Favorite books

Patricia McKillip's Riddlemaster series
CJ Cherryh's Cyteen
Andre Dubus' House of Sand and Fog

Here's a top 20 list (completely arbitrary numbers, BTW) that I just compiled for a friend who was looking for something to read.

1. White Noise, Don DeLillo
2. Absalom! Absalom!, William Faulkner
3. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, John Ashberry
4. The Poet and the Murderer, Simon Worrall
5. Straight Man, Richard Russo
6. Life of Pi, Yann Martel
7. The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, Brady Udall
8. Blue Angel, Francine Prose
9. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
10. Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem
11. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace
12. Night Shift, Stephen King
13. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
14. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
15. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
16. I Know This Much is True, Wally Lamb
17. Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn
18. Underworld, Don DeLillo
19. Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer
20. Ghost Story, Peter Straub

Watership Down, by Richard Adams
The Stand, by Stephen King
Roots, by Alex Haley
The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair
The Outsiders, by SE Hinton
Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll
LA Confidential, by James Ellroy

1. MEDITATIONS – Marcus Aurelius
2. WUTHERING HEIGHTS - Emily Bronte
3. THE TWITS - Roald Dahl
4. REBECCA – Daphne Du Maurier
5. CHILD OF THE PHOENIX – Barbara Erskine
6. BIRDSONG – Sebastian Faulks
7. WHITE OLEANDER - Janet Fitch
8. CROSS STITCH - Diana Gabaldon
9. THE FORSYTE SAGA - John Galsworthy (Volume 1: The Man of Property, In Chancery & To Let)
10. THE END OF THE AFFAIR - Graham Greene
11. BLACKBERRY WINE – Joanne Harris
12. NOTES ON A SCANDAL – Zoe Heller
13. THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY – Karleen Koen
14. I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE - Wally Lamb
15. SHE’S COME UNDONE - Wally Lamb
16. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD – Harper Lee
17. THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE - CS Lewis
18. THE THORN BIRDS - Colleen McCullough
19. PEYTON PLACE – Grace Metalious
20. GONE WITH THE WIND - Margaret Mitchell
21. TOM’S MIDNIGHT GARDEN - Philippa Pearce
22. INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE – Ann Rice
23. THE STRANGER BESIDE ME – Anne Rule
24. THE CATCHER IN THE RYE - JD Salinger
25. WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN – Lionel Shriver
26. TULLY – Paullina Simons
27. THE SECRET HISTORY – Donna Tartt
28. ANNA KARENINA - Leo Tolstoy
29. KNOWLEDGE OF ANGELS – Jill Paton Walsh
30. A TASTE OF BLOOD WINE – Freda Warrington
31. FOREVER AMBER - Kathleen Winsor

Dam. Lavender and Peaches already grabbed many of my faves. So I'll throw in a few others. If I repeat anything, forgive me. I'm about to get banned, anyway.

The Ox-Bow Incident, Walter Van Tilburg Clark
Mildred Pierce, James M. Cain
Eden, Stanislaw Lem
Fiasco, Stanislaw Lem
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut
Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut
Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut
The Inheritors, William Golding
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
Cannery Row, John Steinbeck
Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
The Water-Method Man, John Irving
Kaputt, Curzio Malaparte
Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Celine
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas (this is probably No. 1)
The Man Who Laughs, Victor Hugo
Huck Finn, that Twain fella
The Time Machine, H. G. Wells
Fahrenheit-451, Ray Bradbury
Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
The City and the Stars, Arthur C. Clarke
The Green Ripper, John D. MacDonald (or about ten other Travis McGee novels)
The Dark Wind, Tony Hillerman
The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
The Good Soldier Svejk, Jaroslav Hasek
Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
Victory, Joseph Conrad
Native Son, Richard Wright
Howards End, E. M. Forster
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle
She, H. Rider Haggard

Ecletic enough?

caw

A Scanner Darkly, Philip K Dick

What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me? Into us? Clearly or darkly? I hope it sees clearly because I can't any longer see into myself. I see only murk. I hope for everyone's sake the scanners do better, because if the scanner sees only darkly the way I do, then I'm cursed and cursed again.

The Twits!! I had totally forgotten about that book.

Another great YA book (and series) I still love 15 years later is Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising.

Oof.

I forgot Rupert Thomson's brilliant The Book of Revelation, which would probably be in my top five.

And piss!

What about Jonathan Ames's funny-as-hell Wake Up, Sir!

And Cormac McCarthy's earth-shatteringly weird Blood Meridian.

I need to puff my list.

For swashbuckling, and meticulously researched, historical fiction, I love Dorothy Dunnett.
Sharon Penman is also excellent, especially Here Be Dragons, about Llewelyn the Great of Wales.
Mary Gentle is fantastically good - Ash: A Secret History has historical detail shading into more and more wierdness as the story goes on.
Comfort reading (kind of - some of it is pretty harrowing when you care about the characters) - Katherine Kurtz's Deryni series. Well detailed medieval society and magic.
I love Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series, as well.

Children's books - Susan Cooper, Antonia Forest (girls' school stories and stories about the same family in the holidays), Diane Duane's Young Wizard series, and anything by Rosemary Sutcliff (historical, especially good at Romans).

I can't praise Meditations enough. Not because 'Marcus Aurelius' appeared in Gladiator but because my aunt bought it for me a few years back when my head was all screwed up and by the time I finished it I wasn't my usual chipper self, but I could see light at the end of the tunnel.

