What are your five favorite books to date?

In fairness to authors, one may only select one book per author.

My current top 5 are:

Pride and Prejudice, Anna Karenina, The Grapes of Wrath, Dandelion Wine, Nineteen Eighty-Four

I assume you mean any books, not specifically Folios since I don't think there's been a FS edition of Dandelion Wine. So, impulsively and all for different reasons: Heart of Darkness (Conrad), The Emigrants (Sebald), Cancer Ward (Solzhenitsyn), The Awakening (Chopin), and Dubliners (Joyce).

My War Gone By I Miss It So - Anthony Lloyd
The Good Earth - Pear S. buck
The Silmarillion
The odyssey - Fagles translation
Histoires Grecques - Sartre

s

1. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
2. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
3. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
4. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
5. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

In no particular order
The Alchemist - Paolo Coelho
Meditation - Marcus Aurelius
The Aeneid - Virgil
Children of Hurin - Tolkien
Lord of the Flies - William Golding

Pretty tough list as I have a few more favs and the list might differ depending my mood

King Lear - William Shakespeare
Metamorphoses - Ovid
Tristram Shandy - Lawrence Sterne
Eugene Onegin - Alexander Pushkin
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
Emma - Jane Austen
Aurora Leigh - Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Alice In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

I can't count.

My next five would be:

Anna Karenina - Tolstoy
Dead Souls - Gogol
Canterbury Tales - Chaucer
Gawain and the Green Knight - Anon
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Iliad - Homer
Madame Bovary - Flaubert
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The Lord of the Rings - Tolkien

Yes, I still can't count. Impossible task, this!

Only five? Oh well...

(These are listed in no particular order).

Anna Karenina
God of Small Things
Never Let Me Go
Lord of the Flies
Great Gatsby
To Kill a Mockingbird

(I cheated,I know! Should be five instead of six)
There's also The Picture of Dorian Gray!

In no particular order -

Moby Dick
The Lord of the Rings
Hamlet
War and Peace
David Copperfield

Don Quixote
Tristram Shandy
Ulysses
A Remembrance of Things Past
A Dance to the Music of Time

Light in August
Name of the Rose
The Brothers Karamozov
The Lord of the Rings
Angle of Repose

Tomorrow might bring a different five.

Light in August
Name of the Rose
The Brothers Karamozov
The Lord of the Rings
Angle of Repose

Tomorrow might bring a different five.

Today, my five favorite Folio books are:

Pride and Prejudice (2013 edition)
The Little White Horse
The Once and Future King
The Silmarillion
The Dark Is Rising

impossible question to answer, I'm going to address chronologically with the books that have affected me most as I have aged.
1) The Book of Three, Lloyd Alexander
2) The Lord of the Rings, JRRT
3) A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway
4)Sons and Lovers, Lawrence
5) Engleby, Faulks

With The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Murakami and American Psycho, Ellis mentioned in somewhat disturbed dispatches

These are the books that I just keep coming back to every year, especially Hemingway.

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Dracula by Bram Stocker
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

I don't remember how many times I've read my Shakespeare and Co. stamped The Old Man and the Sea (And yes without cliche, I went to France for the first time when I was 22 with a friend and I talked endlessly on the plane about Shakespeare English bookshop in Paris and about Hemingway's A moveable feast only to be sidetracked and beaten by my comrade for the last paperback copy for the elusive Shakespeare and Co. stamp). Heartbreaking yes, I think I've never forgiven him even though I've been to Paris twenty times after that.

Has Folio every published The Old Man and the Sea?

>16 ironjaw: Indeed Faisel, the society published a very nice five volume set of Hemingway in 1999 that includes The Old Man and the Sea. As a sidenote, my book club is reading The Old Man and the Sea next month.

In no order:

His Dark Materials (love the Folio edition)
The Master and Margarita
1984
Dracula
Memoirs of A Geisha

>18 Edyno.Bathana:
Good thing I bought The Master and Margarita! It is a relatively unknown classic.

I absolutely love Bulgakov. Heart of a Dog is also in the 'favourite list'!

