Your top-10 all-time favourite books

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MattLarkin
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Re: Your top-10 all-time favourite books

Post by MattLarkin » August 23rd, 2011, 8:18 am

Cookie wrote:10. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
I forgot about this one. I love this book!
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Sommer Leigh
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Re: Your top-10 all-time favourite books

Post by Sommer Leigh » August 23rd, 2011, 8:51 am

Cookie wrote:Ah man, you're going to pin me down? *bites nails. Um. Um. If I have to choose--

1. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
3. Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
4. Harry Potter Series by Jk Rowling
5. Angelique and the King by Anne Golon
6. Leviathan Series by Scott Westerfeld
7. Love and Louis XIV by Antonia Frasier (non-fiction)
8. 1984 by George Orwell
9. The Iliad by Homer
10. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Gah! There are so many good books out there!
You have such great taste :-)
I almost had Hitchhiker's Guide, but it has been so long since I read it that I'm not sure it would still be a favorite or just one I once really loved.
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Re: Your top-10 all-time favourite books

Post by Cookie » August 23rd, 2011, 10:01 am

Sommer Leigh wrote:
Cookie wrote:Ah man, you're going to pin me down? *bites nails. Um. Um. If I have to choose--

1. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
3. Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
4. Harry Potter Series by Jk Rowling
5. Angelique and the King by Anne Golon
6. Leviathan Series by Scott Westerfeld
7. Love and Louis XIV by Antonia Frasier (non-fiction)
8. 1984 by George Orwell
9. The Iliad by Homer
10. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Gah! There are so many good books out there!
You have such great taste :-)
I almost had Hitchhiker's Guide, but it has been so long since I read it that I'm not sure it would still be a favorite or just one I once really loved.
Thanks. I liked your choices too! I had such a hard time deciding. There are so many good books out there. Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey almost made it to the list, but by the time I walked back to my laptop from the bookshelf I had forgotten about it. The Princess Bride might hover at about #11 or 12.

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Re: Your top-10 all-time favourite books

Post by Falls Apart » August 23rd, 2011, 10:11 am

Wow, almost missed this. That'll teach me to spend a weekend hiding in an internet-less room. My favorite books . . . *whips out 20 ft long list*

1. A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. R. Martin. Seriously. Can't. Read. Enough. *goes on an hour long rant about their awesomeness, gets shot by a mob of annoyed people, recovers miraculously*
2. Gone series, Michael Grant
3. The PIllars of the Earth, Ken Follett. Not so much the sequel.
4. Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling
5. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens.
6. Under the Dome, Stephen King
7. Othello, Shakespeare
8. King Lear, also by Shakespeare
9. Taking Back God, Leora Tanenbaum
10. How Not to Write a Novel by . . . who wrote that again?

Yeah, the last two aren't novels, but I love them, so . . . yeah. I absolutely adore these books.

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Re: Your top-10 all-time favourite books

Post by Sanderling » August 24th, 2011, 9:01 pm

What great lists from everyone. Quite a lot of variety! And quite a lot of different tastes. I've noted a number of titles that I've read and felt were only so-so, but obviously others loved them enough to include them on a top-ten list. I always find observations like this heartening - more support for the assertion that you should write what you love and keep going even in the face of initial rejections: eventually someone you send it to is going to love it as much as you do.

I find it interesting that there's a number of newer titles in there, but so many of them are classics that are decades old, titles that I read when I was growing up. I don't know, but I'm guessing this is the case for many of the list-writers, too. Do you think that we form greater attachments to books that we read when we're younger?
Quill wrote:Interesting that not one person so far has named a non-fiction book among their faves. For me, just about all my top ten would be non-fiction.
I maintain a separate literary non-fiction favourites list. There's not enough room on a top-ten list to include all my favourites from both sides of the library. ;) Among my favourite non-fiction books/authors are most works by Tim Flannery, Scott Weidensaul, Bill Bryson, and David Quammen, and a few odds and ends such as Douglas Adams' Last Chance to See. Nearly all nature-themed.
dios4vida wrote:So, if you only read the first two Ender (Ender's Game and...Speaker of the Dead, I think?) have you heard of Ender's Shadow? It's parallel to Ender's Game but told from Bean's POV. I actually like it better than Ender's Game. Highly recommended, especially if you liked the Battle School.

