Lear ~ Shakespeare
Animal Farm ~ George Orwell
Anne of Green Gables series ~ Lucy Maud Montgomery
Little Women ~ Louisa May Alcott ( by the way, ever noticed how Montgomery and Alcott have the same first two initials: L.M. ?)
Ivanhoe ~ Sir Walter Scott (I'm surprised I haven't seen that one here yet)
Le Tour du Monde en 80 jours (Around the world in 80 days) ~ Jules Verne
The Bible

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## Pensive

East Of Eden and The Long Walk added to my list!

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## Mary Sue

Wuthering Heights
David Copperfield
The Brothers Karamazov
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Madame Bovary
Dr. Zhivago
The Great Gatsby
Absalom, Absalom!
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Rebecca

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## anne1987

1. rebecca-du maurier
2. gone with the wind-margaret mitchell
3.jane eyre-charlotte bronte
4.wuthering heights-emily bronte
5.great expectations-dickens
6.heart of darkness-joseph conrad
7.far from the madding crowd-hardy
8.the razor's edge-somerset maugham
9.of human bondage-''
10.pride and prejudice- jane austen

this list chiefly consists of romantic books because i am a romantic at heart and may not be completely based on logic.

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## underground

just as the title says.

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## Charles Darnay

Five is hard, there are sooo many.... there's a thread "10 must read books", you should check that out. Off the top of my head I would say:

Illiad/Odysey - Homer
Canterbury Tales - Chaucer
Don Quixote - Cervantes
Something by a Victorian author
Something by Stienbeck
Something by Faulkner

I know that's more then five,

----------


## stlukesguild

Well... there's already a top-ten books thread and a desert island ten thread. It was hard enough for me to cut it down to just that:

1. Dante Allighieri- The Divine Comedy
2. William Shakespeare- Collected Plays
3. John Milton- Paradise Lost
4. Cervantes- Don Quixote
5. The Bible (King James Translation)
6. William Blake- Collected Poetic Works
7. J.L. Borges- Collected Fictions
8. Kafka- Collected Short Stories
9. Italo Calvino- Invisible Cities
10. Proust- In Search of Lost Time (as I'll have found all the time I'll ever need
I'll finally be able to complete this one :Brow: .

I don't know that I could pick which 5 of these to cut. Of course... I might add that while Dante has a ring in hell for just about everything, I don't know if there is a space for those who haven't read the great classics (of course there should be  :Biggrin:  ... perhaps a small, dingy room where you would be consigned to reading Jackie Collins novels while watching re-runs of "Oprah" and "Hee-Haw".  :FRlol:

----------


## grace86

> Of course... I might add that while Dante has a ring in hell for just about everything, I don't know if there is a space for those who haven't read the great classics (of course there should be  ... perhaps a small, dingy room where you would be consigned to reading Jackie Collins novels while watching re-runs of "Oprah" and "Hee-Haw".



Eeeww...Oprah, dingy room, and Hee-Haw...I do not want to picture that.

----------


## subterranean

> 7. J.L. Borges- Collected Fictions


Ah Borges, my unfulfilled wish until now

----------


## Comrade Ahab

so i really doubt anyone is even still reading this thread, and i'm sure that all of mine have been mentioned 50 times over, but i feel like adding a list as well. 

in no particular order:

Moby-Dick Herman Melville
The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov
Dead Souls Nikolai Gogol
A Confederacy of Dunces John Kennedy Toole
Complete Short Stories Flannery O'Connor
The Fountainhead Ayn Rand
The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Richard III William Shakespeare


so that's 9, i should probably put the Bible or Ulysses or something like that up there too, but i've never finished either so...

----------


## EAP

Lotr
Asoiaf 
Mbotf 
Kotab
Pon 
Coa 
Mog 
Mst
Bt
Aolad

----------


## Adolescent09

Ok first of all George Orwell's Animal Farm is just in a league of its own. There isn't a book that tops its candid explicitness, but blatant message in only 100 or so pages and the ending is just magnificent. The pigs and the humans are the same was just a stroke of pure brilliance. I will always respect George Orwell for Animal Farm; It's kind of like Mario Puzo's The Godfather (the cinematic version), that is to say, completely flawless. Not a foible anywhere.

Since Animal Farm is in a league of its own here is my list of other highly recommended books (mostly classics). 

My top ten...

The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas 
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo 
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Scarlet Pimpernel - Baroness Emmuska Orczy 
Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beacher Stowe 
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Anna Karenina - Fyodor Dostoyevsky 
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad 
The Iliad - Homer

and most recently... State of Denial - Bob Woodward... pure integrity and brilliance.

----------


## Woland

Cant be bothered with 10 but here's three

_Things Fall Apart_ - Achebe
_Lolita_ - Nabokov
_The Tempest_ - Shakesy

----------


## higley

I recommend these not for their renown or cultural significance, or because they are classics (and some of them aren't), but because I consider them to be the ten most highly enjoyable, inspiring, or poignant books I know, for whatever respective reasons why. It would take far too long for me to express the reasoning for each of these in just this post (I'd only end up rambling), so I'll just have to list them:

_Life of Pi_- Yann Martel
_The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay_- Michael Chabon
_Life Expectancy_- Dean Koontz
_The Killer Angels_- Michael Shaara
_Crime and Punishment_- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
_Fahrenheit 451_- Ray Bradbury (and any of his short stories)
_Kidnapped_- Robert Louis Stevenson
_The Chronicles of Narnia_- C.S. Lewis (also his illuminating book _The Screwtape Letters_, which is undervalued in my opinion)
_My Brother Sam is Dead_- James and Chris Collier
_The Pilgrim's Progress_- John Bunyan

----------


## Adudaewen

I'm not sure if I can come up with 10, but here goes, my top favorite books I think everyone should read. (I guess I'm narcissistic)  :Wink:  

1. _Dracula_ by Bram Stoker
2. _1984_ by George Orwell
3. _Lord of the Rings_ by JRR Tolkien
4. _Pride and Prejudice_ and _Sense and Sensibility_ by Jane Austen
5. _Phantom of the Opera_ by Gaston Leroux
6. _The Hobbit_ by JRR Tolkien
7. _Beowulf_ unknown
8. _Iliad_ and _Oddysey_ by Homer (I'm acutally in the process of reading these now)
9. _Republic_ by Plato (I haven't read this one yet, however my sister said it was one of the greatest books she ever read)
10. _The Illustrated Book of Signs and Symbols_ by Miranda Bruce-Mitford

Why look at that, I did manage to dredge up ten.

----------


## livelaughlove

Adolescent- Actually, Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina. It's wonderful, but I don't know if I would put it on a "must read" list... but that's just my opinion!

Has anyone read The Mysterious Stranger by Twain? I found it very twisted but oh so fabulous!

----------


## grace86

> _The Pilgrim's Progress_- John Bunyan


I just received this book from a pastor I know. So you liked it very much then Higley? It's not that long, maybe I can squeeze it in before Christmas break is over.

----------


## higley

> I just received this book from a pastor I know. So you liked it very much then Higley? It's not that long, maybe I can squeeze it in before Christmas break is over.


Oh yes it's lovely.  :Smile:  Very much enjoyed it; reads like a dream.

----------


## Tasartir

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Carc&#237;a M&#225;rquez
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
1984 by George Orwell
Night by Elie Wiesel
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Mrs.Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

----------


## Whifflingpin

Giles Goat-Boy - John Barth
Don Quixote - Cervantes
Lord Jim - Conrad
Tulku - Peter Dickinson
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Gibbon
God Knows - Joseph Heller
Darkness at Noon - Arthur Koestler
The Other Wind - Ursula le Guin
The Road Back - Erich Maria Remarque
Candide - Voltaire

.

----------


## THX-1138

1984 by George Orwell
Beowulf 
The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
Fahrenheit 451- Ray Bradbury 
Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
brave new world by Aldous Huxly
the kite runner by Khaled Hosseini
the heart is a lonely hunter by Carson Mccullers
the catcher in the rye by J.D Salinger
great expectations by Charles Dickens
the trial by Franz Kafka

----------


## bouquin

my recommendations:

_Catch-22_ (Joseph Heller)
_Angela's Ashes_ (Frank McCourt)
_Three Men in a Boat_ (Jerome K. Jerome)
_Frankenstein_ (Mary Shelley)
_A Farewell to Arms_ (Ernest Hemingway)
_Brave New World_ (Aldous Huxley)
_The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ (Mark Twain)
_Death in Venice and Other Stories_ (Thomas Mann)
_Ten Little Indians_ (Sherman Alexie)
_The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time_ (Mark Haddon)

----------


## Shakira

1] _Pride and Prejudice_ – Jane Austen.
2] _Her Mother’s Daughter_ – Marilyn French.
3] _1984_ – George Orwell.
4] _Beloved_ – Toni Morrison.
5] _Anna Karenina_ – Leo Tolstoy.
6] _Lolita_ – Vladimir Nabokov.
7] _100 Years of Solitude_ – Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
8] _Mill on the Floss_ – George Eliot.
9] _Jane Eyre_ – Charlotte Bronte.
10] The Diary of Anne Frank.

----------


## Niamh

1. _Persuasion_- Jane Austen
2. _Hellfire_- Mia Gallagher
3. _The Alchemist_- Paulo Coelho
4. _East of Eden_- John Stienbeck
5. _Utterly Monkey_- Nick Laird
6. _Merlin Trilogy_- Mary Stewart
7. _Artemis Fowl_- Eoin Colfer
8. _His Dark materials_- Philip Pulman
9. _Deirdre of the Sorrows_- J.M.Synge
10. _Jane Eyre_- Charlotte Bronte

----------


## Adolescent09

> Adolescent- Actually, Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina. It's wonderful, but I don't know if I would put it on a "must read" list... but that's just my opinion!
> 
> Has anyone read The Mysterious Stranger by Twain? I found it very twisted but oh so fabulous!


Yes, sorry I meant Tolstoy  :Wink: , ever cared to read War and Peace? I'm hacking through that right now.

----------


## andave_ya

I'm an adolescent too...
Anyway, these books aren't all classics, but they are must-reads:
(in random order)

Any of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries by Dorothy L. Sayers
Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam (Persian poetry)
The Pickwick Papers by Dickens
Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte
Any of Emily Dickinson's poems
The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
and, of course, the Illiad and the Odyssey by Homer

----------


## SaGe

> Adolescent- Actually, Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina. It's wonderful, but I don't know if I would put it on a "must read" list... but that's just my opinion!
> 
> Has anyone read The Mysterious Stranger by Twain? I found it very twisted but oh so fabulous!


I love Anna Karenina but agree that it's not top 10 (though _War and Peace_ may very well be).

And yes, _The Mysterious Stranger_ is great.

_Gravity's Rainbow_ by Thomas Pynchon
_1984_ (and _Animal Farm_ for that matter) by George Orwell
_A Tale of Two Cities_ by Charles Dickens
_War and Peace_ by Leo Tolstoy
_The Great Gatsby_ by F. Scott Fitzgerald
_The Catcher in the Rye_ by J.D Salinger
_The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ by Mark Twain
_In Search of Lost Time_ (_&#192; la recherche du temps perdu_) by Marcel Proust
_The Odyssey_ by Homer
_The Trial_ by Franz Kafka

Somewhat of a Generic list, but what can you do...

----------


## rocket_pilot

1. Brothers Karamazov
2. Mary Called Magdalene
3. White Nights
4. The Trail
5. Padre Pio
6. The Count of Monte Cristo
7. A Tale of Two Cities
8. The Autobiography of a Yogi
9. The Adolescent
10. The Idiot

----------


## zigzig20s

ten is definitely not enough...i would think you should start with the bible and the odyssey and the illiad...then shakespeare...those things are very often echoed in later literature, so if uve not read them u won't understand things fully. then things like dickens, austen, thoreau...as for contemporary literature, have a look at the nobel prize winners for lit.

----------


## Adolescent09

> 1. Brothers Karamazov
> 2. Mary Called Magdalene
> 3. White Nights
> 4. The Trail
> 5. Padre Pio
> 6. The Count of Monte Cristo
> 7. A Tale of Two Cities
> 8. The Autobiography of a Yogi
> 9. The Adolescent
> 10. The Idiot


I only got through half of Dostoevsky's The Adolescent. I loved Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov though. Nice list.

----------


## Tasartir

Hmm, top ten to read. I'd agree that JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are definitely top tens, but I would add The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner to some of you people's lists, as well as War and Peace by Tolstoy, also Don Quixote by Cervantes, and Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais.

----------


## Adolescent09

Wow you've read War and Peace ^^^? I only got through half of it... then got half way through Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville (which I plan on finishing soon). After that I finished Anna Karenina. It's great you've read it.

