Name your top ten favorite books

Big O wrote:

Anything Oprah tells me to read!

Oddly enough, as much as I hate Oprah, she has pretty good taste in books. She has picked 100 Years of Solitude, which is in my top 5, and some other good books. They do tend to be really disturbing though, I had to read Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye for a college English class. This is one of the most disturbing books I've ever read, being about a little black girl who wishes she had blue eyes so she could be pretty like the white girls, and gets pregnant with her dad's child.

Oh, pretty much anything Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle, Sirens of Titan, Slaughterhouse Five

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Great Gatsby

100 years of Solitude

Mrs Dalloway

Reservation Blues (Sherman Alexie, great author, unique perspective)

People's History of the United States

Guns Germs and Steel

Not coming up with anything else right now, sure I'm missing some great ones

darren wrote:

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

It took you guys long enough.

Without definite hierarchy:

Orthodoxy - G.K. Chesterton

Paradise Lost - John Milton

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

Lolita - Myself

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

Harry Potters - J.K. Rowling

Perelandra - C.S. Lewis

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

The Faerie Queen - Edmund Spenser

Jeremiah - Jeremiah/Holy Spirit

Limiting myself to novels:

1: In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust

2: The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

3: War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

4: Anna Karennina - Leo Tolstoy

5: The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann

6: Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

7: The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner

8: 100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

9: My Antonia - Willa Cather

10: Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

11: Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

12: For Whome the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemmingway

13: A House For Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul

14: Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston

15: Invisible Man: Ralph Ellison

16: The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

17: From Here To Eternity - James Jones

18: Sophie's Choice - William Styron

19: Killing Mr. Watson - Peter Matthieson

20: The Violent Bear it Away - Flannery O'Connor

None of these books of any of these posters are truly thier favorites. You all are just naming books that are intellectual classics. Gimme a break. Most of these books are only good sleeping material.

Im sure most of you couldnt put down Davinci code, America psycho etc....

Wrong. These are truly my favorite novels. I don't mind telling you such works as "Ulysses" didn't make my list because I just couldn't manage to get through them. I have not read either "The Da Vinci Code" or "American Psycho".

Tortilla flat

chimes wrote:

Im sure most of you couldnt put down Davinci code, America psycho etc....

Hmm, these two writers couldn't be more different. I don't see how The DaVinci Code could be someone's favorite. It's fun and a page turner, but among your ten favorite books? Brett East Ellis' novels, yes. He's inventive and moving.

High Fidelity - Nick Hornby

American Pastoral - Philip Roth

The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger

A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

The Ancestor's Tale - Richard Dawkins

LowLife- Mike Duff

America, Empire of Liberty - David Reynolds

The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie

1984 - George Orwell

Post Office - Charles Bukowski

*Easton

Many of my favorites are already listed. I would add The Comfort of Strangers (McEwan), which I love and hate equally; Sanctuary (Faulkner); First Love (Turgenev); Pensées (Pascal). Other all-time favorites, I'd rather keep them secret.

Not in my top ten, but I liked them a lot: My Idea of Fun; The House of Sleep; Smilla's Sense of Snow; The Secret History.

scrump

Confining myself to novels, and keeping to one work per author.

Catch-22: Joseph Heller

The Aubrey-Maturin Series - Patrick O'Brian

A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway

A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

The Tenth Man - Graham Greene

The Winds of War - Herman Wouk

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

Germinal - Emile Zola

You Know Me Al - Ring Lardner

Confining to novels, more than one work per author allowed:

no particular order

Ulysses-Joyce

War and Peace-Tolstoy

Brothers K-Dostoevsky

Go Down, Moses- Faulkner

A Hero of Our Time-Lermontov

Absalom, Absalom!-Faulkner

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man-Joyce

The Chouans-Balzac

Crime and Punishment-Dostoevsky

Against Nature-Huysmans

Writing this list made me realize how few novels I read for an English and philosophy major (I tend to read more history and about law...that said, I'm starting law school in the fall).

1. falling through the earth by danielle trussoni

2. the golden compass by philip pullman

3. the amber spyglass by philip pullman

4. the wind-up bird chronicle by haruki murakami

5. east of eden by john steinbeck

6. every visible thing by lisa carey

i've read a lot of books but these are the only ones i've read more than five times each.

Dusty Bones wrote:

Crime and Punishment- Dostoevsky

War and Peace - Tolstoy

American Pastoral - Philip Roth

Wise Blood - Flannery O'Connor

The German Lesson- Siegfried Lenz

Breakheart Hill - Thomas H. Cook

Enduring Love - Ian McEwan

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

A Star Called Henry - Roddy Doyle

Master and Margarita - Bulgakov

I can't believe you included a book by Ian McEwan among that list of greats! He is awful!

Please get over the idea that people are listing "intellectual classics," not their actual favorites. You maybe be intimidated by its length, but Tolstoy's "War and Peace" is an extremely readable book, never a chore, never boring. And I don't know of any other book as exciting as Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment"

some coked up brit wrote:

I can't believe you included a book by Ian McEwan among that list of greats! He is awful!

What? He's my favorite living author!

The Little Prince - taught me my first lessons about love and loss

Voyage to Arcturus - taught me about passion and the metaphysical

The Inferno - Dante - taught me about poetry and great art

Don Quixote - taught me to laugh

Fictions - Jose Luis Borges - taught me about the mind

The Palm Wine Drinkard - taught me about the wild

Faust - taught me ethics

Galapagos - taught me about absurdity

One Hundred Years of Solitude - taught me about time and history

The Wasteland - taught me criticism

The Sound and the Fury - taught me about the grotesque

Lord of the Rings (Tolkien)

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Twain)

Science and Human Values (Bronowski)

Dune + associated sequels and prequels (Herbert, Herbert)

The Foundation Trilogy (Asimov)

Night Never Ending (Komorowski)

David Copperfield (Dickens)

Nine Princes In Amber (many sequels - Zelazny)

A Wizard of Earthsea (Le Guin)

Wow, lots of profound books here, which makes me feel like a slacker. Some books are a struggle to get through. Some of books I couldn't put down...

A Walk in the Wood

Into Thin Air

Into the Wild

The Wandering Taoist

Once a Runner

Tao Te Ching (sp?)

I've also enjoyed books for the young adult (action/adventure), such as Unwind and The Hunger Games.

Any recommendations on meaningful books that aren't more than ~300 pages?