5 Best Novels Ever?

In a sort of follow-on to the public confession thread, I propose that people list their five favorite novels. I guess I am hoping that I will be pushed to read some great books that I haven't.

So, my list, in chronological order(all are of course available in FS editions):

Cervantes - Don Quixote
Fielding - Tom Jones
Melville - Moby Dick
Joyce - Ulysses
Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury

Going to be hard but the first 3 are definite for me, the bottom 2 could change depending on my mood as there's a few others that are equally as awesome.
Children of Hurin
Enders Game
The Alchemist
Dune
Aeneid

Edit:
Notable Mentions
Lord of the Flies
A Game of Thrones
The Golden Ass
Stardust
Neverwhere

Moby-Dick
War and Peace
In Parenthesis (if it counts)
Anna Karenina
Jane Eyre

In no specific order - except for Anna Karenina and Life... then the rest is definitely based on time, place and mood:

Life: A User's Manual
Anna Karenina
Jane Eyre
Left Hand of Darkness
All Quiet on the Western Front

Here are my five:

Emma
Wuthering Heights
Middlemarch
Bleak House
Madame Bovary
Don Quixote
Anna Karenina
The Last Chronicles of Barchester
The Moonstone
Dead Souls
Far From The Madding Crowd
Nostromo
Neuromancer (to drag me out of the nineteenth century)

And of course The Charterhouse of Parma (to drag me back!).

I know. I can't count.

Today the list is:

Wuthering Heights (undisputed no. 1)
Toilers of the Sea / Notre Dame de Paris (love them both)
Frankenstein
The Castle - Kafka
Lord of the Rings

On another day I may have selected from: A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House, The Trial, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Les Miserables, Crime and Punishment

FWIW, my five are (in no particular order):

1. Ulysses by James Joyce
2. The Brothers Karamazov by F. Dostoevsky
3. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
4. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
5. Don Quixote by M. Cervantes de Saavedra

Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys

Great question. Here are my top 10.

1. Lord of The Rings & The Hobbit (Tolkien)
2. Starmaker (Stapledon)
3. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
4. Les Miserables (Hugo)
5. Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas)
6. Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky)
7. Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky)
8. Tau Zero (Anderson)
9. Toilers of the Sea (Hugo)
10. Atlas Shrugged (Rand)

>1 garyjbp:
I'll try a top 10,because a top 5 is just impossible:

1.One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
2.Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
3.Labyrinths (Jorge Luis Borges)
4.God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy)
5.Inheritance of Loss (Kiran Desai)
6.Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
7.To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
8.Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)
9.Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
10.Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)

Honourable mentions: The Great Gatsby (I'd have added it if there was a 11th spot),Sense of an Ending,Disgrace,The Picture of Dorian Gray,Alice Munro's stories,and Possession.

I've yet to read books like Breakfast at Tiffany's,Master and Margarita,Brothers Karamazov or Midnight's Children,so I'm sure the list is bound to change in the future.

I should really have Tristram Shandy on my list, and it is certainly in my top five books. But somehow I fail to think of it as a "novel" (even though of course it is), but rather a biographical treatise on metaphysics and philosophy!

Sticking to novels I have in Folio editions:

Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
The Deptford Trilogy (Robertson Davies)
The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)

Oh, dear. Twenty years' acquaintance seems almost essential for such a list (given that I've been around for rather longer than twenty years). In chronological order only, with of course no pretensions to their being "greatest" - just the most consistently rewarding books to me -

The Antiquary (Sir Walter Scott)
Marius the Epicurean (Walter Pater)
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Rainer Maria Rilke)
Crutch (Seton Peacey)
Sparkenbroke (Charles Morgan).

Toughest exclusions Moby-Dick, William Jordan Junior (J.C.Snaith), Glastonbury Romance, The Voyage (Morgan again), White Chappell Scarlet Tracings (Iain Sinclair). Clearly I'd be in serious trouble were I to confine myself to Folio publications.