----------


## grace86

> Hmm, top ten to read. I'd agree that JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are definitely top tens, but I would add The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner to some of you people's lists, as well as War and Peace by Tolstoy, also Don Quixote by Cervantes, and Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais.


I love Gargantua and Pantagruel! Perfect satire.

----------


## SaGe

> Wow you've read War and Peace ^^^? I only got through half of it... then got half way through Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville (which I plan on finishing soon). After that I finished Anna Karenina. It's great you've read it.


War and Peace is great, you should give it another shot  :Smile:  It's probably good that you read _Anna Karenina_ first.

----------


## Idril

> I only got through half of Dostoevsky's The Adolescent. I loved Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov though. Nice list.


I just finished _The Adolescent_ and while I wouldn't consider it Dostoevsky's greatest work or anything, I rather enjoyed it. I even liked it better than _Brothers Karamozov_.

----------


## Adolescent09

What would you consider Dostoevsky's greatest work? Crime and Punishment?

----------


## Idril

> What would you consider Dostoevsky's greatest work? Crime and Punishment?


Well, that's a tough one. First of all, it would just be a personal opinion, I'm not making any sort of professional-type critique, I like what I like and that's about as technical as I get.  :Tongue:  Secondly, I know which ones I would omit, _The Adolescent_ and _Brothers Karamazov_ but that leaves _Crime and Punishment_, _Demons_ and _The Idiot_ all of which I loved, although I don't know if I could really say I loved the _The Idiot_, I'm not sure you can love something that completely devastates you but it was an incredibly powerful book unlike anything I've ever read. It's such a close race between those 3, they are each brilliant for their own reasons and evoke such different but equally as strong emotional responses....I don't know which I would choose, do I have to answer that question?  :Tongue:

----------


## Adolescent09

You do have a valid point and I have yet to read The Idiot and Demons (I never even knew he had written a book by the name of Demons) but if by your standards they exceed Brothers Karamazov then they must be exceptionally good, because to me Brothers Karamazov is one of the most powerful books I've ever read.

----------


## Idril

> You do have a valid point and I have yet to read The Idiot and Demons (I never even knew he had written a book by the name of Demons) but if by your standards they exceed Brothers Karamazov then they must be exceptionally good, because to me Brothers Karamazov is one of the most powerful books I've ever read.


_Demons_ goes by a couple different names, _The Posessed_ and _Devils_ so if you go looking for it, be warned that it comes in different guises. 

And I didn't really care for _Brothers Karamazov_ and I know that puts me in a very significant minority. There were aspects to the story that I found fascinating, there were characters that I liked, particularly Ivan, but overall, it didn't really impact me on the same level as Dostoevsky's other novels so my standards are not going to be the same as yours. You may read the others and decide I'm out of my mind not to put _Brothers_ at the top.  :Tongue:

----------


## Mark F.

How dare you forget "Noets From the Underground"? It's short, simple and brilliant. I'd definitely stick it in with the other three you mentioned.

----------


## Idril

> How dare you forget "Noets From the Underground"? It's short, simple and brilliant. I'd definitely stick it in with the other three you mentioned.


I didn't really care for that one either.  :FRlol:  I have some of the same issues with that one as I do with _Brothers_ but as I was careful to point out, this is a personal list, not some kind of definitive ranking of books for the masses.  :Wink:

----------


## CindyBo

1. Lord of the Rings
2. Swan Song, Robert MacCammon
3. Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
4. The Time Machine, HG Wells
5. Dark Tower series, Stephen King
6. Once An Eagle, Anton Myrer
7. Bone Collector, Jeffrey Deaver
8. From the Corner of his Eye, Dean Koontz
9. Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry
10. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

Not necessarily in that order though.

----------


## Inderjit Sanghe

1. Lord of the Rings: Tolkien
2. Crime & Punishment: Dostoesvskii
3. The Castle: Kafka
4. Brothers Karamazov: Dostoevskii
5. 100 Years of Solitute: Marquez
6. History: Morante
7. Hunger: Hamsun
8. Master & Margarita: Bulgakov
9. Don Quixote: Cervantes
10. Pride and Prejudice: Austen

Other novels which came close to top 10 were-"Red and the Black" by Stendahl, "Madame Bovary" by Flaubert, "Lolita" by Nabakov, "The Silmarillion" by Tolkien and "Love in the Time of Cholera" by Marquez.

----------


## FemaleQuixote

1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
2. The Illiad by Homer
3. A Tale of Two Cities
4. Julius Caeser by Shakespeare
5. Le Morte de Arthur
6. Dracula
7. Jane Eyre
8. The Count of Monte Cristo
9. The Mabinogion
10. The House of Mirth

----------


## Lyn

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.

----------


## romantic1117

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

----------


## Redzeppelin

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

----------


## Gibran

Why lots of you enjoy _1984_? I think it's hardly called a _classic_,it's a boring book anyway.

----------


## Behemoth

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  :Biggrin:  P.S. I didn't think that _1984_ was great, but I didn't think it was boring. Profoundly depressing, maybe.

----------


## Inderjit Sanghe

[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!

----------


## Mugwump101

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

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## wratchild

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)

----------


## LucyBeth

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

----------


## ennison

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.

----------


## ennison

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.

----------


## Jetxa

*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.

----------


## starbuck

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:

----------


## McGrain

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:

----------


## Adolescent09

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

----------


## McGrain

There are a few with that novel on their list. I like it, but sometimes feel it was "overtaken" by the movie?

----------


## rielgenius1688

My favorites
The Once and Future King by TH White,
The Brother's Karamazov by Dostoevsky,
Crime and Punishment, also by Dostoevsky,
Le Morte D'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory,
Candide, by Voltaire,
Light in August, by William Faulkner

----------


## DavePatron

Hi, my name is Dave and I'm new here(registered 5 minutes ago). I'm 28(yesterday) and I'm a student living in Michigan. The reason for my post is that I have a project for school that I need a little help with. I won't bore you with all the details but the idea is to poll several hundred people and come up with a list of the top 100 novels ever written. My approach is to ask as many people as possible for their favorite 10 novels and to score 1-2 with 3 points, 3-5 with 2 points, and 6-10 with 1 point. Then I plan to simply add up the points of every book and put them in order. The problem I've found is that when walking around a college campus, more often than not, people can't even name 10 books. Thats why I've decided to take my quest to the internet. At least I know people here have read 10 books lol. When my study is complete I will surely post the results here if anyone is interested in seeing them. And if this post is inappropriate I apologize. Mods feel free to delete/modify/or move to a more appropriate forum if needed. Thanks everyone. Here is a sample list of my favorites thus far.

1. The Count Of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
2. Ulysses - James Joyce
3. War And Peace - Leo Tolstoy
4. Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
5. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
7. Lord Of The Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
8. The Catcher In The Rye - J.D. Salinger
9. Watership Down - Richard Adams
10. Angels And Demons - Dan Brown

Thanks in advance for your help

-DP

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## andave_ya

1. Lord of the Rings
2. Pride and Prejudice
3. The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
4. The Chronicles of Narnia
5. Pickwick Papers
6. Anything by Moliere
7. The Odyssey
8. Anything by Edgar Allan Poe
9. Anne of Green Gables series
10. Silmarillion

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## Moira

1. The Magus - J. Fowels
2. The Demons - Dostoievsky
3. Lord of the Flies - W. Golding
4. Perhaps an island - M. Houllebeque
5. Middlesex - J. Eugenides
6. The Catcher In The Rye - J.D. Salinger
7.The Agony and the Ecstasy - Irving Stone 
8. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
9. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
10. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

I hope it helps.

----------


## THX-1138

Lord Of The Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
The Hobbit-J.R.R. Tolkien
1984-George Orwell
Animal farm-George Orwell
the kite runner-Khaled Hosseini
Brave New world-Aldous Huxley
Fahrenheit 451 -Ray Bradbury
The Catcher In The Rye - J.D. Salinger
Dark tower-Stephen King
Robinson Crusoe-Daniel Defoe

----------


## cuppajoe_9

1. _To the Lighthouse_ - Virginia Woolf
2. _Crime and Punishment_ - Fyodor Dostoevski
3. _A Tale of Two Cities_ - Charles Dickens
4. _The Grapes of Wrath_ - John Steinbeck
5. _The Old Man and the Sea_ - Ernest Hemmingway
6. _The Catcher in the Rye_ - J.D. Salinger
7. _Animal Farm_ - George Orwell
8. _His Dark Materials_ - Philip Pullman
9. _One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich_ - Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
10. _Slaughterhouse 5_ - Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (RIP)

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## DavePatron

Thx Scheherazade,

That is actually VERY helpful. Nice list. Its gonna take me a bit of time to get through it lol but I guess thats a good thing. Thx again.

-DP

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## HannibalBarca

*Note: This list includes chiefly history and science fiction. If you are interested in either, you have to read the books listed.

1. The Art of War Sun Tzu - History
2. The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck - The Tough Life
3. Time Machine H. G. Wells - Classic Science Fiction
4. Conquest of Gaul Julius Caesar - History
5. The Island of Dr. Moreau H. G. Wells - Classic Science Fiction
6. Hannibal Theodore Ayrault Dodge - History
7. Plutarch's Lives Plutarch - History
8. Alexander T A Dodge - History
9. First Men In The Moon - Classic Science Fiction
10. Outline Of History - H. G. Wells

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## DavePatron

Ok so I went through this entire thread and entered all the top 10 lists into a database. I got rid of the books that were not novels. I also polled hundreds of live people along with a partner and came up with a list. We polled ~500-600 people and came up with a top 100 novels list. Anyone who is interested the list can be found at Top 100 Novels. If linking is against the rules I apologize. Mods feel free to delete the link if it is against the rules. Thanks to everyone who listed their favorite books. This thread was a huge help in the project.

DP

----------


## andave_ya

Nice job. I must say I'm glad LOTR was number 2, and it was really thoughtful of you to add that other top books section.

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## bazarov

Nice, but not objective. Actually, very nonobjective.

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## DavePatron

> Nice, but not objective. Actually, very nonobjective.


I Don't understand......

----------


## drunkenKOALA

Personal Top Ten:

1. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
2. The Idiot by (Dostoevsky, Modern Library edition translated by Anna Brailovsky)
3. Great Expectations (Dickens)
4. White Fang (London)
5. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Mark Twain)
6. The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde)
7. The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger)
8. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Kesey)
9. Butterfield 8 (O'Hara)
10. Treasure Island (Stevenson); or any other adventure novels will do, Three Musketeers (Dumas), The Scarlet Pimpernel (Orcszy), etc

----------


## Moandor

1. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
2. The Lord of The Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
3. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
4. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
5. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
6. The Count of Monte Christo - Alexander Dumas
7. The Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco
8. The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
9. The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis (one of the best stories for children)
10. Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell

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## bazarov

> I Don't understand......


You have done a great job, now I know which books I should read, thank you! :Thumbs Up:  
But list is based on readers picks, some novels are definitely much higher then they really should be. I understand that if 10 people say that book A is better then B, then A is probably better than B, but some books are really overrated.

----------


## livelaughlove

Wow, thanks very much DavePatron. I was just about to jet off to the B&N, so this list comes in handy. Are you in desperate need of book reviewers? I've read a good dozen or so on the list already, and I can review some of them if you would like. Just let me know. I'm very surprised that the Scarlet Letter isn't there -- or is it? -- I might have missed it.

----------


## grace86

That is a very good list. A few of them I would have moved, but I like it a lot. What types of reviews are you looking for, because I've read quite a bit of them. Thanks for putting that list together and sharing your results with us.

----------


## Dante Wodehouse

> hm..I just didnt get hte Grapes of Wrath, all that anger growing at their maltreatment, throughout the entire book, and you think, yes! now they will finally rebel, and do they? no, its ends like that. lame.


It was about what people did at the time. It didn't make sense, but it wasn't poor creativity on Steinbeck's part.

----------


## chaplin

I firmly believe in the supremacy of the Russian writer, for whatever mysterious reason that is so. It is interesting to note that the Russian novel developed really 200+ years after the English novel, and yet, perhaps because of geography or history, the Russian novel quickly surpassed the English novel in its first century, not to mention decade. I am not a big fan of Victorian literature which was the beneficiary of 200 years of opportunity to improve but nonetheless failed to better itself. The ten best novels or works of fiction are hard to pinpoint, but I think that at least 6 would have to be russian.

e.g 
_War and Peace_
_Anna Karenina_
Any collection of Chekhov stories
Any collection of Gogol stories
_Fathers and Sons_
The much underrated _A Hero of Our Time_
Anything by Solzhenitsyn or Bulgakov
And even though I'm not a big fan of Dostoevsky, _Crime and Punishment_ or _The Brothers Karamazov_, because I still believe he's a unique contribution to Russian fiction.