I enjoyed The Master and Margarita too, as bizarre as it was. I appreciated the enlightening editorial notes of the Everyman Library edition. It's intriguing how much superb literature has come out of Russia, as if political oppression is literary fertiliser.

1. The Bible (New King James Version)
2. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
3. Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers
4. On Stories and Other Essays on Literature by C. S. Lewis
5. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

If not for the "one book per author" rule, my 4 and 5 would have been . . .

4. Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
5. The Man Born to Be King by Dorothy L. Sayers

today's favourites

Little White Horse (childhood favourite)
Far from the Madding Crowd
Middlemarch
Madame Bovary
The Stranger's Child (Hollinghurst)

A Month in the Country - JL Carr
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee

bubbling under:
The Sea Road - Margaret Elphinstone
This Thing of Darkness - Harry Thompson
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel
The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer

Non-fiction
A History of the Countryside - Oliver Rackham
Crow Road - Mark Cocker
Chasing the Monsoon - Alexander Frater
The Pinecone - Jenny Uglow
A Voyage for Madmen - Peter Nichols

but this is probably more vulnerable to change than the above list!

I'm getting a lot of reading ideas from this thread, as if I really needed any. I'll have to whittle my list down from the dozen or so I have written down, and post it some time soon.

Reading ideas is why I wanted this thread. I also knew I had books on my shelf that I had not read that I should.

The Lord of the Rings seems to be enjoyed by quite a few of us, although it is not in my top 5, I understand why it is up there for others.

Also, I'm glad I'm not the only one who favors Anna Karenina over War and Peace. While I've read both, I have re-read Anna Karenina a few times. It is much more relevant it seems to me.

I find it very difficult to compile lists of this sort, though I invariably feel drawn to make the attempt! I'm afraid my list will not be terribly literary though as I'm not really a lover of high literature (most of which I simply do not understand), plus it depends upon my mood as to which I choose so this is a list 'of the moment'.

Small Gods by Terry Pratchett
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
How To Be Wild by Simon Barnes
British Bats by John Altringham
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

For all its faults I do love The Lord of the Rings, and Small Gods just seems so insightfully written that I find myself returning to it frequently.

Let's have a go:

Uncle Fred in the Springtime by P.G. Wodehouse
The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1918 edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Mani by Paddy Leigh Fermor
Novellen by Heinrich von Kleist

No. Those are all books I'd want to have on my "top five", but they are just an arbitrary set. There should be more poetry on the list: at least Prufrock and other poems, The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, and Crow; there should be Dickens and Conrad and Hardy and Thackeray, not to mention Zola, Balzac, Stendahl, (Th.) Mann, Grass, Böll, Siegfried Lenz, Sebald, Thomas Bernhard; there should be some of my essential reference books (the OED, The Art of Electronics, Jowett's pre-grouping railway atlas, Facts from figures; there should be some history, some drama, some Greek and Latin, there should be George MacDonald Fraser and Patrick O'Brian, there should be Tales of the City and The swimming-pool library and Valmouth...

Five is impossible.

"For Whom the Bell Tolls" - Hemingway
"Steppenwolf" - Hesse
"Meditations" - Marcus Aurelius
"Flowers of Evil" - Baudelaire
"Short Stories" - Borges

31>

That was the only book I took with me when I left my library and country and moved to Sweden. Then one day I lent it to a "friend" and never got it back. That's something I just can't forget. Now I have the Easton Press Edition but one day I will buy the LEC one.

>31 EclecticIndulgence: Find with Hemingway that it's 1A, 1B, and 1C w/ A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hard to pick one.

Cervantes - Don Quixote
Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
Herman Melville - Moby Dick
James Joyce - Ulysses
Leo Tolstoy - Collected Short Stories

Shakespeare- Macbeth
John B Keane - The Celebrated Letters
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe- Faust
P G Wodehouse- The Inimitable Jeeves
Charles Dickens- The Pickwick Papers

What an ordeal it was to condense to just five.
Depending on my fickle mood, time of the day, whether or not I had imbibed in an amber restorative and should the wind be blowing from a different direction, I may well have picked 5 completely different books.
However my selection would materialise, I would always have one or two comic/picaresque titles in there to balance out the more serious offerings.