I have an inordinate fondness for doorstop-sized, intricately-plotted books, which may skew this list a bit, but here's some of my favorites:

David Mitchell; Cloud Atlas
John Fowles; The French Lieutenant's Woman
Charles Palliser; The Quincunx
Stephen King; The Stand and Bag of Bones
Cormac McCarthy; Suttree and Blood Meridian
Ralph Ellison; Invisible Man
Don Delillo; Underworld
Iain Pears; An Instance of the Fingerpost
Barbara Kingsolver; The Poisonwood Bible
Tom Robbins; Skinny Legs and All
Robertson Davies; A Mixture of Frailties
Susannah Clarke; Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
T. Coraghessan Boyle; Riven Rock and Drop City
John Irving; The World According to Garp
Nevil Shute; On the Beach
Katherine Dunn; Geek Love
Alexander Dumas; The Three Musketeers
Miguel de Cervantes; Don Quixote (the Tobias Smollett translation in particular)
George Eliot; Middlemarch
JK Rowling; the Harry Potter series
Ivan Doig; Bucking the Sun and Dancing at the Rascal Fair
Mark Twain; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
George Gissing; New Grub Street and The Odd Women
Michel Faber; The Crimson Petal and the White
Michael Chabon; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Then there are some authors who have written too many books I've loved to list them all, so I'll just give blanket recommendations of their work:
Jane Austen
Anthony Trollope
John Steinbeck
E.M. Forster
James Ellroy
John le Carré
James Morrow
Neil Gaiman

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Slan by A.E. van Vogt
The World of [Null] A by A.E. van Vogt
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" by C.S. Lewis
The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Dragon's Blood by Jane Yolen
Heart's Blood by Jane Yolen
A Sending of Dragons by Jane Yolen
The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey

English Passengers, Matthew Kneale
Galapagoes, Kurt Vonnegut
Welcome to the Monkeyhouse, Kurt Vonnegut
Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut
Into the Forest, Jean Hegland
Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris
Naked, David Sedaris
Step Across This Line, Salmon Rushdie
Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, Florence King
The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
The Beans of Egypt, Maine, Carolyn Chute
A Town Like Alice, Neville Chute
The Book of Fred, Abby Barti
The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins
Freakonomics, Stephen D. Levitt

My List (which could be longer)

The Monkey Wrench Gang - Edward Abbey
Airport & Hotel & ... - Arthur Hailey
Jurassic Park - Michael Crichton
The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostevsky
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Captain from Castille - Samuel Shellabarger
Captain Blood - Rafael Sabatini
Scottish Chiefs - Jane Porter
Ivanhoe - Sir Walter Scott
A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
The Scarlet Pimpernel - Baroness Orczcy (sp?)
Angelique - Sergeanne Golon

Can't tell I used to read a lot of historical fiction, can you. Puma

Sean D. said:

Dragon's Blood by Jane Yolen
Heart's Blood by Jane Yolen

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This was a great trilogy. I have a three books in one copy. She's currently working on book 4 according to her blog.

Yep, I could make an excessively long list of books I love.

The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
On Writing (Stephen King)
The Dark Half (Stephen King)
The Masterharper of Pern (Anne Mccaffrey)
The Diviners (Margaret Lawrence)
The Simple Truth (David Baldacci)
Hour Game (David Baldacci)
Dragon DelaSangre (Alan F. Troop)
The Guilded Chain (Dave Duncan)
The Pact (Jodi Picoult)
Silence of the Lambs (Thomas Harris)
The Bestseller (Olivia Goldsmith)
Lord of the Flies (William Golding)

Great lists!

Here's mine:

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

The Cider House Rules by John Irving

Evening Class by Maeve Binchy

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Missing Susan by Sharyn McCrumb (for a little humor mixed with mystery)

Too long a list. Read what you prefer in a genre (if you want to write in that genre) and read what interests you because when it comes down to it; reading a book is supposed to be enjoyable. The other perks of reading is learning something new, inspiration, finding the excitement of a character in distress, etc. I think you get the picture.

*looks at SkippyJon Jones books*

*looks at Pearls Before Swine comic strip collections*

*looks at stack of trashy romance*

I'm thinking my list doesn't fit in here.

Storyteller5 said:

This was a great trilogy. I have a three books in one copy. She's currently working on book 4 according to her blog.

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Book 4? Cool! I look forward to seeing that book come out. I always thought very highly of that particular world and its characters.

If you don't mind my asking, where might I find Ms. Yolen's blog? I would love to see what all she has planned for her future endeavors.

Sean D. Schaffer said:

Book 4? Cool! I look forward to seeing that book come out. I always thought very highly of that particular world and its characters.

If you don't mind my asking, where might I find Ms. Yolen's blog? I would love to see what all she has planned for her future endeavors.

Click to expand...

No problem.

http://www.janeyolen.com/journal.html

I forgot to add (how could I forget?!) Charles de Lint for urban fantasy - he makes you want to go to Ottawa!
And Lindsay Davis for her ancient Roman detective series - Falco is great fun, as much for his relationship with Helena Justina as for solving the mysteries.

Most of these are YA....but really good.

Sins of the Fathers by Chris Lynch
Under The Wolf, Under the Dog by Adam Rapp
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Looking for Alaska by John Green
The Willowdale Handcar by Edward Gorey
A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby
Be More Chill by Ned Vizzini
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
What's Eating Gilbert Grape by Peter Hedges