One must realize that Hemingway and Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Dickens and the Brontes etc. are all good writers but they are really just weak similes to what the Russian masters have mastered. The whole of life is there in the immediate summit of Russian literature.

----------


## JaneB

All my top ten have already been listed except one which is Johnny Mad Dog by Emmanuel Dongala

----------


## Aiculík

Awww... most of my favourite books didn't even make it in Top 100.  :Bawling:  Oh well. I always knew I was weird.  :Biggrin:  

_Foucalt's Pendulum_ by Umberto Eco
_Lord of the Rings_ by J.R.R. Tolkien
_Diary of a Country Priest_ by Georges Bernanos
_A Chronicle of Death Foretold_ by G.G. Marquez
_Lord of the Flies_ by Wiliam Golding
_1984_ by George Orwell
_The Scaffold_ by Chingiz Aitmatov
_The Late Mattia Pascal_ by Luigi Pirandello
_The Education of *H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N*_ by Leo Rosten
_Life of Pi_ by Yan Martel

Pirandello and Bernanos are recent discoveries, which moved T_he Name of the Rose_ and _One Hundred Years of Solitude_ to position 11 and 12, though these positions are not "fixed" (except first two :Biggrin: ), and what was one day on the 5th position, may be on the 9th next day and vice versa.

----------


## Nossa

What are the 'must-read' books for you, on both English and American Lit.? Or any other kinds of literature for that matter. What are the books that you think everyone should read/have on thier to-read list?!

----------


## JuLe

Amm.. there are plenty, my list is really long. During this summer I wish to read everything that James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Nabukov have ever written.

----------


## Mortis Anarchy

> Amm.. there are plenty, my list is really long. During this summer I wish to read everything that James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Nabukov have ever written.


I love Nabukov...he is amazing. I have been compiling a list for the past year...its indecently long...

----------


## kilted exile

I'm gonna try and keep this to 5 books (these are the 5 of the books that had the most impact on me - not in any order)

Narziss & Goldmund
Hard Times
Less Than Zero
Slaughterhouse 5
Frankenstein

----------


## tudwell

Pynchon, Faulkner, Beckett. Nuff said.

----------


## Mortis Anarchy

Slaughterhouse Five
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
The Picture of Dorian Gray
I, Lucifer
The Secret Life of Salvador Dali
Lolita
The Iliad
The Metamorphosis
Running With Scissors
Fahrenheit 451

----------


## Argyroneta

some have already been stated...but here are some of my favorites in no particular order:

Dostoyevsky - Crime & Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov
Gogol - Dead Souls
Voltaire - Candide
Camus - The Outsider, The Plague
Balzac - Old Goriot
Hesse - Peter Camenzind
Rand - Atlas Shrugged

----------


## kenikki

Not necessarily my top ten favourite books but these are what i recommend everyone to read at least.

1. 1984
2. Angela's Ashes
3. American Psycho
4. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
5. Dubliners
5. Frankenstein
6. Catcher in the Rye
7. Alice in Wonderland
8. On the Road
9. Cannery Row
10. Great Gatsby

----------


## Stieg

No particular order:

_Nineteen Eighty-Four_ by George Orwell

---

_The Haunted Dolls' House and Other Ghost Stories/Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories_ 

(Two great collections from Penguin edited by S. T. Joshi that include together all 33 of M R James' complete ghost stories with the complete manuscript of _The Fenstanton Witch_ from "Stories That I have Tried to Write." 

And am probably going to double dip and get Ash-Tree's $75 corrected second reprint of _A Pleasing Terror_ due late this year. 

Oxford's _Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories_ edited by scholar Michael Cox is a highly recommended collection too but contains only 12 of 15 stories from the first Penguin collection and only 9 of 19 from the second Penguin collection - and lacks the complete manuscript of _The Fenstanton Witch_.)

---

_The Best Ghost Stories of J S Le Fanu/Ghost Stories and Mysteries of J S Le Fanu_ 

(Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's complete collection of ghost stories and mysteries compiled into two volumes from Dover however the latter volume above is out of print but obtainable through second hand sources.)

---

_The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories/The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories/The Thing on The Doorstep and Other Weird Stories_ 

(Penguin's three affordable volumes of H. P. Lovecraft edited by Lovecraft Scholar S. T. Joshi containing the corrected text as HPL's work was constantly assailed by editing by Derfeth and others *Derfeth ironically is also credited with preserving Lovecraft and reintroducing his works to future generations I guess there is a good side to every bad thing and vice versa* and further encouraged by various publishers over the decades. Fortunately, S. T. Joshi exhaustively restored the author's original writings from liberal editing unfortunately the Penguin collection isn't as catagorically organized or as complete as Del Rey's collection of corrupted texts. 

And these volumes don't represent the complete HPL but one would have to go through Arkham House and their five volume collection of HCs were priced around $30 a piece sadly some are out of print currently. Egads! 

Library of America also released around two dozen stories in their HC volume with S.T. Joshi's corrected texts.) 

---

I love ghost stories and the supernatural and these author have been well organized in collections unlike other greats such as Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood which require obtaining several collections.

Also would love to include Jackson's _The Haunting of Hill House_ and Matheson's _Hell House_, the two finest contemporary ghost story novels of our time but my list would have little diversity.

----------


## Lag866

Some are favorites and some are just simply good. In no particular order...

1. Wuthering Heights
2. Picture of Dorian Gray
3. To Kill a Mockingbird
4. The Great Gatsby
5. Brave New World
6. Jane Eyre
7. Farenheit(sp?) 451
8. His Dark Material Trilogy- I dont think this is a classic so The Bell Jar
9. Lord of the Flies
10. A Seperate Peace

----------


## tulysg1982

My choice:
1.Anne frank: diary of a young girl
2.crime and punishment-Dostoyevsky
3.Resurrection- Tolstoy
4.The vinci code-Dane brown
5.Sophy's world-Jastein Garder
6.Iliad-Homer
7.The canterbury tales-Chaucer
8.The steel-Nikolai ostrovsky
9.One hundred years of solitude- Gabriel garcia
10. Macbeth, Hamlet, king lear-Shakespeare

King Oedipus by Sophocles and War and peace by Tolstoy are also my favourite.

----------


## collinsc

I want to read some famous books- what are the top 10?

i thought war and peace- crime and punishment...?


i read cathcer in the rye and didnt think it was that great!

id be interested to see everyone top10 then i can take the average.

thanks

----------


## Etienne

Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel
Cervantes - Don Quixote
Tolstoy - War and Peace
Dickens - David Copperfield
Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment
Voltaire - Candide, Zadig, Microm&#233;gas, l'Ing&#233;nu (all together as you can get them all in one book :P)
Gogol - Petersburg Tales
Boris Vian - Froth on the daydream (what a strange title translation)
Marquez - 100 Years of Solitude

----------


## Big Al

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Dune by Frank Herbert
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

----------


## Etienne

> I want to read some famous books- what are the top 10?
> 
> i thought war and peace- crime and punishment...?
> 
> 
> i read cathcer in the rye and didnt think it was that great!
> 
> id be interested to see everyone top10 then i can take the average.
> 
> thanks


If you want to read the most famous classics and most influential books in literature, I'd suggest:

Tolstoy - War and peace
Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel
Cervantes - Don Quixote
Dante - The Divine Comedy
Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
Shakespeare - Hamlet
Voltaire - Candide
Homer - The Iliad
Virgil - Aeneid
Dickens - David Copperfield

----------


## Dori

My top 6:

Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Les Miserables
Irving Stone: The Agony and the Ecstasy
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
Voltaire: Candide
Alan Moore, David Lloyd: V for Vendetta

----------


## collinsc

ok here is one...!

has anyone ever attempted to total everyones top 10? and find out the most popular!?

perhaps a vote is in order!?

----------


## bazarov

Brothers Karamazov
Don Quixote
War and Peace
Eugene Onegin
Anna Karenina
Les Miserables
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Crime and Punishment
Fathers and Sons
Master and Margarita

----------


## bluelightstar

In no particular order, my 10 favorites are

1. Hamlet 
2. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
3. The Great Gatsby 
4. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard which also ties with Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
5. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
6. Heart of Darkness by Conrad
7. A Lesson Before Dying or Gathering of Old Menby Ernest Gaines
8. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
9. Frankenstein
10. The Stranger by Camus

----------


## packersfan

I can't limit my list to ten, but I tried to reduce the list as much as possibe. These are in no particular order (i'd probably die if I had to put them in order).

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime-Mark Haddon
Go Ask Alice-Anonyomus
Animal Farm-George Orwell
Matilda- Ronald Dahl
The Voyage of "Dawn Treader" CS Lewis
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer- Mark Twain
A Tale of Two Series- Charles Dickens
Moby Dick-Herman Melville
Lord of the Rings-Tolkien
Jane Eyre-Bronte
The Alchemist- Coelho
Odyssey-Homer

----------


## Etienne

> A Tale of Two Series- Charles Dickens
> The Alchemist- Coelho


A Tale of Two Cities  :Wink:  

And out of curiosity, what exactly did you like in The Alchemist? I read it because some people told me they really liked it, but I really, really hated that book. I think it's probably the worst book I've ever read honestly.

----------


## Old Crow

My top five are pretty much set, but anything after that and my head starts to spin.

1. East of Eden - John Steinbeck
2. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
3. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
4. Wise Blood - Flannery O'Connor
5. I and Thou - Martin Buber

...These choices are really just personal preference, and not meant to connote social/philisophical/historic significance.

NOTE: Had Kafka's novels been in the same league as his short stories, he would most certainly be first on the list.

----------


## bazarov

> And out of curiosity, what exactly did you like in The Alchemist? I read it because some people told me they really liked it, but I really, really hated that book. I think it's probably the worst book I've ever read honestly.


I second to that!

----------


## DavePatron

> ok here is one...!
> 
> has anyone ever attempted to total everyones top 10? and find out the most popular!?
> 
> perhaps a vote is in order!?


I did just that. The results are posted at Best 100 Novels.

----------


## Etienne

> I did just that. The results are posted at Best 100 Novels.


Yet one more list made by and for english people only  :Sick:

----------


## snowangel

In the Lake of the Woods - Tim O'Brien
Maus: A Survivors Tale Vol. I & II - Art Spiegelman
Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut
I, Claudius - Robert Graves
A Scanner Darkly - Phillip K. Dick

----------


## StayGolden

My top 10 are as follows:

*The Count of Monte Cristo* by Alexandre Dumas*Les Misérables* by Victor Hugo*The Chronicles of Narnia* by CS Lewis*The Hobbit* by JRR Tolkien*The Sound and the Fury* by William Faulkner*Pride and Prejudice* by Jane Austen*Ulysses* by James Joyce*The Idiot* by Fyodor Dostoevsky*Crime and Punishment* by Fyodor Dostoevsky*The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy* by Douglas Adams
(OK, so *The Hitchhiker's Guide* isn't really a "classic" - but it should be!  :Tongue: )

----------


## oracle13

In no particular order:

The Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz - Richler
Hamlet
The Tempest
The Great Gatsby
Beloved - Morrison
Not strictly a book, but most stories by Edgar Allen Poe, especially The Fall of the House of Usher and The Masque of the Red Death
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Songs of Innocence and Experience
Not a novel, but for the way it changed my life perceptions - Russell's History of Western Philosophy
And of course, a cosy childhood favourite, all the Drenai Tales by David Gemmell

I found it quite challenging to pick my 10 favourite books, not because so many spring to my mind...more because its difficult to seperate a novel's immediate impact from its impact on reflection, if that make sense. A book I thought would be a really great contender for a top 10 spot was Portnoy's compaint, which had a pretty big impact on me upon first reading. A year later, I realise that it was Mordechai Richler's coming of age novel which I remember most fondly.

----------


## nyka

> I second to that!


same here  :Wink:

----------


## Dori

I just finished _Of Mice and Men_ by John Steinbeck. I feel obliged to edit my list:

Top 9 (I'm still trying to find a tenth)
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone
V for Vendetta by David Lloyd, Alan Moore
Candide by Voltaire 
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

----------


## jlb4tlb

> I just finished _Of Mice and Men_ by John Steinbeck. I feel obliged to edit my list:
> 
> Top 9 (I'm still trying to find a tenth)
> Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
> The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo
> Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
> The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
> The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone
> V for Vendetta by David Lloyd, Alan Moore
> ...


Indeed a great read, Steinbeck at the top of his game

Jeff

----------


## rmd

I would like to know what other readers consider their 10 favorite novels. My favorites are novels that I have read more than once and will no doubt read again at some point in time. Here are mine in no particular order (and if I made the list next week it might be slightly different):

_Howards End_ by E. M. Forster
_Zorba the Greek_ by Nikos Kazantzakis
_The Grass Is Singing_ by Doris Lessing
_The Victim_ by Saul Bellow
_Mrs Dalloway_ by Virginia Woolf
_The French Lieutenant's Woman_ by John Fowles
_Washington Square_ by Henry James
_The Voyeur_ by Alain Robbe-Grillet
_July's People_ by Nadine Gordimer
_Voss_ by Patrick White

----------


## rmd

I see that my Ten Favorite Novels thread has gotten folded into the Ten Must-Read Books, which seems different to me. Maybe the number of threads has gotten out of hand?