(in fact, fie, I just realised I never put a Roderick Random or Humphry Clinker in there.....to say nothing of The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius or the magnum opus Amis classic, Lucky Jim).

Also in no particular order:

Capitalism and Freedom - Milton Friedman
Knowledge and decisions - Thomas Sowell
King Lear - Shakespeare
Restaurant at the end of the Universe - Douglas Adams
Dodger - Terry Pratchett

It's really hard to pick just five.

Anything by Jules Verne
The Pickwick Papers- Charles Dickens
Ride The Wind- Lucia St. Clair Robson
The Sketchbook- Washington Irving
Tanakh

I do have one favorite short story though, The Man Who Could Work Miracles, by H.G. Wells.

And one favorite horror- The Terror, by Dan Simmons.

>31 EclecticIndulgence:

For Whom the Bell Tolls has long been my favourite also. None of the rest of Hemingway's oeuvre resonates for me in the same way.

I would choose For Whom the Bell Tolls, but add:

To the Lighthouse, Woolf
Ninety-Three and Notre-Dame de Paris, Hugo (I love each book too much to select between the two)
Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner
Gatsby, Fitzgerald

On an ideal list, I'd have space to add Tale of Two Cities, some Virgil, Aeschylus, and enough Shakespeare to constitute another list or two altogether.

You all are wonderful!

I've had to really think about this, I admit.

The usual caveats - in no particular order, may very well change tomorrow, etc. - are in force.

- Sandman series - Neil Gaiman (while this is a graphic novel series, the sheer breadth and depth of the story in covering mythologies and stories from classical antiquity to the present, with a healthy dose of sci-fi and fantasy thrown in, is just staggering)

- Calvin and Hobbes - Bill Watterson (this series essentially defined my childhood)

- Hamlet/King Lear - Shakespeare (I can never decide, to be honest!)

- Sonnets - Petrarch (one has not lived until they've read Petrarch!)

- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Edward Gibbon (this is pretty much what got me into history in the first place; if only I could write like Gibbon...!)

Fiction 5:

The Great Gatsby (F Scott Fitzgerald)
Mrs Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)
Go Tell it on the Mountain James Baldwin
War and Peace Leo Tolstoy
Short Stories: Raymond Carver

Non-Fiction 5:

Out of Africa (Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen)
Postillion Struck by Lightening Dirk Bogarde
Diaries: Virginia Woolf
Diaries: Vincent Van Gogh
Complete World Art (what do you mean I am cheating?)

Poetry 6 (he):

Rilke
Neruda
Byron
T S Eliot
Ted Hughes
Michael Longley

Poetry 6 (she):

Emily Dickinson
Elizabeth Battett Browning
Tess Gallagher
Mary Oliver
Maya Angelou
Anne Sexton

5 to be read before I die:

A Remembrance of Things Past (Marcel Proust)
Odyssey and the Iliad (Homer)
Dante
Chekhov
1 that hasn't been written yet!

Couldn't squeeze into the first 5:

Middlemarch (George Eliot)
A Month in the Country (J L Carr)
On the Black Hill (Bruce Chatwin)
Angle of Repose (Wallace Stegner)
Beloved (Toni Morrison)

Couldn't get into the second 5;

Seneca

I assume Willie Shake is a given?

>41 Caroline_McElwee:

I love Wallace Stegner, I really do.

>40 scholasticus:

I am in agreement with both 'Sandman' and 'Calvin and Hobbes'. I would add 'Moonshadow' as a comic book (does graphic novel sound better, or is that just a word to make it acceptable?) that I would classify as good literature, better than most published novels.

>38 Lantenac06: I love For Whom The Bell Tolls too, and hereby include it as the sixth of my five favourites, since others have taken such unfair advantage of innumeracy!

>41 Caroline_McElwee:

Wonderful titles and smart ideas!

It's really hard to choose just five. There are quite a number of poets I like so much.

1) Chekhov's short stories
2) Tolstoy's Anna Karenina
3) Flaubert's Madame Bovary
4) Dante's The Divine Comedy
5) Shakespeare's tragedies

For poetry, I'd like to add Elizabeth Bishop, G. M. Hopkins, W. H. Auden and Robert Frost.

