all time 5 favorite novels

[ScottRadom]

Hmm... don't know that I could narrow it to five.

Easy one is Dune. That's my fav. Love everything about it.

Also up there....

Foundation
Battlefield Earth (All hail L. Ron! Drink the Kool-Aid!)
Early Discworld books
Stainless Steel Rat
A Song of Ice and Fire (Get Writing Martin, you lazy bastard!).

So real high literature is obviously my thing.

Man.... I see there's some Lovecraft fans. Yikes. Thomas Covenant? Double Yikes. One of my first eDebates on these forums was about how I was sure nobody out there actually liked that Thomas Covenant series. I stand corrected!

Lot's of variety on here for sure!

 

[Wyrmypops]

As an unfortunate Y-Wing pilot once said "theeeere's tooo many of them".

David Gemmell - pretty much any book as they're often quite similar but not any worse for that. Best are probably the Rigante books though.

Bernard Cornwell - Sharpe is good, but his Arthurian trilogy is easily the best treatment afforded that period I've ever read.

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. I've had to buy the book four times now, it's so good whenever I lend it out I don't tend to get it back.

Robert Rankin - a master of talking toot. I saw the Antipope got mentioned, and is clearly the book to start with to better appreciate all the running gags that are repeated in further novels.

Robin Hobb - the Assassin/Farseer is some of the best fantasy I've enjoyed.

Stephen Fry - they're all exultant joys revelling in language and wickedly lush characters.

Christopher Brookmyre - his books feel like a Bond film would be if everyone was a normal person.

Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion. Reading it now and loving the fiercely rational assault on superstition.

 

[viashimo]

Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Anathema by Neal Stephenson
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
Ambient by Jack Womack

I love alot of the books I see popping up on peoples lists. Got some reading to do

 

[funnymouth]

Man.... I see there's some Lovecraft fans. Yikes.

shhhhhhhh. yog-shaggoth is always listening.

Christopher Brookmyre - his books feel like a Bond film would be if everyone was a normal person.

why not read an actual bond book? they're quite good (made my top spot).

i noticed a few people have posted books which are not novels [ "a fictitious prose narrative of book length, typically representing character and action with some degree of realism"]....

 

[Wyrmypops]

why not read an actual bond book? they're quite good (made my top spot).

Have done. Some Ian Fleming, and some of the more recent authors. They don't leap to mind the way the Brookmyre ones do. It's the characters and ability to empathise with 'em. Feels more heroic when the bloke crawling through a vent ain't trained to amazing levels, but is some IT technician alternatively geeking out on Die Hard and worrying that his wife is gonna kill him for getting grease on his new trousers. :glasses-nerdy:

 

[Tercha]

I got 100 top novels for the nintendo DS , great stuff on there! and smaller than a paperback to carry around, but I can't really name favorites as I like so much.

 

[breadhead]

I can't believe I forgot about Robin Hobb, the Farseer trilogy is incredible. Everyone I've encourage to read it has loved it, and not just fantasy fans either.

The Lies of Locke Namora is very good too, there's a load of great books in this thread!

 

[DannyBoy2k]

The Lies of Locke Namora is very good too, there's a load of great books in this thread!

WANT THE THIRD GENTLEMEN BASTARDS! Errrmmm...sorry. I don't know what came over me.

 

[falela]

Off the top of my head, they are:

The First Law series by Joe Abercrombie (Just finish it, the writing and story are excellent, abeit too pessimistic, eveyone loses at the end)

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon

American Gods and Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin

 

[Jericho]

1) The Big Sleep (Raymond Chandler)
2) The High Window (Raymond Chandler)
3) The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (H.P. Lovecraft)
4) War and Peace
5) The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula LeGuinn)

:good: Hooray for hardboiled/noir genres :good:

It's damn near impossible to choose favorites for me, I've read so much in my 5 year prison sentence -- I mean university degree -- and all the personal reading on top of it.

In no particular order, some of my favorites are:

The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M Cain
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams
If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino
Mad Shadows by Marie-Claire Blais

The last two happen to sit side by side on my alphabetized book shelf... hooray So many more good books, but no time to think about it all or I'll be here all day. I really loved the books in our Scandalous Fiction class, and I'm a sucker for good translations of the Classics too.

 

[Beelzebrush]

Off the top of my head, they are:


The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon

I read this recently, it's a great book. I really enjoyed it

 

[Tercha]

@ Jericho
If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino
Mad Shadows by Marie-Claire Blais

The last two happen to sit side by side on my alphabetized book shelf... hooray

No books between I & M?