----------


## Fowles27

My ten "favorite"  :Smile: 
The French Lieutenant's Woman, J. FowlesThe Magus, J. FowlesInvisible Man, R.EllisonCatch-22, J. HellerA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, J. JoyceNostromo, J. ConradSlaughterhouse Five, K. VonnegutJude the Obscure, T. HardyMidnight's Children, S. RushdieThe Great Gatsby, F. S. Fitzgerald

----------


## bazarov

> I see that my Ten Favorite Novels thread has gotten folded into the Ten Must-Read Books, which seems different to me. Maybe the number of threads has gotten out of hand?



 :FRlol:   :FRlol:  No, I doubt it's out of hand!
You're right, it's different, but they only wanted to help; it's very often that someone new don't look in other similar threads before opening new one!  :FRlol:

----------


## aabbcc

> I second to that!


And I third it  :Wink:

----------


## Simao

My list is:
1- The Brothers Karmazov by Dostoyevsky.
2- Don Quixote by Cervantes.
3- Les Mesirebales by Victor Hugo. 
4- Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky.
5- War and Peace by Tosltoy.
6- 100 years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez.
7- The Silent Don.
8- David Cooperfield by Charles Dickens.
9- "don't laugh at this please lol" Stephen King's The Running Man.
10- The Davinci Code by Dan Brown.

----------


## aabbcc

Do they have to be strictly _novels_? Most of my favourite works are not.

In no particular order, at this moment, my favourite works - novels and other - would be:

Alighieri, D. - _La Divina Commedia_
Selimović, M. - _The Death and the Dervish_
Milton, J. - _Paradise Lost_
Calderón de la Barca, P. - _Life is a dream_
Shakespeare, W. - _Hamlet_
Goethe, J. W. - _Faust_
Gundulić, I. - _Osman_
Dostoevsky, F. M. - _The Brothers Karamazov_
Mann, Th. - _Doktor Faustus_
Hesse, H. - _The Glass Bead Game_

----------


## bazarov

> Alighieri, D. - _La Divina Commedia_
> Selimović, M. - _The Death and the Dervish_
> Milton, J. - _Paradise Lost_
> Calderón de la Barca, P. - _Life is a dream_
> Shakespeare, W. - _Hamlet_
> Goethe, J. W. - _Faust_
> Gundulić, I. - _Osman_
> Dostoevsky, F. M. - _The Brothers Karamazov_
> Mann, Th. - _Doktor Faustus_
> Hesse, H. - _The Glass Bead Game_


I couldn't find Dervi i Smrt nowhere on Interliber but I really want to read it. ivot je san, a san su i sami snovi - De La Barca ? :Biggrin:

----------


## Joreads

1. The Catcher in the Rye
2. To Kill a Mocking bird
3. 1984
4. A Passage to India
5. Lord of the rings

These are in no special order I love them all

----------


## thegreenthing

Here goes (no order)

1984
Crime and punishment
A farewell to arms
Silmarillion
A tale of two cities 
The silent Don

----------


## IrishMark

Anybody notice that a lot of the material being quoted are not even novels but poems and plays such as les miserables and paradise lost. i move to propose that the list be kept solely to novels and hence a greater range of names will appear instead of simply the literary canon that has been taught in schools across the western world this past 20/30 years.

For my part, my ten ould be (in no specific order)
1. Catch 22
2. Great Expectations
3. A Farewell To Arms
4. 1984
5. The Lord of The Rings
6. Gulliver's Travels
7. Frankenstein
8. Jane Eyre
9. In A Glass Darkly
10. Pudd'nhead Wilson

----------


## bazarov

> Anybody notice that a lot of the material being quoted are not even novels but poems and plays such as les miserables and paradise lost. i move to propose that the list be kept solely to novels and hence a greater range of names will appear instead of simply the literary canon that has been taught in schools across the western world this past 20/30 years.


Les Miserables is a play?!?!?!? :Bawling:   :Bawling:   :Bawling:   :Bawling:

----------


## Etienne

> Les Miserables is a play?!?!?!?


One could argue that Paradise Lost is somewhat a novel in verse too... although I'm not very scholarly in literature theory... (at least I know that Les Misérables is a novel though...)

----------


## IrishMark

lol, sorry, my mistake, i meant to say hamlet lol- apologies...

----------


## LadyWentworth

Well, top 10. The first 5 always remain the same. The last 5 tend to jump around or get knocked off the list by something else based on my mood. So these are my current choices....

1) *Jane Eyre* - Bronte
2) *Persuasion* - Austen
3) *The Phantom of the Opera* - Leroux
4) *A Tale of Two Cities* - Dickens
5) *The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe* - Lewis
6) *Maurice* - Forster
7) *The Mystery of Edwin Drood* - Dickens
8) *Gone With The Wind* - Mitchell
9) *Nicholas Nickleby* - Dickens
10) *A Long Fatal Love Chase* - Alcott

Honorable mention: The "Little House" series by Laura Ingalls Wilder  :Smile:

----------


## IrishMark

> Well, top 10. The first 5 always remain the same. The last 5 tend to jump around or get knocked off the list by something else based on my mood. So these are my current choices....
> 
> 1) *Jane Eyre* - Bronte
> 2) *Persuasion* - Austen
> 3) *The Phantom of the Opera* - Leroux
> 4) *A Tale of Two Cities* - Dickens
> 5) *The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe* - Lewis
> 6) *Maurice* - Forster
> 7) *The Mystery of Edwin Drood* - Dickens
> ...


yes the lion the witch and the wardrobe is a brilliant book- first captured my imagination in primary school and has never let go...hopefully it never will...

----------


## aabbcc

> I couldn't find Dervi i Smrt nowhere on Interliber but I really want to read it. ivot je san, a san su i sami snovi - De La Barca ?


There is a DiVič edition of _Dervi i smrt_ (Zagreb, 2001.), and my own copy is of that edition, and most of the copies I have been coming across in Croatian libraries over the years had either that edition, or Svjetlost edition (Sarajevo, year depending on edition). I could not find DiVič on web, but you might wish to attempt to contact them, probably there is only some address or some way to get to them if you really wish.

And yes, those are Calderón's verses. I remember from school, it was something like:
_... O, malen je dar nam dan, Jer sav ivot - to je san, A san su i sami snovi..._
God I love that work. :Biggrin: 




> Anybody notice that a lot of the material being quoted are not even novels but poems and plays such as les miserables and paradise lost. i move to propose that the list be kept solely to novels and hence a greater range of names will appear instead of simply the literary canon that has been taught in schools across the western world this past 20/30 years.


I feel alluded to - though, unlike some, I clearly warned that I was not making a list of 10 favourite _novels_ since most of my literary favourites happen _not_ to be novels  :Smile:  - since my post was relatively recent at the time you replied, so alright, let me modify the post of my "top 10" according more to the form and less to the content.

If we insist on the form of novel, then:
Selimović, M. - _The Death and the Dervish_
Dostoevsky, F. M. - _The Brothers Karamazov_
Mann, Th. - _Doktor Faustus_
Hesse, H. - _The Glass Bead Game_ (these four remain from my old response, if I exlude the non-novels off the list)

And, in addition to those, right now if I had to compose a list of another six, they would be:
Kundera, M. - _Life is Elsewhere_
Zweig, S. - _The World of Yesterday_ (strictly speaking, that is also not a novel, it is sort of mixture of his memoirs?)
Lermontov, M. Ju. - _A Hero of Our Time_ (though again, strictly speaking, one could argue this is not a novel in full sense)
Yourcenar, M. - _Alexis_
Pushkin, A. S. - _Evgenij Onegin_ (we defined it as "novel in verse" at school when studied, so...  :Biggrin: )
and, say, Turgenev's _Fathers and Sons_.

Equally predictable and "school"-ish list as the one I had before, except that these are novels, and that I tried not to have the same author twice (otherwise I could have composed an addition to the list out of Kundera and Dostoevsky only) ...  :FRlol:  
I had a hard time composing it, though. I _really_ prefer other types of works, so this was a nice challenge.

----------


## Ana Lovejoy

1 The Devil to Pay in the Backlands - Guimar&#227;es Rosa
2 1984 - George Orwell
3 Budapeste - Chico Buarque
4 Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
5 A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
6 Dom Casmurro - Machado de Assis
7 The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera 
8 S&#227;o Bernardo - Graciliano Ramos
9 High Fidelity - Nick Hornby
10 The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

----------


## IrishMark

> I feel alluded to - though, unlike some, I clearly warned that I was not making a list of 10 favourite _novels_ since most of my literary favourites happen _not_ to be novels  - since my post was relatively recent at the time you replied, so alright, let me modify the post of my "top 10" according more to the form and less to the content.
> 
> If we insist on the form of novel, then:
> Selimović, M. - _The Death and the Dervish_
> Dostoevsky, F. M. - _The Brothers Karamazov_
> Mann, Th. - _Doktor Faustus_
> Hesse, H. - _The Glass Bead Game_ (these four remain from my old response, if I exlude the non-novels off the list)
> 
> And, in addition to those, right now if I had to compose a list of another six, they would be:
> ...



im sorry if i gave you this impression, as I was actually looking through the pages and I seen several people doing it so no I shall not blame you lol...

----------


## packersfan

> A Tale of Two Cities  
> 
> And out of curiosity, what exactly did you like in The Alchemist? I read it because some people told me they really liked it, but I really, really hated that book. I think it's probably the worst book I've ever read honestly.


That's what i meant-im the kind of person who thinks of something else why they're talking (in this case typing), and so i sometimes say (or think) of what im thinking-not what i really mean 

I love the alchemist- its a universal book that gives universal lessons, and its a story about a boy on a journey-and that's what life is-a journey...

i first thought it was awful because i was forced to read it in school (any book i'm forced to read is a terrible book for me at the time)-but then i read it again and saw the beauty of a book like that  :Smile:  )

----------


## Ana Lovejoy

> i first thought it was awful because i was forced to read it in school (any book i'm forced to read is a terrible book for me at the time)-but then i read it again and saw the beauty of a book like that  )


Now I'm really curious. Could you please say where are you from? I'm really surprised, especially because here in Brazil the only time I 'have to' read Coelho was when my Literary Theory teacher asked us to read "_in order to understand why people love so much Coelho's works_".

----------


## Scheherazade

There is a _The Alchemist_ discussion thread if anyone is interested  :Smile: 

http://www.online-literature.com/for...ad.php?t=27870

----------


## hellsapoppin

Great selections by everyone on this thread --- obviously the forum is blessed with participants who are exceptionally knowledgeable. I see that the selections have been broadened to include poems and literature that are not novels. And, to me, that's a good idea.

Here are books I would include among my top ten:


Aesop *Fables*

Confucius *Analects*

Khayyam *Rubiyat*

Cervantes *Don Quixote*

Erasmus *In Praise of Folly*

Hugo *Les Miserables*

Melville *Moby Dick*

Dostoyevsky *Crime and Punishment*

Santayana *The Last Puritan*

Orwell *1984*

----------


## Marata

Milan Kundera - The Joke

Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita

Oscar Wilde - The picture of Dorian Gray

Herman Hesse - Demian

Albert Camus - The stranger

Bernhard Schlink - The Reader

G. G. Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude

Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita

Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment

Antoine de Saint-Exupery - Le Petit Prince

----------


## rgdmalaysia

Ten is too little....Here's my list;

Mysteries and Victoria by Knut Hamsun
The Lake and A Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata
Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller
The Razor's Edge and Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham
Death on the Installment Plan and Journey to the End of the Night by Celine
On The Road by Jack Kerouac
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
The Web and the Rock by Thomas Wolfe
L'Assomir by Emile Zola
The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
No Longer Human and The Setting Sun by Osamu Dazai
The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
The Abortion;A Historical Romance by Richard Brautigan
The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki
My Autobiography by Maxim Gorky
Wait Until Spring Bandini by John Fante
Winesburg Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
Take a Girl Like You by Kingsley Amis
Independent People by Halldor Laxness
Howards End by EM Forster
The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren

----------


## thescholar

1984-George Orwell
Ender's Gamie-Orson Scott Card
Crime and Punishment-Dostoyevski
Don Quixote-Cervantes
Brave New World-Aldous Huxley
Dracula-Bram Stoker
The Count of Monte Cristo- I can't remember
Farenheit 451-Ray Bradbury
The Chrysalids-John Wyndham
If-Rudyard Kipling (actually a poem but with enough depth to be a novel, also one of my favourite pieces of literature ever)

----------


## Mattch1331

There are so many great novels, but these are probably my favorite...