To add my list of five for today, without duplicating titles already mentioned above, and with the first three available in FS editions:
Under the Greenwood Tree
Puck of Pook's Hill
A Room with a View
Tales of the City
The Rings of Saturn

- The Count of Monte Cristo
- Epitaph for a Spy
- The Secret Garden
- Lord of the Rings & Hobbit
- Pride and Prejudice
- Emma
- Percy Jackson
- Mapp & Lucia

- The Lord of the Rings
- The Hobbit
- Kidnapped
- War and Peace
- Les Miserables

(all subject to change)

Les Liaisons Dangereuses
The Betrothed
David Copperfield
The Good Soldier
The Sign of Four

No order within these, except alphabetical
/
Aeneid (Virgil)*

The Confidence Man:
his Masquerade (Melville)

Odyssey (Homer)*

Ulysses (Joyce)

War and Peace (Tolstoy)

*Limiting it to Western Literature, and assuming epics/long poems are allowed; see
Aeneid(2), above

honorable mentions (and with a protest about being
limited to 5!):
/
Maggie (Crane)

Vanity Fair (Thackeray) which I almost
put in the 1st five but then changed it
to Ulysses

Visi / The Possessed (Dostoevsky)

Fun exercise.
Moby-Dick
Blood Meridian
Heart of Darkness
Brothers Karamazov
Midnight's Children

Five more:
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Desolation Angels
Grapes of Wrath
Gilead
V

It comes and goes of course but, money where your mouth is...
Sword of Honour (a bit of a cheat as it's a trilogy) by Evelyn Waugh
Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Armadale by Wilkie Collins
Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Gosh, an impossible exercise, I'd give a different answer every day according to the vagaries of mood and memory. Today's answer, in no particular order:

Portrait of a Lady (H. James)
The Awakening (K. Chopin)
Lord Jim (J. Conrad)
Watership Down (R. Adams)
The Kite Runner (K. Hosseini)

(edited to add that I read this thread more as listing subjective 'favourites' than making the weighty choice as to what novels are objectively 'best')

My #2

Homer - Iliad
Homer - Odyssey
Virgil - Aeneid
Samuel Richardson - Clarissa
Xavier Herbert - Poor Fellow my Country

Currently favoured:

Three Men in a Boat (Jerome)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick)
Lucky Jim (Amis)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)
Far from the Madding Crowd (Hardy)

The list may be entirely different tomorrow.

1. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
2. 2666 by Roberto Bolano
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
5. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

Great thread...my top 5 would be:

1. The Green Mile by Stephen King
2. Don Quixote by Cervantes
3. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
4. Ulysses by James Joyce
5. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

OK - not the best but the favourites for today (and only one for each author):

Middlemarch
Right Ho, Jeeves
Pride and Prejudice (just ahead of Emma)
The Great Gatsby
The Magician's Nephew

5 is like squeezing the world in a bottle.

The brothers Karamazov.
Rendevous with Rama
Weaveworld. The solution to academic Steinbeck, Boring and depressing.
David Copperfied Or any Dickens for that matter.
Midnight Children

I put together a list of my 100 favorite books here: http://www.jasonlinden.com/100-favorite-books/

My top 5 (for now):

Anna Karenina
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Moby-Dick
Winesburg, Ohio
The Children's Book

As is common with selections like this, the first 3 are easy, but the marginal selections are far harder. But for today:

1. A Month in the Country - JL Carr
2. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
3. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
4. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
5. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

Another 5 (to give a top 10) on the shortlist for positions 4 and 5:

To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
The Aubrey-Maturin sequence - Patrick O'Brian
Middlemarch - George Eliot
A Sensible Boy - Vikram Seth
The Sea Road - Margaret Elphinstone

But even these could be subject to some fierce competition!

30

I thought the Woolf classic was an exceptional read. Your Hardy choice is truly magnificent also.

1. Master and Margarita
2. The Great Gatsby
3. Brideshead Revisited
4. The Catcher in the Rye
5. The Goldfinch (I know it's very new, but I also know that this novel and I, we're meant to be)

I don't believe those are inarguably the 'best' novels, but they are my favorite ones that I would reread infinitely. I do quite have a type, too :)

The runners up would be Anna Karenina, The Remains of the Day, The Little Prince, and so many more.

What a great idea. Definitely nice to get some fresh recommendations for new books to seek out. Many thanks!