 

[johnboyjjb]

I think he means Blais and Calvino

 

[IdofEntity]

:good: Hooray for hardboiled/noir genres :good:

In no particular order, some of my favorites are:

The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M Cain
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams
If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino
Mad Shadows by Marie-Claire Blais

Thank all that is fuzzy that there's another Douglas Adams fan out there besides me. I was worried no one else would have it on their top 5 for a minute there.

 

[waghorn41]

Round the Bend - Nevil Shute
Lord of the Rings
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom - T E Lawrence


My top 3, after that all of the works by Tolkein, Lawrence, Shute and Ian Watson

 

[evil tendencies]

:good: Hooray for hardboiled/noir genres :good:

It's damn near impossible to choose favorites for me, I've read so much in my 5 year prison sentence -- I mean university degree -- and all the personal reading on top of it.

I was thinking of The Thin Man and Maltese Falcon on the list, but people might have thought I misunderstood the question...

I hear you exactly when it comes to the reading in college thing. I had the same problem, and my major was English!

 

[cassar]

i don't know if people are fearful of quoting the classics like hamlet, alice in wonderland, the wind in the willows, lady chatterlys lover, homers illiad (just some examples, dont get your knickers in a twist, add your own) or if they just dont bother reading them in this day n age. dont be shy come steaming out of the closet like a herd of stampeding buffalo's, i like hamlet i think he was the tarentino of his age, total pulp fiction style, again hamlet a total bloodbath, macbeth same there, henrythe V, you just have to think about whats being said a little longer than you would reading a modern novel. d h lawrence kinky but remember using a feather is kinky, using the whole chickin is perversion. marque de sade would be your bag. books are good.

 

[IdofEntity]

i don't know if people are fearful of quoting the classics like hamlet, alice in wonderland, the wind in the willows, lady chatterlys lover, homers illiad (just some examples, dont get your knickers in a twist, add your own) or if they just dont bother reading them in this day n age. dont be shy come steaming out of the closet like a herd of stampeding buffalo's, i like hamlet i think he was the tarentino of his age, total pulp fiction style, again hamlet a total bloodbath, macbeth same there, henrythe V, you just have to think about whats being said a little longer than you would reading a modern novel. d h lawrence kinky but remember using a feather is kinky, using the whole chickin is perversion. marque de sade would be your bag. books are good.

I'm willing to bet most of us have read a lot of the classics, but I know in my case I don't pick them as my favorite because they aren't as accessible. They're good reads, and important for an education, but I doubt I'm ever going to put something like Dante's Inferno in my top 10 booklist. Besides which, does something being an old classic make it better than being a contemporary classic? To be honest I'd be more likely to put down Bradbury or Orwell before Shakespeare or Kafka. Not that they weren't fantastic writers!

 

[evil tendencies]

i don't know if people are fearful of quoting the classics like hamlet, alice in wonderland, the wind in the willows, lady chatterlys lover, homers illiad (just some examples, dont get your knickers in a twist, add your own) or if they just dont bother reading them in this day n age. dont be shy come steaming out of the closet like a herd of stampeding buffalo's, i like hamlet i think he was the tarentino of his age, total pulp fiction style, again hamlet a total bloodbath, macbeth same there, henrythe V, you just have to think about whats being said a little longer than you would reading a modern novel. d h lawrence kinky but remember using a feather is kinky, using the whole chickin is perversion. marque de sade would be your bag. books are good.

I have a lot of favorites from the classics too...

From The Bard: King Lear and Twelfth Night are my favs, but I've also had a long fondness for Henry IV part 1, as it was the first live Shakespeare play I saw.
Beowulf - The Seamus Heaney translation is my favorite, though I think others are good
Canterbury Tales - I'm partial to the Knight's tale and the Parson's tale (but I'll let you decide what that says about me).
The Prince, by Machiavelli, if for no other reason than it reminds me why I need God.
I like Caesar's History of the Gallic Wars, but I can't find a translation that makes it accessible for long reading.

I didn't list these because they are hard reads that I only go to when I need something thick and don't have a lot going on in my life. The first list I made is what I can handle pretty much at any time.

 

[Rugne]

Only 5? Argh.

Hmmm.
1) Men At Arms by Terry Pratchet
2) Guardians Of The west by David Eddings (R.I.P)
3) Phule's Paradise by Robert Asprin (R.I.P)
4) The Crystal Singer by Anne McCaffrey
5) Who's afraid of Beowulf by Tom Holt
6) The casebook of Sherlock Holmes

Guess I couldn't stay to 5 after all.
Marc