My husband loves the first three Dune books, too. I think I got lost in the politics of the second and third. The Sci-Fi channel did a miniseries of Dune and Children of Dune (really, the second and third books) that took all the good parts of those books and put them together. That was good. I wanted to like the second and third Dune books a lot more than I did.
Speaking of classics... a couple I've been meaning to read for a while. Well, Ender's Game, at least. I got Dune for Christmas one year when I was a teenager, among a stack of used books. Something about it put me off reading it and it got tucked away on my shelves. I never came back to it, but oddly, I never gave it away, either. I should dig it out.
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Re: Your top-10 all-time favourite books

Post by MattLarkin » August 25th, 2011, 12:43 pm

Sanderling, Dune is kind of dense. I think it might have been harder to appreciate it as a teenager. His writing style is not my favorite, in part because of omniscient POV. However, the series itself is my favorite series, because of it's amazing plotting, world building, and vision.
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Re: Your top-10 all-time favourite books

Post by Cookie » August 27th, 2011, 12:33 pm

Sommer Leigh wrote:My favorite books seem to change a lot, so I can only say for right NOW these are on the list of top 10, but that could change in 20 minutes :-)

In no order and also, I'm counting a series as a whole-

1. the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
2. Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta
3. The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson (just read this for the 9th time this weekend, in fact)
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. the Leviathan series by Scott Westerfeld
6. The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman
7. How to Say Goodbye in Robot by Natalie Standiford
8. Night Watch series by Sergei Lukyanenko
9. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood and Good Bones and Simple Murders by Margaret Atwood (Sorry, I couldn't decide!!)
10. Frankestein by Mary Shelley
I just finished Oryx and Crake. All I can say is, mind= blown.

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Re: Your top-10 all-time favourite books

Post by Beethovenfan » August 28th, 2011, 7:47 pm

Sorry, doing this fast so I will only put author names if I remember them off the top of my head.

Harry Potter books 1 and 7 - you already know the author ;)

Watership Down -

Dragon Singer, Dragon Song - Anne McCaffrey

A Separate Peace - John Knowles

Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

The Hobbit - Tolkien

Great Expectations - Dickens

*Anne McCaffrey's books have a special place in my heart because her books were the catalyst for my love of reading. It all started with her when I was 13 years old.
** Sorry, can't remember the author of Watership Down, :roll: but someone else already posted it. Thanks!
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Re: Your top-10 all-time favourite books

Post by Sanderling » August 30th, 2011, 11:35 pm

MattLarkin wrote:Sanderling, Dune is kind of dense. I think it might have been harder to appreciate it as a teenager. His writing style is not my favorite, in part because of omniscient POV. However, the series itself is my favorite series, because of it's amazing plotting, world building, and vision.
That's good to know! Thanks, Matt. There're probably a number of books that would fall into that category that I should give a second try now that I'm older.
Cookie wrote:I just finished Oryx and Crake. All I can say is, mind= blown.
Margaret Atwood being among those. I've heard good things about this one, and also Year of the Flood. And maybe The Handmaid's Tale would be better with some years now between me and high school.
Beethovenfan wrote:*Anne McCaffrey's books have a special place in my heart because her books were the catalyst for my love of reading. It all started with her when I was 13 years old.
Great list, Beethovenfan. McCaffrey was the first author I fell in love with. I read just about every one of her books during my high school years, starting at about the same age as you. And she had a lot of books. I don't think I read any other author's backlist with that level of dedication, before or since.
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Re: Your top-10 all-time favourite books

Post by Gypson » August 31st, 2011, 6:08 pm

I can only choose ten?! Ack! I'll have to group some of my selection by author or series...

In no particular order:

1. Beowulf
2. The Perks of Being a Wallflower
3. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (perhaps the most rewarding text I've ever had the joy to read)
4. Harry Potter series
5. Watership Down
6. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (pure literary gorgeousness)
7. Time Windows (children's lit perfection, in my opinion)
8. Shogun
9. Daughter of the Forest
10. The House of the Seven Gables

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Re: Your top-10 all-time favourite books

Post by TaylorNapolsky » August 31st, 2011, 10:29 pm

1. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
3. Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
4. Harry Potter Series by Jk Rowling
5. Angelique and the King by Anne Golon
6. Leviathan Series by Scott Westerfeld
7. Love and Louis XIV by Antonia Frasier (non-fiction)
8. 1984 by George Orwell
9. The Iliad by Homer
10. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

This seems like a good list! I haven't read much on there but I like the stuff I have.