1) The Great Gatsby
2) To the Lighthouse
3) Notre Dame de Paris/Les Miserables/Ninety-Three (sorry, can't choose between Hugo's oeuvre, but all his mature works deserve a place as far as I am concerned)
4) The Fountainhead

The first four books are reasonably constant in my mind, albeit in an order that is constantly shifting. The top two I have found recurrently enriching due to the sheer elegance and beauty of their prose and the protean themes and feelings they evoke; the works of Hugo and Rand I marvel at for the scale of the worlds they create, their imagination and vibrant sense of the universe.

I will have to cheat with my final choice and say it is constantly vacillating; placeholders include at various times The Sound and the Fury, Absalom! Absalom!, Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Brideshead Revisited, Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, Mrs. Dalloway, and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Summer Lightning
The luck of the Bodkins
The code of the Woosters
Ice in the bedroom
Hot Water

...no, wait a minute. I've got to five and I haven't even started on Stendhal and Thomas Mann yet! Five isn't enough.

Too hard to be definitive, but here are 5 for now:

Blood Meridian
Moby Dick
Lord of the Flies
Huckleberry Finn
A Farewell to Arms

Might throw some light:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393083020?ref_=cm_sw_r_awd_yxd8vb4RCQ9SD

Easy to be definitive:

Mansfield Park
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
Pride and Prejudice
Emma

>37 Andrew-Constantine:

What do you have against Sense and Sensibility!!!

>37 Andrew-Constantine: Yes, why no Sense and Sensibility? Are you some kind of anti-Janeite? ;-)

S&S would have been the sixth ... although I do find its relentless critique of sensibility a little trying. S&S was of course JA's first full length novel and was probably first written in an epistolary form and that structure might have limited her revision of it.

As we all know Jane Austen's writing just got better and better and with the incomplete Sanditon she was heading at the time of her early death in 1817 to making a further development in the novel.

Deleted

So many books, so many parts of your life. Almost impossible, but including childhood, here goes :

The Lord of the Rings ; Tolkien
Titus Groan ; Peake
Taran Wanderer ; Alexander
Engleby ; Faulks
Cocaine Nights ; Ballard

>42 tarangurgi: Huzzah for Faulks!

The Cruel Sea I will always cherish.

I have a predictable predilection
for the usual Russkie suspects...

What ho! >34 thorold: love this list ... and there are some I have not read, so will have to push up my TBR pile.
Although read four years ago, the early Piccadilly Jim remains one of my favourites, together with the Psmith and Blandings (especially Uncle Fred in the Springtime).
The man can do no wrong.

Here's my list. Same as in the other thread about making confessions - I still find these works a challenge to read but I wouldn't have it any other way and they are certainly my top 5 as of today.

1. Dante's Commedia
2. Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel
3. Chrétien de Troyes (please don't make me choose between Yvain, the Knight of the Lion and Perceval, Michael! For the uninitiated, Yvain has many structures similar to the modern novel, and Perceval kickstarted the whole Grail story craze in these days - see #4 below.)
4. Eschenbach's Parzival, one of the best-known continuations of Troyes (and also a semi-continuation of sorts of The Romance of the Rose - I can just hear Christine de Pizan screaming* right now....)
5. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales simply because the man wrote all the national fart jokes of England. If you haven't yet read this work, you have nooooooo idea what you're missing, seriously. ;)

BONUS:
6. Montaigne's Essais

*The Romance of the Rose is misogynistic as hell, to put it politely. Christine de Pizan went onto a quasi-feminist rampage about this and, fortunately, we have her writings on the subject. They make for some pretty fascinating reading, given that this is 15th c. France we're talking about. No, this is not Eco's The NAME of the Rose.

>45 scholasticus: this is a most unusual list. Are you a professor? I am reading Dante's Comedy with Dore illustrations, about a Canto or two a day; I am enjoying it but thankful for the Internet so that I can determine who the cast of characters are (my copy is not annotated). Also recently picked up a beautiful Rabelais with Dore illustrations (Franklin GBWW). So looking forward to that.

Disclaimer: None are Folio

American -- Lonesome Dove
British -- Vanity Fair
French -- A Very Long Engagement
Russian -- War and Peace
Australazea -- The Luminaries

Runner Up, German -- Death in Venice

>47 Limelite: Surely you don't mean that the FS has not published any of these books? There's a FS edition of Vanity Fair, War and Peace, and Death in Venice was included in a short story collection in 1998. I'd love to see them put out an edition of Lonesome Dove.