> 41 Wonderful collection, Caroline! I would choose most of this too.

When I couldn't sleep last night, I played around with this question in my head. In order to prevent going completely insane and never falling asleep, I decided to cheat and impose some of my own rules. So I opted to choose only the five novels (my favourite genre in any case) I would want to reread if I know I am to die in two to three weeks. This leaves out all poetry, drama and non-fiction, as well as most literature before about the 18th century.

Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges (Of course not a novel, but in a way all of Borges forms one large text).
Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann
The Eye of the Storm or The Vivisector by Patrick White

It grieves me that there is no Flaubert, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov or Virginia Woolf in here - to say nothing about a host of more recent novelists - but it has to be five, and I would be happy dying knowing that I can read these five beloved works again.

If I could be allowed, as well, to list five Classical authors/collections I'd like to read as often before I die (though I'll need more than 2-3 weeks for this), I'd go with:

Homer
All the Greek Tragedies and Comedies (but if forced to choose, then Sophocles be it)
Virgil
Seneca
Tacitus

ETA: Since I am on a go, why not list my five favourite large-scale History works as well?

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
France and England in North America by Francis Parkman
The Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II or Civilization and Capitalism by Fernand Braudel
The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud by Peter Gay
History of French Passions by Theodore Zeldin

It was difficult to choose between Gay's Bourgeois Experience and his equally magnificent The Enlightenment: An Interpretation but as the former is a longer work, and this means more to read of one of my favourite historians, I'd go with this choice. Here too it was very hard to leave out some other much admired writers such as Macaulay, but I can only choose five titles (albeit close to about 30 individual volumes as each one of these works contains three to seven volumes).

Now, the hardest of them all - to choose only five post-medieval poets to read....

Milton
Heine
Dickinson
Rilke
Auden

What a task! But an intriguing exercise nonetheless.

I am delighted to see so many people selecting Tristram Shandy!

Naturally! Along with Don Quixote it is one of the most protean works of fiction ever written. And such fun! Now if only FS will notice this and reissue it, please!!

>47 groeng: Quite right Gerald, and Don Quixote sits happily alongside Tristram Shandy on my top five above too!

>47 groeng:
>48 Conte_Mosca:

There is some comfort in not feeling lonely and dejected...

>47 groeng:, >48 Conte_Mosca:, >50 drasvola:

You three have convinced me to add Tristram Shandy to my reading list for this summer; I've already read Don Quixote twice, so I'm sold!

> 51 - Our experiences match - Don Quixote 2, Tristam Shandy 0. Now I am convinced to narrow the gap, though my TBR list would constitute years of reading. I really need to stop checking in on these threads for a while.

>52 coynedj:

Just do what I do and say to hell with the TBR pile - if it gets read, it gets read; if it doesn't, it'll keep another day.

It also doesn't help that I have two TBR piles - one non-academic, one academic!

As my mother always told me, I just have to do everything the hard way.

Like almost everyone here, to choose five only is impossible. Many works of fiction have thrilled me at various stages of my life, but if I were to wait ten minutes and try again, another five books would readily come to mind.

While I've been wowed by 'great' literary classics as much as the next man, it isn't always the giants who've meant most to me at different times over the years. For example, I was greatly moved as a teenager by the three 'Cathedral' novels of Elizabeth Goudge, particularly The Dean's Watch. I even have to admit that Enid Blyton and Captain W. E. Johns held my attention for some years!

My 10.30pm list:
The Magic Walking Stick by John Buchan
Pigeon Post by Arthur Ransome
Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

My 10.40pm list:
A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys
All Hallows Eve by Charles Williams
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
The Shrimp and the Anemone by L. P. Hartley

Ask me again in ten minutes!

>56 EclecticIndulgence:

Oh, don't ask me what my other personalities think! My 10.30 and 10.40 personalities cannot agree what their favourite books are . . . and neither can I.

Tee heee!