The Great Gatsby
Ulysses
The Catcher in the Rye
Gravity's Rainbow
Brave New World
War and Peace
Whisper of Death 
Emma
The Sound and the Fury
The Odyssey

----------


## LeonMello

The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, _Guimar&#227;es Rosa_ 
The Toilers of the Sea, _Victor Hugo_
A Tale of Two Cities, _Charles Dickens_
The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, _Machado de Assis_
Animal Farm, _George Orwell_
The Picture of Dorian Gray, _Oscar Wilde_
Edgar Allan Poe's Tales
Sherlock Holmen's canon, _Conan Doyle_
Ben Hur, _Lew Wallace_
The Death of Ivan Ilych, _Leon Tolstoy_

----------


## APEist

> It's actually a quintet. In 1985, ajoe was born.


LMAOROFL

God that hit the spot for some reason

----------


## WaffenOates

1. Melville's MOBY DICK
2. Faulkner's GO DOWN MOSES
3. Joyce's ULYSSES
4. Dostoevsky's THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV 
5. Traven's THE DEATH SHIP
6. Dostoevsky's THE IDIOT
7. Wittgenstein's TRACTATUS LOGICO PHILOSOPHICUS
8. Nietzche's ANTI-CHRIST
9. Plato's THE REPUBLIC
10. McCarthy's BLOOD MERIDIAN

----------


## Etienne

> 7. Wittgenstein's TRACTATUS LOGICO PHILOSOPHICUS


Have you read the Philosophical Investigations? I'd expect one would rather enjoy it than the Tractatus. However the Tractatus is very interesting as well and also has some great quotes  :Tongue: 

Also, I haven't read the Anti-Christ by Nietzsche, what form did he give to this book?

----------


## Julian Koller

1. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
2. Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert
3. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
4. Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
5. Hamlet by William Shakespeare 
6. Arabian Nights 
7. Stories and Drama by Anton Chekhov
8. Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes 
9. The Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
10. A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov

----------


## Mal Reynolds

In no particular order~

*The Catcher in the Rye* by J.D. Salinger
*The Great Gatsby* by F. Scott Fitzgerald
*Dune* by Frank Herbert
*The Hobbit* by J.R.R. Tolkien
*Candide* by Voltaire
*Hamlet* by William Shakespeare
*The Sign of the Four* by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
*1984* by George Orwell
*And Then There Were None* by Agatha Christie
*The House of Leaves* by Mark Z. Danielewski

----------


## Simao

I was wondering which novel occured the most in the this thread? Doesn't matter which order just the fact it's in the posters top ten list. I saw Don Quixote few times in few pages but I am too lazy to look for the entire thread so if anyone knows please tell I am really interested to see what's the forum visitors have in common.

----------


## Remarkable

My top ten in disorder:

The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man-James Joyce
1984-George Orwell
Jane Eyre-Charlote Bront&#235;
Pere Goriot-Balzac
Novels-Tolstoy
Don Quixote-Servantes
The Picture of Dorian Gray-Oscar Wilde
Blindness-Jose Saramago
Brave New World-Aldous Huxely
Arabian Nights

This is what I can recall right now,I might find something else later.

----------


## marakatsu

My Personal Top Ten

1. David Copperfield-Charles Dickens
2. Swann's Way- Marcel Proust
3. Mrs. Dalloway- Virginia Woolf
4. The Secret Agent- Joseph Conrad
5. Antony and Cleopatra- Shakespeare
6. To the Lighthouse- Virginia Woolf (again)
7. Bleak House- Charles Dickens (again)
8. Moby Dick- Herman Melville
9. Lolita - Nabokov
10. The Mill on the Floss - George Eliot

----------


## Remarkable

Just rethinking,here is another Top Ten.The thing is,I cannot make myself prefere some books upon others.

Novels-Stephan Zweig
Joseph Fouche-Stephan Zweig
Great Expectations-Charles Dickens
Jacob's Room-Virginia Woolf
Year '93-Victor Hugo
The House of Mirth-Edith Wharton
Dubliners-James Joyce
Les Sorcieres de Salem-Arthur Miller(actually a play and I haven't read it in English,so I don't know the original title)
Huckelberry Fin-Mark Twain

----------


## nathank

* War&Peace
* Mason and Dixon
* Moby Dick
* Absalom Absalom
* Pale Fire
* Lolita
* Sot Weed Factor
* Grapes Of Wrath
* Scarlet Letter
* Huckfinn

----------


## V.Jayalakshmi

Dear Members,

My selection is as under.

1)War & Peace

2)Crime & Punishment

3)Razor's Edge.

4)My Cousin Rachel

5)David Copperfield.

6) Grapes Of Wrath.

7)Wuthering Heights.

8)The Mayor Of Castor Bridge.

9)Gone With The wind.

10)The Mill On The Floss.

----------


## Tersely

Well you want my opinion of ten classics that everyone should read. (Only from what I've read so far, 10 is a limited number)
This is what I started out with when I began to get into literature. There isnt one I'd pick over the other and there are alot more that should be on there but I only had a choice of ten. I wanted a kind of broad introduction when I started out...you know the novels that have been made into movies and plays or mentioned in little tv side jokes. Alot of these you can find mentioned in other literature also. 


-Les Miserables by Victor Hugo 
-Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
-Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
-A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
-Hamlet by Shakespeare
-Don Quixote by Cervantes
-Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn by Mark Twain
-Beowulf by Unknown
-The Scarlett Letter by Hawthorne
-Dracula by Bram Stoker

----------


## The Intended

(in no particular order)

The Dark Tower Series - Stephen King
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wlde
The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
1984 - George Owell
The Invisible Man - H. G. Wells
The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne
"Youth" - Joseph Conrad (a short story, but I love it too much not to put it up)

----------


## Kafka's Crow

*Pre-twentieth Cntury*
1- The Brothers Karamazov- Fyodor Dostoevsky
2- The Idiot- Fyodor Dostoevsky
3- Crime and Punishment- Fyodor Dostoevsky
4- Notes from the Underground- Fyodor Dostoevsky
5- War and Peace- Leo Tolstoy
6- Madame Bovary- Gustav Flaubert
7- The Mill on the Floss- George Eliot
8- Tess of the d'Urbervilles- Thomas Hardy
9- Fathers and Sons- Ivan Turgenev
10-A hero of Our Time- Mikail Lermontov 

*The 20th Century*
1- The Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable)- Samuel Beckett
2- Ulysses- Jame Joyce
3- The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man- James Joyce
4- Watt- Samuel Beckett
5- Murphy- Samuel Beckett
6- A Farewell to Arms- Ernest Hemingway
7- The Moviegoer- Walker Percy
8- A Confederacy of Dunces- John Kennedy Toole
9- The Name of the Rose- Umberto Eco
10-Post Office- Charles Bukowski

Dostoevsky and Samuel Beckett, the two hemispheres of my imaginative world! I could add people like Reverte and Zafon, Rushdie, DM Thomas etc but these writers have yet to pass the test of time. They are too contemporary to be labeled classics. Eco's novel made into my list, just could not keep that one book out.

----------


## Kafka's Crow

> Just rethinking,here is another Top Ten.The thing is,I cannot make myself prefere some books upon others.
> 
> Novels-Stephan Zweig
> Joseph Fouche-Stephan Zweig
> Great Expectations-Charles Dickens
> Jacob's Room-Virginia Woolf
> Year '93-Victor Hugo
> The House of Mirth-Edith Wharton
> Dubliners-James Joyce
> ...


This must be 'The Crucible' (1953). Excellent play. I read it to a blind friend of mine in 1990, watched its movie in cinema in 1996 (newly married couple, out and about in London, hoping from cinema to cinema, watching film after film, oh yes those were the days!)

----------


## knightss

> This must be 'The Crucible' (1953). Excellent play. I read it to a blind friend of mine in 1990, watched its movie in cinema in 1996 (newly married couple, out and about in London, hoping from cinema to cinema, watching film after film, oh yes those were the days!)


That is a great play, I've read it a few times and I've seen it performed a few times. Arthur Miller's work is amazing. Death of Salesman is another one of my favorites.

----------


## amalia1985

1) _Wuthering Heights_ by Emily Bronte

2) _Jane Eyre_ by Charlotte Bronte

3) _A Tale of Two Cities_ by Charles Dickens

4) _The Phantom of the Opera_ by Gaston Leroux

5) _Persuasion_ by Jane Austen

6) _Les Miserables_ by Victor Hugo

7) _Crime and Punishment_ by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

8) _The Crucible_ by Arthur Miller 

9) _Wings of the Dove_ by Henry James

10)_The Picture of Dorian Gray_ by Oscar Wilde

----------


## Axle1017

1.Catcher in the Rye by Salinger
2.Crime and punishment by dostoevsky
3.anna karenina by tolstoy
4.huck finn by twain
5.the great gatsby by fitzgerald
6.in cold blood by capote
7.slaughterhouse five by vonnegut
8.hunchback of notre dame by hugo
9.the stranger by camus
10.the metamorphosis by kafka

hands down best ten ever correct me if i am wrong.

----------


## ntropyincarnate

In no particular order

_War and Peace
Les Miserables
To Kill a Mockingbird
Quo Vadis
The Lord of the Rings
A Tale of Two Cities
Wuthering Heights
Ivanhoe
Moby Dick
Lord of the Flies_

----------


## LadyWentworth

> 1) *Jane Eyre* - Bronte
> 2) *Persuasion* - Austen
> 3) *The Phantom of the Opera* - Leroux
> 4) *A Tale of Two Cities* - Dickens





> 2) _Jane Eyre_ by Charlotte Bronte
> 
> 3) _A Tale of Two Cities_ by Charles Dickens
> 
> 4) _The Phantom of the Opera_ by Gaston Leroux
> 
> 5) _Persuasion_ by Jane Austen


I swear, Amalia, you are turning more and more into me everyday!  :Tongue:   :Biggrin:

----------


## Igetanotion

OK here is my list. Maybe not a list of what should be required for everyone to read, but things I think would be beneficial to anyone and that everyone ought to read them anyway.  :FRlol: 

1. One Hundred Years of Solitude-Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
2. Slaughter House Five- Kurt Vonnegut
3. The Iliad and the Odyssey.. (I'm counting them as one)- Homer
4. The Sea Wolf- Jack London 
5. A Farewell To Arms- Ernest Hemingway
6. The Inferno- Dante Alighieri
7. Treasure Island-Robert Louis Stevenson
8. Love in the time of Cholera-Gabriel Garcia Marquez (do not judge the book on the movie.. the movie did not do it enough justice)
9. Huckleberry Fin- Mark Twain
10. The Great Gatsby- F. Scott. Fitzgerald.

OK, so some of them are not quite 'classics' yet, they are all still great books. 

If I could throw a number 11 on there, it would be "Sometimes A Great Notion"- Ken Kesey... Really great book
Oh and 12 would be "The Scarlet Letter" -Nathaniel Hawthorne

----------


## bakestewah

My top 10 would have to;
Orwell-Nineteen Eighty-Four
Shakspeare-Julius Ceaser
Salinger-Catcher in the Rye 
Palahniuk-Fight Club 
Hinton-The Outsiders 
Harris-Silence of the Lambs
Cantor-Alexander the Great: journey to the end of the earth
Meyer-Twilight
Meyer-New Moon
Meyer-Eclipse

----------


## annakarina

In no particular order:

Notes From the Underground - Dostoievsky
Love in a Cold Climate - Nancy Mitford
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
L'Amant - Marguerite Duras
Christ Stopped at Eboli - Carlo Levi
The Sword in the Stone - TH White
Emily of New Moon - LM Montgomery
Down and Out in Paris and London - Orwell

And so many still out there...

----------


## johann cruyff

Without giving it too much thought(because I could never decide otherwise),here are my current top 10,in no particular order:

_Nausea_ Sartre
_Steppenwolf_ Hesse
_The Trial_ Kafka
_Crime and Punishment_ Dostoevsky
_The Death and the Dervish_ Selimovic
_The Bridge on the Drina_ Andric
_The Name of the Rose_ Eco
_Hadji Murad_ Tolstoy
_The Master and the Margarita_ Bulgakov
_The Damned Yard_ Andric

Not to say that this list is rock-solid,though...