For me, in no particular order it would be:

1) David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
2) Moby Dick by Melville
3) Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
4) Harry Potter and the half-blood prince
5) The Hobbit
6) Twelfth Night by Shakespeare
7) Ender's Game
8) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
9) Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
10) Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas


I don't know. Those are basically the first ones that came to my head.

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Re: Your top-10 all-time favourite books

Post by Sanderling » September 1st, 2011, 12:16 am

It's interesting to see the titles and authors that get mentioned time and again. And such a great cross-section of classic and contemporary works. What is it about classics that makes them so enduring? Is it the stories that really grab people, or the language, or some combination of both? Or something else altogether?
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Re: Your top-10 all-time favourite books

Post by rojerronny » September 27th, 2011, 9:30 am

My top 10 favourite books would be :
1. Bartlett and the Ice Voyage - Odo Hirsch
2. Mr. Maybe - Jane Green
3. Barra Creek - Di Morrissey
4. Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5. Miss Lonelyhearts - Sheryn George
6. Straight Talking - Jane Green
7.The Idiot - Fydor Dostoevesky
8.To Kill A Mocking Bird-Harper Lee
9. The Power of One - Bryce Courtenay
10. The Book Thief - Marcus Zusak

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Re: Your top-10 all-time favourite books

Post by Chantelle.S. » September 30th, 2011, 5:54 pm

1.The Forbidden Game trilogy by L.J. Smith. Her antagonist was the muse that inspired and directed my own writing. I'm still a major fan of this trilogy. Not just for sentimental reasons. The antagonist really is the most awesome bad boy she has ever written.

2. The Nightworld series by L.J. Smith. A secret society of witches, shifters and vamps living among us? I like it. Which is saying a lot because I'm not a fan of Wicca-inspired or vampire sucking stories.

3. Servant of the bones by Anne Rice. The only other story I've read revolving around a genie of some sort. There's got to be a market for genies in the literary-verse because I struggle to find books based off them. It was also a very well crafted book, anyway, I had my doubts because it's a story being TOLD to the MC. Not exactly my style of writing, but it was different, and refreshing, and very well done, and I'd be a fooly fool not to put it on my all-time favourites list.

4. Everything's Eventual by Stephen King. My. Word. If you've read this book, you'll understand what I mean when I say - what.a.catch. The prologue was horrifyingly good. True Master-of-Horror style.

5. The Vampire Academy series by Rachelle Mead. I haven't actually read the whole series, I've barely gotten past the first 50 pages of one of the books. But I like her style of writing, and I like the characters she painted, even though I was obviously a bit lost with the plot for not having read the books in order. She's a good writer, and good writers produce good books, and good books are not that easy to find (or maybe I'm just very very fussy with which books I can connect), so a good book will definitely make it into my list of all-time favourites. Because all-time favourite books, to me, mean it's a book/series that I will go back to reread time and time again and still fall in love with it all over again.

6. The Angel Experiment by James Patterson. I read the first 9 pages of Maximum Ride, and again, fell in love with the style of writing. Very very engaging, sucked me in from the first line despite it being a cliche start to a story. I can overlook cliche when the writing hooks me.

7. Anne McCaffrey's Pern Series. Again, I only read one of the books, have been trying to get hold of the others to read. Sci-Fi usually isn't my cuppa tea, but this woman's books are magnificent!

8. Skyfall by Anthony Eaton. Another book in a series, I believe, but the story stuck with me to this day. It's also sci-fi-ish, I think.

9. The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling. I'm not a HP fan, at all. But I've got the Philosopher's Stone and The Deathly Hallows, for the plain and simple reason that Ms Rowling is a brilliant writer. I read HP for the pleasure of reading good writing. I'm not kidding. I hate HP. I think he's the most selfish self-pitying little... boy to ever traipse into the literary world. But the author, I looove her work.

10. The Haunted by Jessica Verday. If this was listed on fanfiction.net under TFG, I'd favourite it a million times over.

Wow. I made 10. I was worried I didn't have that many favourites. I'm not that fussy after all! :D
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Re: Your top-10 all-time favourite books

Post by Mira » October 17th, 2011, 4:52 pm

Great thread! I'll have to think of my top 10.

This is a great TBR list! :D

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