To be totally honest we don't need five books, we need one book each, and no two of those single books would be exactly alike as each one would be the amalgamation of every good book (and the few bad) that each one of us has read, and it would be constantly evolving and transforming as we continue to read and re-read.

>59 Caroline_McElwee:

We agree . . . that's the only solution!

("Pssst! Who's that talking?"

"I don't know. I thought it was you."

"I never said anything! My favourite's still Fifty Shades of Grey."

"SSSShhhhhh! They'll hear you!"

"Who will?"

"Those others."

"What others? I thought we were alone. We are, aren't we?. . . Aren't we? . . . . Hello? . . . . Hellooooerrrr??? . . . I need to get out more.

>55 boldface:
My allegiance has wavered many times over the years, but I recently also came to the conclusion that Pigeon Post is the best of the Swallows and Amazons books. I haven't read The magic walking stick - if I had space for a Buchan on my list (and I ought to have), it would be Huntingtower.

My five of the moment (excluding many of those already listed above):
Homage To Catalonia - Orwell
The Member of the Wedding - McCullers
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Carver
Puck of Pook's Hill - Kipling
Under the Greenwood Tree - Hardy
but as with all of us, the list could go on..
and the Buchan on my list would be John MacNab

Now that I've allowed the question to swim around in my head for a little while each time I've visited here since it appeared, my first team seems to be settling down as

The Antiquary - Scott
Pericles and Aspasia - Landor
William Jordan, Junior - J.C.Snaith
Crutch - Seton Peacey
Sparkenbroke - Charles Morgan

Any of them, though, with I think the exception of Crutch, might surrender its place next time I reflect on the matter to any of the next five,

Living Alone - Stella Benson
The Pathway - Henry Williamson
A Glastonbury Romance - John Cowper Powys
The Dreams - Anna Sebastian
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings - Iain Sinclair.

And any of those five might... etc., etc., etc. Books are wondrous.

Each list's ordering is simply chronological.

I guess no one here likes Dan Brown :) laughing out loud hilariously

>64 ironjaw:

Fun story: With my 3rd year (high school) writing students, I do an exercise where I give them 8 paragraphs, 4 good and 4 bad and ask them to rank them without knowing who wrote them. Sometimes they do mix the good and the bad, but they never get Dan Brown wrong.

Amazing with those exercises. Even with the bad writing Dan Brown has been laughing all the way back from the bank

>67 ironjaw:

I'll never understand it. I do take pride in the fact that often, students come to me loving that stuff and leave me wondering what they ever saw in it (often with Tolstoy or Atwood or the like under shoulder).

>68 Jason461:

I assume it's because, however badly written, it's a good story that captures their imagination. I first read the tale as told in the '70s by Henry Lincoln and Michael Baigent in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, an apparently serious and factual book that claimed it was a true story, yet with all the ingredients of romance - secret messages in code hidden in pillars in far-flung Languedoc, hidden clues in the paintings of Poussin, strange organisations guarding dark religious secrets for over a thousand years. Even the BBC were convinced and featured the ongoing 'investigation' in several programmes in their highly-respected history strand, Chronicle. Some years later they featured the story again, showing how it had all been an elaborate hoax.

Now, I have this theory about the Voynich Manuscript . . .

Stretching a point as to what constitutes a book:-

Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time
Alasdair Gray - Lanark
Sterne - Tristram Shandy
Kafka - The Castle
Sartre - Roads to Freedom

2nd Set

Chaucer - Canterbury Tales
Shelby Foote - Civil War
Gibbon - Decline & Fall
Joyce - Dubliners
Grossman - Life and Fate

Would love to see a Folio edition of Roads to Freedom or even an Everyman's Library Edition, Ditto a Folio Lanark

Too many others to count, like stars in the sky

As to the Da Vinci Code, I enjoyed reading that so much I didn't realise it was bad until everyone told me so. Then I felt terribly ashamed, but still picked up a copy of the Illustrated Da Vinci Code at my local Goodwill.

>70 Geedge:
That's a very interesting list,and pretty unusual too!
A freak of Scottish literature once suggested Lanark to me.She says it's a masterpiece.
As for Kafka,I prefer The Trial,even if many people seem to like The Castle better!
And the fact that you've included Sartre's book in your favourites makes me want to read him even more.
And I should gather some courage and start reading Proust some day....