----------


## eyemaker

In no particular order, this is my Top 10

A Separate Peace
Pride and Prejudice
Father and Sons
A Tale of Two Cities
Master and Margarita
War and Peace
Dune
The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn
Les Miserables
Crime and Punishment

----------


## Sir Bartholomew

Emma (Jane Austen)
Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
The Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas Hardy)
Kim (Rudyard Kipling)
Women in Love (DH Lawrence)
An American Tragedy (Theodore Dreiser)
The Great Gtasby (F Scott Fitzgerald)
To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)
Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather)
The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (Carson McCullers)
The Sheltering Sky (Paul Bowles)
The Ginger Man (JP Donleavy)
The Catcher in the Rye (JD Salinger)
Pale Fire (Vladimir Nabokov)
Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys)

----------


## Joreads

There are a lot of Top books of all time lists around at the moment. I thought that it would be interesting to see what your top ten books of all time are.

----------


## Dharmabeat

I'm by no means a very experienced reader, but if I had to pick 10 of my favourite books I've read, they'd have to be these. Obviously in no order! (And they are rather clichéd choices, so please, no judging  :Wink:  )

1. American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis
2. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
3. The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac
4. Perfume - Patrick Süskind
5. The Virgin Suicides - Jeffry Eugenides 
6. Junky - William S. Burroughs
7. Post Office - Charles Bukowski
8. Ham on Rye - Charles Bukowski
9. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
10. The Rum Diary - Hunter S. Thompson

----------


## Dark Muse

Well here is my list based on the books I have read thus far. 

1. The Magus ~ John Fowles 
2. Catcher in the Rye ~ J. D. Salinger
3. The Red Tent ~ Anita Diamant
4. Island of the Blue Dolphin (I know it is a kids book but I read it like three times and it really stuck with me. I loved it.) ~Scott O'Dell
5. Middlesex ~ Jeffrey Eugenides
6. Jane Eyre ~ Charlotte Brontë
7. Rainbow ~ D.H. Lawrence 
8. A Passage To India ~ E.M. Forster 
9. The Legend of Nightfall (Yes it is fantasy, but I thought it was brilliant, and ranks among my faveorites) ~Mickey Zucker Reichert
10. Call of the Wild ~ Jack London

----------


## Hank Stamper

Jack Kerouac - On The Road
Hunter S Thompson - The Great Shark Hunt
Bret Easton Ellis - American Pyscho
Hunter S Thompson - Hell's Angels
Charles Bukowski - The most Beautiful Woman in town
John Fante - The Bandini Quartet
George Orwell - Down and out in Paris and London
Tom Wolfe - The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test

----------


## Dharmabeat

Ah, I really like your choices Hank. 

I keep meaning to check out 'The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test'. 
Will do so soon hopefully  :Smile:

----------


## tscherff

sometimes a great notion--kesey
catch 22---heller
absalom, absalom--faulkner
sound and the fury--faulkner
world according to garp
to the lighthouse---woolf
in search of lost time---proust
crime and punishment---dostoevski
heart of darkness---conrad
ancient evenings---mailor

----------


## _Shannon_

Ugh I dunno--I like so many different kinds of books--and like books for so many different reasons...

How about a list of 10 books I like a lot  :Smile:  ( I started making my list and decided that I'd have to do fiction and non-fiction)
Fiction
1. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
2. Sister Carrie- Theodore Dreiser
3. The Good Soldier- Ford Maddox Ford
4. Jane Eyre- Charolette Bronte
5. The Dharma Bums- Jack Kerouac
6. Pudd'nhead Wilsom- Mark Twain
7. Bridge of Sighs - Richard Russo
8. Sanctuary- William Faulkner
9. Manhattan Transfer - John Dos Passos
10. Appoinment in Samarra - John O'Hara

Non-Fiction
1. Dispatches- Michael Herr
2. They Things They Carried - Tim O' Brien
3. Home Town - Tracy Kidder
4. Friday Night Lights- Buzz Bissinger
5. In Cold Blood- Truman Capote
6. There Are No Children Here- Alex Kotlowitz
7. Rocket Boys - Homer Hickam (all three of the "Coalwood" books are awesome)
8. Young Men and Fire - Norman Maclean
9. Wait "til Next Year- Doris Kearns Goodwin
10. Executioner's Song- Norman Mailer

----------


## Hank Stamper

> Ah, I really like your choices Hank. 
> 
> I keep meaning to check out 'The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test'. 
> Will do so soon hopefully


do it. its great!

----------


## THEfanatic

1. The Possessed - Fyodor Dostoevsky
2. Candide - Voltaire
3. The Cask of Amontillado - Edgar Allan Poe
4. The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
5. A Modest Proposal - Jonathan Swift
6. Julius Caesar - Shakespeare
7. The Crucible - Arthur Miller
8. A Doll House - Henrik Ibsen
9. Faust - Goethe
10. A Living Chattel - Anton Chekhov

----------


## amalia1985

This is STRICTLY my personal opinion. It may very well be wrong, okay? :Smile:  

In no particular order:

1) _Wuthering Heights_ by Emily Bronte
2) _Jane Eyre_ by Charlotte Bronte
3) _Rebecca_ by Daphne Du Maurier
4) _A Passage To India_ by E.M.Forster
5) _Les Miserables_ by Victor Hugo
6) _Hamlet_ by William Shakespeare
7) _Macbeth_ by William Shakespeare
8) _The Crucible_ by Arthur Miller
9) _The Sun Also Rises_ by Ernest Hemingway
10) _The Glass Menagerie_ by Tennessee Williams

----------


## Hank Stamper

> sometimes a great notion--kesey


great book  :Wink:

----------


## Statistic

1) Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures
2) Blue Lagoon
3) The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death
4) Dr. Rat
5) Treasure Island
6) Survivor
7) The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath
8) Heroics for Beginners
9) The Book of Three
10) Angela's Ashes

I tend to stick to low brow texts because most literary stuff deals with common morals with which I almost never agree. Religion, guilt, honor, courage. Bah, I'd rather hear about a dog who can talk.

----------


## Dark Muse

> This is STRICTLY my personal opinion. It may very well be wrong, okay? 
> 
> In no particular order:
> 
> 1) _Wuthering Heights_ by Emily Bronte
> 2) _Jane Eyre_ by Charlotte Bronte
> 3) _Rebecca_ by Daphne Du Maurier
> 4) _A Passage To India_ by E.M.Forster
> 5) _Les Miserables_ by Victor Hugo
> ...



We have simillar taste in books. I acutally went back and forth with The Sun Also Rises, almost added to my last, glad to see someone else did.

----------


## johann cruyff

My top ten books of all time...hmmm,not easy,but I'll give it a go:

_The Divine Comedy_ - Dante
_The Brothers Karamazov_ - Dostoevsky
_The Death and the Dervish_ - Selimović
_The Damned Yard_ - Andrić
_The Trial & The Metamorphosis_ - Kafka
_The Master and Margarita_ - Bulgakov
_Remembrance of Things Past_ - Proust
_Thus Spake Zarathustra_ - Nietzsche
_The Glass Bead Game_ - Hesse
_Dead Souls_ - Gogol

My current top ten,novels only(I'm aware Zarathustra isn't exactly the classical novel).There are way too many plays and poems to take into account.

----------


## Brasil

*Mysticim of number 3*

The number 3 can represent "God" or the divine, "the unknown".

*Divine Comedy:*
- 3 books (hell, purgatory and heaven)

- 33 chants

- Hell, purgatory and heaven are divided in 9 (3 x 3) circles, it makes a total 27 (3 x 3 x 3).

- Verse in tercet (3 lines)

rhyme: 
It is written in a technique known as the original _terza rima_ (third rhyme)
_Terza rima_: the center line of each tercet control both lines of marginal following tercet: ABA, BCB, CDC, DED .... 
...gives the illusion of growth to infinity


My list (it includes literature and not literature):
1- Iliad (Homer)
2- Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri)
3- Os Lusíadas - The Lusiads - (Luis de Camões)
4- Don Quijote de la Mancha (Miguel de Cervantes)
5- Fedon (Plato)
6- The Republic (Plato)
7- The Capital (Karl Marx)
8- Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas - The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas - (Machado de Assis)
9- Quincas Borbas (Machado de Assis)
10- Odissey (Homer)

----------


## JBI

How basic Brazil, you forgot the connections to 9 as well, and 2. There are other numerical things in it as well, and other considerations. For instance, Dante met Beatrice when he was 9 (3x3), got rejected when he was 18 (9x2, symbolizing the devil to some extent), but unfortunately she died two years too soon at 25. Scholars have found tons of other numerical things within the book itself, which are generally included in any introduction.

The Divine Comedy seems to be perhaps the 3rd or so most studied book in the Western tradition, behind Hamlet and the Bible. Dante scholarship is massive, dating back to even his contemporary times.

----------


## amalia1985

> We have simillar taste in books. I acutally went back and forth with The Sun Also Rises, almost added to my last, glad to see someone else did.


 :Wink:   :Smile:   :Wink:   :Smile:

----------


## DapperDrake

Ok, this isn't a definitive list and if you ask me again in 12 months it will have changed etc. but here it is:

Silas Marner - George Eliot
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Emma - Jane Austen
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

...Those are the ones I'm sure of :-/ I'll add more to bring the list up to 10 once I've decided.

Other candidates:

Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

And if plays are allowed:

Macbeth - William Shakespeare
The importance of being earnest - Oscar Wilde

----------


## Mark F.

A Farewell to Arms - Hemingway
Notes From the Underground - Dostoevsky
The Fall - Camus
Ham on Rye - Bukowski
The Metamorphosis - Kafka
The Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - Joyce
The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner
Sentimental Education - Flaubert
The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald

----------


## stlukesguild

1. The Bible
2. Homer- The Odyssey
3. Dante- The Divine Comedy
4. Shakespeare- Plays: King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, and MacBeth especially
5. Cervantes- Don Quixote
6. Proust- In Search of Lost Time
7. Blake- Collected Poems
8. Kafka- Short Stories, Tales, and Parables
9. J.L. Borges- Collected Works
10. Sterne- Tristam Shandy

The first 5 are permanent fixtures but the final 5 may change tomorrow.

----------


## Sir Bartholomew

another one?

Mansfield Park / Emma (tie) - Austen
the Sheltering Sky - Bowles
Wide Sargasso Sea - Rhys
To the Lighthouse - Woolf
The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner
An American Tragedy - Dreiser
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - McCullers
The Rainbow / Women in Love (tie) - Lawrence
The Golden Bowl - James
The Sun Also Rises - Hemingway

and many others, can't think well clearly

----------


## Dark Muse

> Wide Sargasso Sea - Rhys


I want to read that

----------


## Sir Bartholomew

> I want to read that


yes, do. you'll see mr rochester in a very different light.

----------


## Drkshadow03

I consider these more personal favorites than the best.

1) Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth

2) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

3) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

5) Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

6) A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

7) Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

8) The Jewish Bible by G-D and an assortment of Hebrew writers

9) 1984 by George Orwell

10) The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

----------


## Dark Muse

I read Homebody by Orson Scott Card and enjoyed it. I haven't read anything else of his yet though

----------


## aabbcc

My current favourites:

1. Alighieri, D. - _La Divina Commedia_
An absolute number one for me. The other works are, in no particular order:

Goethe, J.W. - _Faust_
Shakespeare, W. - _Hamlet_
Dostoevsky, F.M. - _Brothers Karamazov_
Sophocles - Theban plays (_Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone_)
Ovid - _Metamorphoses_
Bulgakov, M. - _Master and Margarita_
Selimović, M. - _Death and the Dervish_
Homer - _The Odyssey_

----------


## Cadi

This was much harder than it seemed  :Idea: 
Bible
Pride & Prejudice
Persuasion
Crime & Punishment
War & Peace
East of Eden
The Great Gatsby
The Age of Innocence
To Kill a Mockingbird
Gone With the Wind

----------


## _Shannon_

> I read Homebody by Orson Scott Card and enjoyed it. I haven't read anything else of his yet though


I am not a big sci fi fan---but _Ender's Game_ was great! I really, really enjoyed it!

----------


## mortalterror

1.The Inferno- Dante
2.Romeo and Juliet- Shakespeare
3.The Bible
4.The Republic- Plato
5.The Catcher in the Rye- Salinger
6.Catch-22- Heller
7.On the Road- Kerouac
8.The Metamorphoses- Ovid
9.Lolita- Nabokov
10.Andromache- Racine

My pick is kind of a mixed bag or all time greats and personal faves. I'm not particularly fond of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Cervantes, Homer, Austen, etc. Most people prefer Hamlet, but I'm going to go with R&J for being Shakespeare's best.

----------


## Drkshadow03

> I read Homebody by Orson Scott Card and enjoyed it. I haven't read anything else of his yet though


You should definitely try Ender's Game. That's considered his best book.