So Best or Favorite? Because the title calls for best, the text for favorite. And I will go for favorite :)

That answer changes for me almost daily... depends on my mood but let's try.

Foundation by Isaac Asimov - sorry but the novel that made me read a whole genre cannot not be here.
Talev's tetralogy about Prespa (not sure if they were ever translated into English)
Dune
Bleak House - Dickens
Far from the Madding Crowd - Hardy

Runner ups: The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay (see the first note), Roadside Picnic, Crime and Punishment (ask me in 10 minutes, it may be another from the Russians), Dictionary of the Khazars, The Ministry of Pain.

Burgess Earthly powers. Has FS ever published it?

>50 David_E: and others
If you need to find out if the FS has published a book, go to the Folio Society Devotees Group Website wiki at:-
http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/Groups:Folio_Society_Devotees
and scroll down to the Index of Folio Books, where very book published by the FS up to 2012 (and some later in the Ardis list), is listed in several different catalogues.

>51 wcarter:. There are no references that I can find in either list to Burgess (even though FS published A Clockwork Orange)

>52 David_E:

Do remember that the list Warwick provided only goes up to 2012, and I know that the Burgess that got published (just Clockwork Orange, I believe) was published recently. The list does need updating, though we have yet to have a volunteer! :)

Another option would be to contact FS and ask if they have any plans to publish any further Burgess.

They should publish a dos-a-dos of A Clockwork Orange and Trainspotting. :-P

1. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
2. Gaudy Night (Sayers)
3. Little Dorrit (Dickens)
4. The House of Mirth (Wharton)
5. Great Expectations (Dickens)

What can I say, I'm a Dickens freak. :-)

So many great books to chose from but for my absolute favourites I keep returning to a few long-time friends.
1. Brothers Lionhearth, Astrid Lindgren. Read it for the first time in a highly impressionable age and it hasn't loosened its grip yet. If anyone reads it let me know, I long to discuss it.
2. Pride and prejudice, Jane Austen. Always a delight to reread.
3. Moomin-books, Tove Jansson. Great fun!

(Long-time lurker, first post, seemed a very appropriate subject)

>48 kdweber:

Should have said I own none of these in Folio Society editions. Sorry for the confusion.

>56 alvaret:
I loved The Brothers Lionheart when I read it years ago. I actually just bought it to re-read but haven't gotten to it yet. I did write about two other Astrid Lindgren books here though:

http://shinynewbooks.co.uk/reprints-issue-6/seacrow-island-and-mio-my-son-by-ast...

She is a wonderful, and I think, somewhat overlooked author (in English translation anyway).

This is so hard! So I am going to list my top 5 favourite novels that have had the most influence on me. And that I need in my life always!

1. Tess of the D'Urbervilles
2. Jane Eyre
3. Old Curiosity Shop
4. Lark Rise to Candleford
5. The Country Child
6. Great Expectations
7. Northanger Abbey
8. Middlemarch
9. Wuthering Heights
10. Little Women
11. Age of Innocence
12. Howards End
13. A Christmas Carol
14. Mill on the Floss
15. Dandelion Wine
16....

Wait. Did someone say 5? lol Impossible! I love them all too much and am big on rereading!

Death Comes for the Archbishop (Cather)
Pride and Prejudice (Austen)
20,000 Leagues Under the Seas (Verne)
Jane Eyre (Bronte)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Marquez)
The Hobbit (Tolkien)

>60 Lady19thC:
From your favourite book selection, I no longer wonder why you chose your FSD name!

Hehehe....Makes a lot of sense now, doesn't it? :)

Well there are a few gentleman callers including one from another century. :¬D

>59withawhy99
Thank you for linking your reviews, I really enjoyed them!

Several of Astrid Lindgren's books should belong in the children literature canon and are a delight to revisit as an adult but I believe that Brothers Lionheart is something out of the ordinary. I am especially fascinated with the way she simultaneously tells one story for the child and another for the adult reader without ever speaking down to the child. And of course of the choice of topic, which I don't want to spoil for anyone who has yet to read it. Obviously it was quite controversial when it was published.

And with that I have gone OT already in my second post in this group. My apologies.