>72 Evets_Kainzow:

Lanark is a masterpiece. With Kafka I can never decide whether The Castle/The Trial/Amerika is my favourite, I love them all. I and probably many other Teenagers in the sixties (or Fifties) went through my Existentialist period, Sartre/Camus/Kafka, and I still read them today now that I am 60.

Proust I first read 30 years ago and twice since.

You have a treat waiting for you if you choose to read him.

Arggg. Such a difficult question!

I'm 32 (and a half) and I've been reading assiduously since I was 12 or 13. I'm over 120 books read so far this year. There are so many books that I have not re-read in so long. Obviously my likes have changed over time. Even so I don't think I can drop down to only 5 top books.

My five favorite Folio books first:
Between Silk and Cyanide
The Chronicles of Narnia
The Monks of War
The Lantern Bearers
An Eyewitness to the Crusades

(I've only read 18 Folio Society books. I have 7 more in my TBR stack).

Otherwise I have to break things down by genre, in no particular order:

FANTASY
The Lord of the Rings
The Chronicles of Narnia
Pilgrim's Progress
Night Angel (trilogy)
Faith of the Fallen

CLASSICS
The Count of Monte Cristo
Lost Horizon
Ben-Hur
A Connecticut Yankee in King Aurthur's Court
A Tale of Two Cities

NEWSPAPER STRIPS
Peanuts
Calvin and Hobbes
Prince Valiant
Herman

SCI-FI
Dune
Journey to the Center of the Earth
Fahrenheit 451
Ender's Shadow
Foundation (trilogy)

More to follow....

>39 sdawson:

So nice to see someone mention Arthur Ransome and a 'Swallows & Amazon" book!

Okay, I'll play:

FICTION
1. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
2. Pride and Prejudice
3. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
4. Short Stories - Kipling
5. Catch-22

NON-FICTION
1. Tao Te Ching (Ray Grigg "interpretation")
2. A Moveable Feast
3. Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
4. Walden
5. Essays - Emerson

>76 vanb:
You've made me want to buy Catch 22,Alice in Wonderland and Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy even more now!
It's great that you listed Lewis Carroll's book among your favourites!

Strictly confined to folio books that I own, and strictly (pace everyone else ) one set of five:

The Luttrell Psalter
the Fitzwilliam Book of Hours
Nineveh & Babylon
The Tomb of tutankhamun
Borges, Labyrinths

- so more a list of top five folios rather than all-time personal favorite books.

>77 Evets_Kainzow:

(OT) Oh, I love Alice, and never tire of re-reading it. A prized possession is my 1932 LEC edition of AAIW signed by her. And I was thrilled and honored to correspond not too long ago with Martin Gardner, author of "The Annotated Alice." I had discovered an inside joke of Carroll's in TTLG that has so far escaped all editions of Gardner's book, so I sent him documentation on it. I received a wonderful note from him promising to include it in the next edition. Unfortunately he passed away shortly after that.

>79 vanb:
So here's some good news for you and all other fans of Lewis Carroll's work.
The Folio Society has indicated on its Facebook page that a new limited edition of Alice in Wonderland with illustrations by Charles Van Sandwyk will be published next year! :)

I think it'll be in late 2015,as the Folio Society said: ''not for a good few months, but it's definitely happening!''

I wanted to create a thread about this,but I'm feeling too sleepy.I have just watched Germany thrash Brazil,and it's already 2:00 A.M here.

In no particular order.

1. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
2. Emma - Jane Austen
3. East of Eden - John Steinbeck
4. The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
5. To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

> 79

How wonderful! Please send your note to the journal "Notes & Queries" -- I am sure many other people would be interested in what you have discovered: http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/notesj/about.html

FICTION

1) The Road by McCarthy
2) The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky
3) Lord of the Rings by Tolkien
4) I Am Legend by Matheson
5) Fahrenheit 451 by Bradbury

I'm sure there are several books I love that could earn a spot on the list but this is just off the top of my head.

> 7

I needed that hearty laugh, thank you.