Let's do this ourselves as the Guardian has caused so much controversy.
Try to limit yourselves to no more than 3 books that you are very glad you have read. I know you won't, but that's the suggestion. I am not asking you to say they are your personal top 1/2/3, just ones you feel you are glad you have read.
We can then state how many of the ROF list we have ticked off.
I think this will lead to better recs than the poncy published ones. But feel free to indulge your inner pseud.
Also feel free to mock anyone who says Proust. A lot.
I will start, given my comment on Cookie's thread, with:
1 - The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by RL Stevenson
2 - Mort, T Pratchett
3 - Meditations, M. Aurelius.
Edward Trencom's Nose.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
My top 3[1]
"The Lives and Opinions of Tristram Shandy" by Laurence Sterne
"On the Beach" by Neville Shute
"Brideshead Revisted" by Evelyn Waugh
"The Spire" by William Golding
"The Cruel Sea" by Nicholas Monsarrat
[1] in the Douglas Adams sense of a trilogy...
Nobody’s Fool, Richard Russo (and the rest of the series)
The Sportswriter, Richard Ford (ditto)
Catch-22
The Crow Road - Iain Banks (tho am also a big fan of the M stuff obv)
The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
The Last Continent - Terry Pratchett (IMH peak Terry)
P.s. good shout on Mort. Personally, I think I prefer the Colour of Magic for it's gleeful piss-taking of the fantasy genre
Colour of Magic is crap imho (or rather is crap by comparison to when he properly hits his stride with the Vimes and later Wizzard/Witches books))
A Fine Balance
The Pillars of the Earth
The Shadow of the Wind
My faves from the last 5 years
Assuming we're sticking with novels, then...
They're all there on the Best Of lists, but they deserve to be. I might also be one of the few that enjoys the deep cetological bits in Moby-Dick.
Could not finish Pillars of the Earth, it draaaagggggeeeed onnnnnnnnnnnnnnn
Two Lives - Vikram Seth
Notes from an exhibition - Patrick Gale
Frenchman’s Creek- Daphne DuMaurier
An impossible task to limit to three Wango but here goes:
The Grapes of Wrath- John Steinbeck
Gilead- Marilynne Robinson
The God of Small Things- Arundathi Roy
(honourable mention- A House for Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul)
Hoping someone puts a Peter Carey novel on their list.
Ulysses
Les Miserables
The Sound and The Fury
The ones that have made the most impact on me are probably:
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J K Rowling
Painted Veil - Somerset Maugham
Death on the Nile - Agatha Christie
Roger's Profanisaurus - Viz
The Big Pink Stiff One - Viz
Of Mice and Men - Steinbeck
Jimbo I picked Mort because it was the first I read and opened the whole pantheon to me.
In my first year (i think probably week) of English we had to read out a passage from a fave book. A girl called Sarah who was absolutely smoking hot did the retroannual but from Mort. I fell in lust. A few weeks later I had read every TP available in the local library. Then I asked her to the Colts xmas ball and she said yes.
She got off with one of the bigger boys
A bloody Pratchett fan too? I’d have expected better of her.
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
H2G2 - Douglas Adams
The three body problem - Cixin Liu
The Sun Also Rises
The Age of Innocence
Lucky Jim
Isn't Ulysses usually described as the greatest unread novel? I have never been able to finish it (even listening to it).
Buzzheh
GO TO CASH
by High Guise
Freedom or Death- Kazantzakis
A Man in Full - Wolfe
Birds Without Wings - de Bernieres
The Art of Fielding - Harbach
Less - Greer
The first of these does not have (probably) universal appeal but I adore it.
Of the TP books, it's probably Night Watch for me, with Guards Guards and Going Postal close behind, but I would also have most of them.
Caves of Steel, Asimov - this was the first Asimov book I read, so probably my favourite.
The Hobbit - first read when I was about 7 and have always preferred it as a book to the slog that is Lord of the Rings
Also an honourable mention to anything by Dan Abnett, but particularly Eisenhorn, or any of the Falco (or Flavia Albia) books by Lindsey Davis.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
The Information by Martin Amis
Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow
The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
The Dice Man - Luke Rhinehart
Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens
One Day - David Nicholls
The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann
Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K Jerome
The Radetzky March - Joseph Roth
The Bonfire of the Vanities - Wolfe. Superb sense of time and place. Got a lot out of it on the second reading too.
barbarians at the gate. I must love stories about powerful men in New York.
Outliers - Gladwell. Changed my outlook on life and the way I parent. .
Some good shouts above but
Rhialto the Marvellous - jack vance
1984
Dracula
Catch-22
No Highway
The Secret History
Lord of the Flies
Confederacy of Dunces
If it is fiction:
Terese Raquin
Crime and Punishment
London Fields
Bonfire of the Vanities is good although I may be the only person who thought the film was better.
If non fiction is allowed, don’t get me started
The film was shit. Iirc they made the Hitch character Amurcan ffs
Wolfe is very patchy.
His 1930s namesake was at least as good. And more interesting. Check him out.
My original post is quite clearly worded. Best reads.
Well since you insist
Robert Caro, the Power Broker and his life of LBJ
Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge and Reaganland by R Perlstein
Soul of a New Machine
Dealers of Lightning
Empire of Pain - by Patrick Raddon Keefe - his new London Falling also looks immense
Tony Judt, Postwar
Almost anything by David Kynaston but especially his history of HSBC
Dominic Sandbrook, White Heat (and any of the others in that series but they get slightly less good as it goes along)
Anything by Jon Grindrod or Owen Hatherley on urbanism and modern architecture
Mark B Smith’s Exit Stalin
William Taubman’s biography of Khrushchev
Jung Chang on Mao
John Foot, Calcio
Jonathan Wilson, Angels with Dirty Faces
Paul Merson, How Not to be a Professional Footballer
Start a thread
Good shout on Crime and Punishment. I read it years ago and remember thinking what talent to write like that.
Black Swan Green - David Mitchell
Last Orders - Graham Swift
A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles
Reaper Man is my favourite Pratchett
Must re read them all
'Glad you have read' =/= 'enjoyed reading'.
Glad I have read because it gives me a common cultural currency I'm glad to have
Ulysses
Glad I have read because they forced a bit of empathy into my callow teenage head
Of Mice and Men
The Pearl
Enjoyed reading
All Agatha Christies, Margery Allinghams, Dorothy L Sayers, Eric Amblers, Josephine Teys, Tana Frenchs
Nancy Mitford
Evelyn Waugh
Tibor Fisher
Kim Stanley Robinson
Anna Funder
For hun bun - I am glad I read Peter Carey ' The Fat Man in History', specifically the story about gambling on changing your body.
name of the rose by umberto eco
an instance of the fingerpost by iain pears
the iliad
Tibor Fischer’s star fell spectacularly
I thought the thought gang and collector collector were superb.
oh and the bromeliad
Tibor Fisher has never stopped being good. The latest, "My Bags are Big", about being a elderly crypto bro in Dubai, is absolutely on the money.
It’s in my basket, I believe
Woman in White, obvs, but other than that:
(1) Blindsight - Peter Watts
(2) The Safekeep - Yael van der Wouden
(3) A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
Surprised to see you're a Shadows of Apt fan Sumo. Met Adrian irl a few times- nice guy. Think he was a legal executive.
My three:
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