What ar your top 5 favorite books of all time?

bborchar

bborchar

Rohan
I know that there's a reading thread, but this isn't it :) I wanted to know what people put in their 5 books of all time. Put whatever you love the most.

I'm a huge lover of the classics (yes, I'm the literary type, lol) so mine would be this:

1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
2. Pride and Prejudice
3. To Kill a Mockingbird
4. Small Gods
5. Dracula

What are yours?
 
1. The Hobbit
2. The Lord of the Rings
3. Pride and Prejudice
4. Little House on the Prairie (entire series)
5. The Time Traveler's Wife
 
We discussed which 9 books we'd paint on a staircase like this:
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m92e1kQRwu1rnroy5o1_500.jpg

Here was my nine.

1. Lord of the Rings
2. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
3. War For the Oaks - Emma Bull
4. My Ántonia - by Willa Cather
5. Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke
6. The Boxcar Children - Gertrude Warner
7. The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin
8. Dandelion Wine - Ray Bradbury
9. The Princess and the Goblins - George MacDonald

They were really 9 books that had some impact on me in my life but I'm fairly comfortable taking the top 5 as my top 5 favorite. It works as well as any other list I could come up with if I could only choose five.

But I might have to have a strong conversation with myself about whether to chose My Antonia or The Princess and The Goblins.

I like Willa Cather very much but the man I would marry and I read The Princess and the Goblins out loud to each other when we first met. We also read Dandelion Wine. So not only did I like them, they have some sentimental value.
 
1. The Lord of the Rings.
2. Jack the Bodiless - Julian May.
3. Changes - Jim Butcher.
4. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang - Kate Wilhelm.
5. Dragonflight - Anne McCaffrey.
 
I've read quite a few of Wilhelm's books and she never fails to satisfy.

I haven't gotten to Changes yet. :-)
I'm at White Night.
 
1. The Hobbit/The Lord of the Rings (I just can't separate them) [;)]
2. The Stand
3. The Martian Chronicles
4. The Wastelands (Third book in the Dark Tower series)
5. Anything by H.P. Lovecraft
 
My favourites tend to change depending on my mood. [blush]

But the all time faithfuls are:

1. The Lord of the Rings
2. Pride and prejudice
3. Most of the books by Terry Prachett ( yes I know. [:/] I couldn't decide)
4. Hamlet
5. Lotr again? [:P] only joking...Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series

...which is, ouch, also a series, not a book.
5a. A Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy

Oh, and also Narnia

Hmm. I'm not particularly good at this...
 
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but I might have to think for a bit about the other spots.

1. The Catcher in the Rye
2: Lord of the Flies
3: Animal Farm

Others that would be in there somewhere would include Watership Down, K.M. Peyton's Flambards series, Tintin (yes, really), and the Plumb books (by Maurice Gee, a very good NZ author).

I mostly read non-fiction these days, and a lot of the books I have particularly enjoyed are related to exploration, disasters, and survival stories, as well as natural history, biography and travel.

Great question!
 
Not in any Order


Without Remorse - Tom Clancy
LOTR
Starship Troopers - Robert Heinlen
The Sword of Shanarra and the Elfstones of Shanarra - Terry Brooks
The Belgariad and the Elenium - David Eddings
Zane Grey westerns
Band of Brothers
Tigers in the Mud
 
1, LotR, especially Book V. That's what I can re-read over and over.

2. War and Peace. I read it straight through in about 4 days, during Christmas break my senior year in high school. I ate, slept, and read.

3. Les Miserables, a few years later. Gripped. Incredible how the musical could capture so much of the magic of that book.

Beyond that, there are only authors:

4. Anything by Jane Austin.

5. About 2/3 of the books by Dick Francis. Inventive, exciting, entertaining. But he did write a few clangers.

Anne McCaffrey is great, but her books are one-time reads. Several authors in that category.
 
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1.The Lord of the rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
2.The Chronicles of Narnia: The lion, the witch, and the wardrobe by C.S Lewis
3. Lemonade Mouth by Mark Peter Hughes
4. Mossflower by Brian Jacques
5. Catching Fire from The Hunger Games series (Yes, I'm a big Hunger Games fan too) by Suzanne Collins

Of course I have a lot more favorite books besides those listed too ;).
 
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1. Hamlet (definite number one, the best thing I've ever read/seen)

The rest in no order:
2. To Kill a Mockingbird
3. Jane Eyre
4. Richard Preston's Dark Biology series (in particular The Hot Zone)
5. Hobbit/LOTR

There are so many more books that I love, but those are the ones that stand out to me the most [heart]
 
Mine, in no particular order:

The Lord of the Rings (gasp!)
1984
The Man Who Was Thursday
The Great Gatsby
The Last Man (probably the most fascinating sci fi/apocalyptic novel in existence)

Honorable mentions: Sherlock Holmes, the Earthsea series, Alexandre Dumas, Jane Austen, REH's Conan, The Hobbit
 
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Not necessarily exactly the same as those I think are best, then - the ones I keep rereading!

1. Lord of the Rings (Hah, bet that surprised everyone!)

2. Harry Potter (if I must choose one, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows"). I came to it later in life (it did not exist in my youth, but I fell hard when I did fall in love with it. This was my first online fandom).

3. Alexandre Dumas' Musketeer series (if I must choose one, "The Three Musketeers". When I was a child/teen, this series was an annual reread, at least. And "Three Musketeers" I have read in three languages - my native language, English, and after 6 years of school French, in the original).

4. Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody mystery series. (The one I've read the most is "The Mummy Case". Possibly not my favorite, but so much older than a lot of them that I've had more time to reread it a lot!)

5. Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series of SF novels. Together with HP, these are the two entries I only came across as an adult. If I had to pick one, probably "Komarr" for its depiction of an unhappy marriage.Though that is not the one I would recommend to a new reader of the series, just the one that is most personally appealing to me.
 
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...but here goes my list of books that I re-read often (annually, in some cases) and that I would not want to be without...

The Hobbit
Sir John Moore (by Carola Oman)
Persuasion
Desiree

Apart from these, I have favourite book series (like Harry Potter) and authors...
 
Persuasion (Austen)
Our Mutual Friend (Dickens)
Jane Eyre (C. Bronte)
The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien)
Middlemarch (Eliot)

I have read all of these too many times to remember, and they continue to delight.
 
Mine, in no particular order:

The Lord of the Rings (gasp!)
1984
The Man Who Was Thursday
The Great Gatsby
The Last Man (probably the most fascinating sci fi/apocalyptic novel in existence)

Honorable mentions: Sherlock Holmes, the Earthsea series, Alexandre Dumas, Jane Austen, REH's Conan, The Hobbit
Click to expand...

I love all of your honorable mentions :D I'm a big fan of Holmes, Musketeers and Jane Austen, of course ;)
 
1. The Hobbit
2. Watership Down
3. Alice in Wonderland
4. Dune (just the original)
5. Anne of Green Gables

Honrable mentions: LOTR, Christopher Tolkien's edited works of his father's writing, The Secret of NIMH, The Last Unicorn, Through the Looking Glass, Ishmael (the one by Daniel Quinn), the whole Anne series, most of Edgar Allen Poe's stuff (that I have read so far), most of what I have read in the Pippi Longstocking series, The Thief of Always
 
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