----------


## SnipSnap

1) Great Expectations - Dickens
2) Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky
3) Lolita - Nabokov
4) Madame Bovary - Flaubert
5) Dracula - Stoker
6) Lord of the Flies - Golding
7) Invisible Man - Ellison
8) Ulysses - Joyce
9) The Enormous Room - Cummings
10) 1984 - Orwell

----------


## Niamh

> 1. _Persuasion_- Jane Austen
> 2. _Hellfire_- Mia Gallagher
> 3. _The Alchemist_- Paulo Coelho
> 4. _East of Eden_- John Stienbeck
> 5. _Utterly Monkey_- Nick Laird
> 6. _Merlin Trilogy_- Mary Stewart
> 7. _Artemis Fowl_- Eoin Colfer
> 8. _His Dark materials_- Philip Pulman
> 9. _Deirdre of the Sorrows_- J.M.Synge
> 10. _Jane Eyre_- Charlotte Bronte


Man i posted this a long time ago!
Be more like;
Persuasion
Bitterbynde Saga by Cecilia Dart Thornton
Hellfire by Mia Gallagher
North and south by Elizabeth gaskell
East of Eden
Merlin Trilogy
Artemis Fowl
His Dark Materials
Deirdre of the Sorrows
Candide by Voltaire

----------


## Ethan Roy

1.Lord of the flies
2.1984
3.And then there were none
4.Treasure Island
5.Inheritence saga
6.The chronicles of Narnia
7.The BitterBynde saga
8.Children of the red king saga
9.A midsummer night's dream
10. Artemis fowl saga

In truth I love just about all the books I've read.

----------


## Guinivere

1. A prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
2. The end of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas
3. Special topics in calamity physics by Marisha Pessl
4. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
5. Faust - Der Tragödie erster Teil by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
6. Der Proceß by Franz Kafka
7. North & South by Elizabeth Gaskell
8. The shadow of the wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
9. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
10. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoj

----------


## kelby_lake

> 2.Romeo and Juliet- Shakespeare


Um, that isn't a novel  :Smile: 

Mine, I dunno (but in no particular order)

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Les Enfants Terribles by Jean Cocteau (which is probably actually a novella)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgeson Burnett
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
1984 by George Orwell

----------


## johann cruyff

Today I noticed that I had placed _The Divine Comedy_ amongst my top ten _novels_ as well... :Blush:  :Biggrin:

----------


## Agatha

1.The Red and the black by Stendhal
2.Lost Illusions by Honore de Balzac
3.Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
4.Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevski
5.Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
6.War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
7.Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
8.Jane Eyre- Charlotte Bronte
9.The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
10.The Egyptian by Mika Waltari

So it's my ten. But I think that that list soon will change, because I have a lots of books which I want to read...

----------


## kelby_lake

> Today I noticed that I had placed _The Divine Comedy_ amongst my top ten _novels_ as well...


I was about to point that out actually!  :Smile:  :FRlol:

----------


## Leaver

books everyone should read:
- Demian, Herman Hesse
- Ishmael, Daniel Quinn, a book that will change your view of the world
- Original Wisdom, Robert Wolff
- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
- 1984
- The Catcher in the Rye
- Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
- Maus, Art Spielgman
- The World According to Garp, John Irving
- Griffin and Sabine

----------


## promtbr

> *Dostoevsky and Samuel Beckett* , the two hemispheres of my imaginative world! I


What Kafka's Crow said. (Two hemispheres together make a world.)

I will add a list beyond the necessity of reading EVERYTHING by the above two authors first:

Franz Kafka- Pick one (the third hemisphere lol... :FRlol: )

Arno Schmidt- everything translated (currently 3 Volumes)

Jorge Louis Borges-- Fictions

Virginia Woolf -- To The Lighthouse

Joseph Conrad-- Pick any of his Majors

Marcel Proust-- In Search of Lost Time

David Foster Wallace-- Essays 

Joyce--- Dubliners or POTAAAYM

I dunno, for the last two, maybe a major work by any 2 of: Camus, Hemingway, Nabakov, Pynchon, Bernhard, Mann, Tolstoy, or Barthelme's short stories...depending on how well grounded in the classics (or Literary IQ) the reader of the list of suggested books is intended for...

----------


## Jeremiah Jazzz

hmm here's my top ten.

Finnegans Wake-James Joyce
The Brothers Karamazov-Fyodor Dostoevsky
Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man-James Joyce
Lolita-Vladimir Nabokov
Crime and Punishment-Fyodor Dostoevsky
Ulysses-James Joyce
Lord of the Flies-William Golding
The Island of Dr.Moreau by H.G. Wells
The Stranger-Albert Camus
Pale Fire-Vladimir Nabokov

half my list is the same three writers. I need to get out more often!

----------


## Etienne

Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel
Bely - Petersburg
Cervantes - Don Quixote
Rulfo - Pedro Paramo
Proust - Swann's Way
Saint-Exupéry - Terre des hommes ("Sand, Wind and Stars", hate the title translation)
Döblin - Berlin Alexanderplatz
Aquin - Next Episode
Nabokov - Lolita
Gide - The Counterfeiters

Hmmmyeah...

----------


## Dr. Hill

1. The Picture of Dorian Gray-Oscar Wilde
2. Crime and Punishment-Fyodor Dostoevsky
3. The Trial- Franz Kafka
4. Animal Farm-George Orwell (Not sure if this is a full-blown novel, due to length) 
5. Tale of Two Cities- Charles Dickens
6. The Count of Monte-Cristo- Alexandre Dumas
7. The Stranger- Albert Camus
8. Moby Dick- Herman Melville
9. Frankenstein- Mary Shelley
10. Heart of Darkness- Joseph Conrad

----------


## Snowqueen

These are the some novels I think all should read, 

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Tess of the d`Urbervilles by Thomas Hard
The Picture of Dorain Gray by Oscar Wild Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Pearl by John Steinbeck 
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hamingway 
Boy by Roald Dahl

----------


## Dr. Hill

If you remove To Kill a Mockingbird, I can state safely that I agree on all points.

----------


## Tallon

I think To Kill a Mockingbird should be mandatory. The world would be a more empathetic place.

----------


## Snowqueen

Why not "To Kill a Mockingbird"? Its a great novel i think.

----------


## Dr. Hill

I think it may be my unnecessary-- in my opinion-- and extraneous exposure to "racial literature". By the time we had reached To Kill A Mockingbird I found myself sadly without a care in the world, as I had encountered so many of the same. TKaM doesn't stand out to me at all as anything more than a quintessential southern novel, and for a novel to be regional is not enough for me to concede its greatness.

This is not, of course, to say that I am not empathetic. I do care about the issue, but the book was too trite by the time I had arrived at it, not a year ago.

----------


## prendrelemick

> These are the some novels I think all should read, 
> 
> Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
> Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
> Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
> Tess of the d`Urbervilles by Thomas Hard
> The Picture of Dorain Gray by Oscar Wild Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
> To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
> The Pearl by John Steinbeck 
> ...



According to this thread, Crime and Punishment should be there as well.

----------


## blp

A baker's dozen. Sorry, couldn't limit myself to ten:

Huckleberry Finn
The Brothers Karamazov
Blood and Guts in Highschool [Kathy Acker]
Heart of Darkness
Vanity Fair
The Sun Also Rises
A Personal Matter [Kenzaburo Oe]
Jane Eyre
Summer Rain [Marguerite Duras]
Nausea
Molloy/Malone Dies/The Unnamable 
Naked Lunch
Tender is the Night

----------


## promtbr

> A baker's dozen. Sorry, couldn't limit myself to ten:
> 
> Molloy/Malone Dies/The Unnamable


Finally some Beckett love. That's what I'm talkin' about...

----------


## blp

> Finally some Beckett love. That's what I'm talkin' about...


Am I really the first in 26 pages? Oy. And people wonder what's wrong with the world today...

----------


## blp

> *The 20th Century*
> 1- The Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable)- Samuel Beckett
> 2- Ulysses- Jame Joyce
> 3- The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man- James Joyce
> 4- Watt- Samuel Beckett
> 5- Murphy- Samuel Beckett
> 6- A Farewell to Arms- Ernest Hemingway
> 7- The Moviegoer- Walker Percy
> 8- A Confederacy of Dunces- John Kennedy Toole
> ...


Ah, OK, no I'm not then.

----------


## Snowqueen

Well! Tallon and prendrelemick didn't mind. So what would you what would you suggest Dr. Hill?

----------


## jbailey

I'm a Steinbeck fanatic:
Please read 
Grapes of Wrath
East of Eden
Of Mice and Men

They aren't classified "classics" yet, but if I had to list my personal library favorites, they would include:
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Hotel New Hampshire 
A Prayer for Owen Meany 
Last Days of Summer
Everything is Illuminated
Boy's Life
Samauri's Garden
Kafka on the Shore

----------


## Tallon

Interesting, Kafka On The Shore is by far the worst Murakami novel i've read. He seems to have hit his zenith with The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.

----------


## hoyden

> I'm a Steinbeck fanatic:
> Please read 
> Grapes of Wrath
> East of Eden
> Of Mice and Men
> 
> They aren't classified "classics" yet, but if I had to list my personal library favorites, they would include:
> One Hundred Years of Solitude
> Hotel New Hampshire 
> ...


I read One Hundred Years of Solitude when I was about 12, I was so confused  :Biggrin:  I remember thinking "wow, this is a crazy book", but I finished it and still remember most of it now. I really should reread it  :Smile:

----------


## bazarov

> These are the some novels I think all should read, 
> 
> Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
> Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
> Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
> Tess of the d`Urbervilles by Thomas Hard
> The Picture of Dorain Gray by Oscar Wild Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
> To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
> The Pearl by John Steinbeck 
> ...


4/10 and 2 are awful!? I am bad.

----------


## KaranTrehan

well, though i cant recall all of my ten favorites (guess i have much more in the list) ...but there are certain novels which i enjoyed immensely. they are..


- Great Expectations
- Wuthering Heights
-A fine balance
- War and Peace
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
-The monk who sold his Ferrari

----------


## Bumbeli

To write down only 10 books is really kinda hard, there are so many more I would recommend.

G. Flaubert - Madame Bovary 
M. Proust - In search of lost time (greatest series of books ever written)
G.G. Marquez - One houndred years of solitude 
L. Tolstoy - Anna Karenina (prefer it over War and Peace)
J. Joyce - Ulysses (hard one, but once you're done you'll always love it)
A. Camus - The Plague (this book had a huge influence on me, definitly got to read it again some time soon)
J. P. Sartre - No Exit/Huis Clos
F. Nietzsche - Thus spoke Zarathustra
F. M. Dostoyevsky - Any of his "great novels" is amazing, though I personally liked The Idiot the most. I can't even tell how much I admire this guy.
Dante Alighieri - Divina Commedia

There are dozens of other books to add, but it's down to 10.

----------


## Awakening

I haven't read a huge number of novels, so this isn't a definitive list; just a list of favorites that come to mind.

Proust - In Search of Lost Time (certainly the greatest novel I have read)
Nabokov - Lolita, Ada, and Pale Fire (works of genius, all three) 
Kafka - The Trial 
Joyce - Ulysses (difficult, but worth it)
Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment 
Robbe-Grillet - Jealousy
Beckett - The Unnameable

That's ten.

----------


## Sakah

Goodness, I'm not sure if I have ten favorites, but I'll list a few books here that I absolutely adore (I have recently started to expand my reading horizon, which mostly includes classics. Until then, here are fantasy/etc novels that I love.)

The Shining by Stephen King

The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice

The Book Thief by Markus Kusak

The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

Twilight + The Host by Stephenie Meyer

----------


## Joreads

> Goodness, I'm not sure if I have ten favorites, but I'll list a few books here that I absolutely adore (I have recently started to expand my reading horizon, which mostly includes classics. Until then, here are fantasy/etc novels that I love.)
> 
> The Shining by Stephen King
> 
> The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice
> 
> The Book Thief by Markus Kusak
> 
> The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank
> ...



I loved The Book Theif it was a wonderful read and really engaging. You should try Interview with a Vampire Ann Rice it is also great

----------


## Amlóði

Subject to change and in no particular order;

i/ The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (Tolkien)
ii/ [What currently exists of] The Gentleman Bastard Sequence (Lynch)
iii/ Watership Down (Adams)
iv/ Lolita (Nabokov)
v/ Gertrude and Claudius (Updike)
vi/ Man and Superman (Shaw)
vii/ True and False (Mamet)
viii/ Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Barrett) !
ix/ Hamlet in Purgatory (Greenblatt)
x/ Slaughterhouse Five (Vonnegut)

----------


## Zee.

Interview with the Vampire is wonderful.
Watership Down.
The Sound and the Fury
Rabbit, Run
In Cold Blood ( why has this not been mentioned!? )

----------


## Tallon

I get the feeling Capote isn't very well regarded here. I like his work anyway, especially Breakfast At Tiffany's.