The tale of Genji
Don Quixote
In search of lost time
Brothers Karamazov
The trial

But those are all well known.

Five not-so-well-known I love just as much:

Jakob von Gunten by Robert Walser
The ice palace by Tarjei Vesaas
The days of abandonment by Elena Ferrante
Happy Moscow by Andrey Platonov
Katinka by Herman Bang

Dante - Divine Comedy
Dostoyevsky - Brothers Karamazov
Cervantes - Don Quixote
Melville - Moby Dick
James Joyce - Ulysses

>66 Cliff-Rhu-Rhubarb:

I like to give Powys a mention every now and again. I could have listed any one of his major novels, Wolf Solent included. The last one I read was Weymouth Sands, another great contender. I've yet to tackle the infamous Porius, though, despite the fact that the two most recent editions are staring at me from the shelf!

My 5 favorites:

Confessions - Saint Augustine
The Day of the Jackal - Frederick Forsyth
The Once & Future King - TH White
Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo
Moby Dick - Herman Melville

>71 lechacal:

Great choice, but to what extent can Confessions be described as a novel? Discuss!

>69 d-b::

Great minds think alike :-)

See my Top Five in post no. 7.

Oh nice! If I had one more space I would have added War and Peace too.

Top Five? Impossible. Twenty-Five, perhaps (in no particular order):

1 The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
2 The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders
3 A Christmas Carol
4 A Tale of Two Cities
5 David Copperfield
6 Crime and Punishment
7 The Hound of the Baskervilles
8 The Sign of Four
9 The Count of Monte Cristo
10 The Three Musketeers
11 The Prisoner of Zenda
12 Moby-Dick
13 Nineteen Eighty-Four
14 Captain Blood
15 Ivanhoe
16 The Talisman
17 Treasure Island
18 Gulliver's Travels
19 War and Peace
20 The War of the Worlds
21 Beau Geste
22 The Martian Chronicles
23 Jane Eyre
24 The Woman In White
25 I, Claudius

Oh, I omitted The Iliad, The Odyssey, Canterbury Tales, all of Shakespeare, etcetera, on the grounds that they are not novels.

>75 Betelgeuse:

Interesting to see Beau Geste there. When I first devoured it at the age of eleven, it was the most exciting book I had ever read. It still ranks high on that scale for me now.

>77 boldface: Yes, at the age of 51 I am still very much a kid at heart! Beau Geste reminded me a lot of The Moonstone but I thought BG was a better adventure story. In a similar vein I might add Falkner's Moonfleet -- a Y/A adventure evocative of Robert Louis Stevenson.

>78 Betelgeuse:

I agree. The Moonstone is more of a puzzle, though it has adventurous moments. I think The Woman in White is more "exciting". As for Wren, a long time later (but still decades ago) I also read the two sequels to Beau Geste: Beau Sabreur and Beau Ideal. I wasn't so impressed by these at the time, but I must re-read all three for a reassessment.

After looking good and hard at my bookshelves, I think these would be my top five*:

Bulgakov - Master and Margarita
Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment
Cain - The Postman Always Rings Twice (surprised not the see any mentions of it here!)
Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Golding - Lord of the Flies
Gibson - Neuromancer (The FS may feel free to do this one at first opportunity.)

*) Adjusted for inflation.

Fun, albeit impossible task. Here's a few tries:

5 "big beasts"
Ulysses
Moby Dick
Crime & Punishment
2666
Underworld

5 svelte slices of perfection
Madame Bovary
Nostromo
The Custom of the Country
The Good Soldier
The Leopard

5 from Ireland
The Third Policeman
Amongst Women
Langrishe, Go Down
The Book of Evidence
Hawthorn & Child

5 from the US century
Slaughterhouse 5
Revolutionary Road
Play It As It Lays
The Confederacy of Dunces
Libra

5 modern classics
Austerlitz
Lightning Rods
Lazarus is Dead
In A Strange Room
Summertime

5 crime classics
The Long Goodbye
The Maltese Falcon
Double Indemnity
Three to Kill
LA Confidential

5 best of British
A Handful of Dust
Hangover Square
The Comedians
The Siege of Krishnapur
Money

etc!