----------


## Saladin

1. _The Brothers Karamazov_  by Fyodor Dostoevsky
2. _The Idiot_  by Fyodor Dostoevsky
3. _Hunger_ by Knut Hamsun
4. _The Growth of the Soil_ by Knut Hamsun
5._ Faust (part 1 and 2)_ by J.W.von Goethe
6. _The Trial_ by Franz Kafka
7. _Kafka On the Shore_ by Haruki Murakami
8. _To Kill A Mockingbird_ by Harper Lee
9. _The Kite Runner_ by Khaled Hosseini
10. _Kimen_ by Tarjei Vesaas

----------


## Caspa

Here are my 10 favourites, not particularly listed in any order:

Fyodor Dostoyevsky _Crime & Punishment_
Albert Camus _The Stranger_
George Orwell _1984_
Kurt Vonnegut _Slaughterhouse 5_
Jack Kerouac _On the Road_
Douglas Coupland _Generation X_
Jeffery Eugenides _The Virgin Suicides_
Irvine Welsh _Ecstasy_
Bret Easton Ellis _American Psycho_
Ernest Hemingway _The Sun Also Rises_

----------


## Zee.

I loved, The Virgin Suicides and American Psycho.

----------


## Caspa

_The Virgin Suicides_ was actually the first book I ever read (outside of education), and _American Psycho_ was the second  :Smile:

----------


## Zee.

I really liked how it left you feeling.. i don't know.
The girl's suicides left you feeling, well left me feeling really... freaked out i guess.

----------


## Remarkable

My top ten for the moment(it might change as soon as tomorrow :Biggrin: )in no particular order:

Midnight's Children-Salman Rushdie
A Portrait of An Artist as a Young Man-James Joyce
1984-George Orwell
Great Expectations-Charles Dickens
War and Peace-Leon Tolstoy
Sophie's World-Jostein Gaarder
Seeing-Jose Saramago
Short Stories-Dino Buzzati
The Institute of Time Regulation-Ahmet Hamdi Tanpynar
All Quiet on the Western Front-Erich Maria Remarque

I tried to pick representatives for different epoches,styles and messages.It would be better to start with classics,like Dickens,but if you want a fast read,Remarque would be perfect.

----------


## Infinitefox

Swan Song by Robert McCammon
The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
A Game of Thrones by George R.R Martin
A Storm of Swords by George R.R Martin
Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong
The Prestige by Christopher Priest
The Stand by Stephen King
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Shining by Stephen KIng
Boy's Life by Robert McCammon

----------


## sixsmith

In no order and likely to change in the next half hour.


Herzog - Saul Bellow
Independence Day - Richard Ford
The Outsider - Albert Camus
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
American Pastoral - Philip Roth
Lolita - Vladimir Nabakov
The Information - Martin Amis
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
Disgrace - JM Coetzee

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## Odysseus93

Probably my favourite ten classics would be, in no particular order: Hamlet, the Illiad, Oliver Twist, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, A Christmas Carol, The Hound of the Baskervilles, A Merchant of Venice, and Macbeth

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## mal4mac

> ... I would love to hear some recommendations from you pros on the classics.


What makes you think we're pros? I don't sell my body on this forum  :Smile:  My recommendation - try reading some recommendations from real pros - like Harold Bloom, John Carey, Clifford Fadiman, and James Wood. They don't just produce another boring list, they actually say, at book length, what might be worth reading and why.

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## Vladimir777

> I loved, The Virgin Suicides and American Psycho.


Interesting, I really liked the latter of these two but I didn't get into the former. Did you feel _Virgin_ was Eugenides's best book? Maybe I should read another one by him.

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## African_Love

Fiction
______

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Kindred by Octavia Butler

Native Son by Richard Wright

Gone With the Wind (I'm currently reading this but already I can tell it will be on my top 10 list)

Roots (although it's debatable as to how fictitious this actually is)

Queen (also based on the life of an actual woman but I'll add it as fiction)

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (not a classic but I'll add it to make a round 10)

Camoflauge by Joe Haldeman (also not a classic but very interesting)



Non-Fiction
--------------

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Speciesism by Joan Dunayer

Finding Fish by Antwone Fisher

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Assata by Assata Shakur

Left To Tell by Imaculee Ilibagiza

A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah

Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama

Wonders of the African World by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Soul On Ice by Eldridge Cleaver

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## onioneater

1. David Copperfield- Dickens
2. East of Eden- Steinbeck
3. The Return of the Native- Thomas Hardy
4. Absalom! Absalom!- Faulkner
5. Don Quixote- Cervantes
6. The Mill on the Floss- Eliot
7. Fortunata y Jacinta- Galdós
8. Jane Eyre- Bronte
9. The Brothers Karamazov- Doestovesky
10. The Last of the Mohicans- Cooper

These are some of my favorites!

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## Vangeory

The writer of The Art of War is Sun Tzu,not Lao Tzu.I am Chinese,and read this book before.Trust me

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## Chabonist

~ The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger)
~ The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)
~ Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
~ Cannery Row (John Stienbeck)
~ Of Mice and Men (John Stienbeck)
~ Damian (Herman Hesse)
~ Siddhartha (Herman Hesse)

Plays:
~ Death of a Salesman
~ Hamlet
~ Cyrano De Bergerac

Almost classics:
~ Farenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
~ The Wizard of Earthsea (Ersula K Leguin)

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## Return Journey

Right now, as I think about my ten best list, these are the books that come to mind. 
Its a mixed bunch including some poetry and non-fiction. 


The Old Curiosity Shop, Charles Dickens
Coming up for Air, George Orwell
Cancer Ward, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Quite Early One Morning, Dylan Thomas
Resolution and Independence, William Wordsworth
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T. S. Eliot
Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence

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## ennison

Outside of The Psalms which I read daily I'd say "Uttermost Part of the Earth" by Lucas Bridges is my favourite book and after that there are too too many.

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## sammyuk

This is probably a poor list really, I haven't read enough to really pick and choose yet, and they're all very mainstream, but here goes anyway (in no particular order, sorry):
1. Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky (not finished it yet)
2. Animal Farm - Orwell (mostly because Russian history fascinates me)
3. Catch 22 - Heller
4. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson (not a novel obviously but I couldn't omit it, it's far too good)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Lee
6. LOTR - Tolkien
7. Brave New World - Huxley
8. Island - Huxley
9. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick
10. The Catcher in the Rye - Salinger

Hardly a revolutionary list, but then I haven't read that much. It's very Western as well.

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## Paulclem

Lists -endless lists.

Instead of lists, I have piles... :FRlol:

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## Travis_R

1. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
2. Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
3. The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
4. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
5. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
6. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
7. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
8. The Brother Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
9. Animal Farm - George Orwell
10. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

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## Satan

*The Brothers Karamazov
Crime and Punishment
Der Steppenwolf
Narcissus and Goldmund
Don Quixote
Portrait of Artist as a Young Man
Jude the Obscure
Sons and Lovers
Lolita
Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable*

Why only ten? Some more:

_Notes from Underground
The Idiot
The Stranger
The Plague
Siddhartha
Nausea
The Master And Margarita
Of Human Bondage
War and Peace
Faust
Great Expectations
Tess Of The D'urbervilles
The Count of Monte Cristo
As I Lay Dying
The Great Gatsby
Mill on the Floss
Journey to the end of the Night
The Unbearable Lightness Of Being
Madame Bovary
The English Patient
Hunger
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Hunchback of Notre Dame
Catcher in the Rye
Pale Fire_

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## neilgee

> What makes you think we're pros? I don't sell my body on this forum  My recommendation - try reading some recommendations from real pros - like Harold Bloom, John Carey, Clifford Fadiman, and James Wood. They don't just produce another boring list, they actually say, at book length, what might be worth reading and why.


Some of us do read these lists, Mal. If I see a list with books on I have also rated very highly then I'm interested to see what's on the list that I have not read because the poster seems to have similar tastes to me. That does in this way make at least as much sense as believing the opinion of a critic whose tastes I know nothing about at all.

Making lists can be quite fun too. I'm not going to be critical of it.

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## Dinkleberry2010

1. The Mahabharata
2. The Bible
3. The Koran
4. The Iliad
5. The Classical Greek Dramatists in One Volume
6. The Divine Comedy
7. The Complete Works of Shakespeare in One Volume
8. Moby Dick
9. War and Peace
10. The Brothers Karamazov

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## Dinkleberry2010

I'm afraid that I misunderstood this thread, and I listed ten literary works, only three of them being novels.

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## Cal1231

In no particular order:

Animal Farm
Anna Karenina
The Catcher in the Rye
The Lord of the Rings
The God of Small Things
The Grapes of Wrath
Great Expectations
Life of Pi
A Tale of Two Cities
Wuthering Heights

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## wlz

Gulliver's Travels.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.
The Vicar of Wakefield.
The Wild Irish Girl.
Melmoth the Wanderer.
Ulysses.
Finnegans Wake.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
At Swim-Two-Birds.
The Ante Room.
An Beal Bocht.
A Drama in Muslin.
Esther Waters.
The Brook Kerith.

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## Lumiere

In no particular order, (except for How Green Was My Valley, which is without doubt my favorite of favorites). 

How Green Was My Valley
Jane Eyre
God Knows
David Copperfield
Coming Up For Air
Dandelion Wine
Life of Pi
Till We Have Faces
Cat's Cradle
Lord of the Flies

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## Babak Movahed

hmmm that's a good question...

1. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave 
3. The Stranger by Albert
4. The Sun Also Rises by Earnest
5. The Blind Owl by Sadegh
6. Lolita by Vladimir
7. Go Tell it On the Mountain by James
8. Fathers and Sons by Ivan
9. The Doctor is Sick by Anthony
10. The Idiot by Fyodor

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## gruntingslime

I can't put them in any specific order...

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Tenant - Roland Topor
The Castle - Franz Kafka
Ferdydurke - Witold Gombrowicz
The Little Prince - Antoine de Sainte Exupery
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
Jacob Von Gunten - Robert Walser
The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Moominvalley in November - Tove Jansson
Joko's Anniversary - Roland Topor

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## ForKnowledge

the idiot Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karazamov FD
Candide Voltaire
Lord Jim Joseph Conrad
Nostromo Joseph Conrad
Don Quixote Cervantes
the Portrait of an Artist as a Young man James Joyce
The Stranger Camus
Tropic of capricorn Henry Miller
The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner

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## janesmith

"Jude" and "Tess" - Thomas Hardy
"The Netherworld" - George Gissing
"La Terre", "La Bete Humaine" and "L'Assommoir" - Emile Zola
"Les Miserables" - Victor Hugo
"The Yellow Wallpaper" - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
"Great Expectations" - Dickens
"Frankenstein" - Mary Shelley

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## Sebas. Melmoth

Ten Favourite Novels?

1) *The Picture of Dorian Gray*, O. Wilde

2) *The Narrow Corner*, W. S. Maugham

3) *Heart of Darkness*, J. Conrad

4) *Spring Snow*, Y. Mishima

5) *Sister Carrie*, T. Dreiser

6) *Madame Bovary*, G. Flaubert

7) *Sons and Lovers*, D. H. Lawrence

8) *Against Nature*, J.-K. Huysmans

9) *A Farewell to Arms*, E. Hemingway

10) *Through the Looking Glass*, L. Carroll

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## BellaRose

From the limited amount that I have read so far:

1. Phantom of the Opera
2. Frankenstein
3. To Kill A Mockingbird
4. A Tale of Two Cities
5. Great Expectations
6. War and Peace
7. The Bell Jar
8. Gone With the Wind
9. Little Women
10. Jane Eyre

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## wokeem

I need to read more

1.Crime and Punishment
2.Tale of Two Cities
3.1984
4.Notes From The Underground
5.Blood Meridian
6.The Invisible Man
7.Suttree
8.Tortilla Flat
9.To Kill a Mockingbird
10. Slaughterhouse-Five

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## victorianfan

1. A Hero of Our Time by Lermontov

2. Chronicles of Travnik by Ivo Andrić

3. The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky 

4. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

5. Middlemarch by George Eliot

6. Anna Karenina by Tolstoy

7. The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy

8. Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen

9. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

10. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

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## jdalvarado

Latin American Literature

1. _Ficciones_ and _El Aleph_ by Jorge Luis Borges
2. _Sobre Heroes y Tumbas_ by Ernesto Sabato
3. _La Invención de Morel_ by Adolfo Bioy Casares
4. _Rayuela_ by Julio Cortazar
5. _La Región Más Transparente_ by Carlos Fuentes
6. _El Llano en Llamas_ and _Pedro Páramo_ by Juan Rulfo
7. _El Astilladero_ by Juan Carlos Onetti
8. _Cien Años de Soledad_ by Gabriel García Marquez
9. _Los Detectives Salvajes_ by Roberto Bolaño
10. _Paradiso_ by José Lezama Lima

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