My top 5 favorite novels right now (soooo tough to pick just 5):

The White Guard. My number 1. Whenever I read it I feel complete immersion into the story, with a sense of practically being there and witnessing all the events as they unfold. And the prose is incredible. What Bulgakov does with words is pure magic. One of those works that is bound to lose some of its greatness in translation.

All Quiet on the Western Front. Great anti-war novel. Should be mandatory reading in schools of aggressive nations like the US, UK, and Russia.

Treasure Island. The mother of all adventure books. Shiver me timbers!

Burmese Days. Incredible how relevant it still is in certain ways. I read about 1920s Burma and I often see modern Thailand. Many characters of both the whites and the locals are very much in line with the modern days if you scratch the surface a bit.

Nanny from Moscow by Ivan Shmelev. A really moving novel about a family taken through a cataclysm of the collapse of the Russian Empire. Never translated into English as far as I know.

Thankful for this wonderful forum. A couple of people rated Wilkie Collins "Woman in White" very high. This intrigued me...I had a leather copy in my library....so I finally read it after 25 years!

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White is certainly the best mystery romance I ever read. One of those rare books I could not put down. It is large and sweeping, and epic with the exception that the cast is only about a dozen key people. The characters are skillfully drawn that they all came alive before my eyes; lovely passages of impeccable beauty. Absolutely haunting scenes, and at times I found myself horrified by what I was reading. The story is very complicated, presented in a unique fashion....much like you would see in a court deposition. The pleasant ending bought a tear to my eye.

So this is now in my top 15!...and I could argue it is in my top 10.

>85 HugoDumas:

Glad you enjoyed it! It's certainly one of my favourites.

Dune, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Pride and Prejudice, One Hundred Years of Solitude, (reluctantly) War and Peace,
Voices from Chernobyl (since the Nobel committee knows best).

Also, since most of my favorite books don't qualify as "novels",
honorable mention to those anti-novelists Borges and Kipling:

Ficciones, Plain Tales From the Hills.

Most Evil Novel of the last 4 decades:

1)Ender's Game, i.e. genocide is ok as long as you feel bad about it.

In no particular order and, yes, definitely more than five (well, I will have been alive at least twice as long as some devotees, so surely I deserve twice as many books?):

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Weaveworld by Clive Barker
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
The House on the Strand by Daphne du Maurier
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Possession by A S Byatt
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg

In no particular order:

The Lord of the Rings
Dune
The Midwich Cuckoos
The Chrysalids
Animal Farm

>89 Studedoo:

As an aside, there was a reference to Animal Farm in a book I just read on Berlin - the author, Torgrim Eggen, observed that 'If you have difficulty determining whether a country you are visiting is a dictatorship or not, try asking for a copy of Animal Farm.'

True, true. It would surprise me if any dictatorship worthy of the name tolerated Animal Farm.

>90 odderi:

Sadly, I wouldn't be surprised to see Animal Farm banned right across the "free world" if things continue on the path they have been on for the last decade and a half!

For me:

Life A User's Manual (like Alendor; hello Alendor!)
The Day of the Jackal
The Monk
Dracula
Madame Bovary

Actually, I'm sure of the first title, pretty sure of the second. Not certain of the pecking order of the 3 others.

Does anyone have the energy to go through this thread and tabulate how often various books were mentioned? I'd generally trust that kind of crowdsourcing.

Don Quixote, by Cervantes
The Magic Mountain, by Mann
The Black Obelisk, by Remarque
Cyrano de Bergerac, by Rostand
The Leopard, by Lampedusa
The Name of the Rose, by Eco
Cousin Bazilio, by Queiros
Zeno's Conscience, by Svevo

>85 HugoDumas: If you get a chance to read more Wilkie Collins do try Arnadale. I think this is his finest work.

> 94

Interesting list many of which are household names, but alas only the first Don Quixote have I read, and that in this case, I remain firmly stuck at the half way point.

> 81

Ian, I could not for the life of me, finish Underworld stuck like Don Quixote at the midway point.

On the big book types, some of my favourites....

Poor Fellow my Country Herbert
War and Peace Tolstoy
Lord of the Rings Tolkien
Clarissa Richardson
Ulysses Joyce
The Life of Samuel Johnson Boswell

>93 Jason461:

There's an enormous spread in the choices. A not too scientific examination would indicate that the top five (with the number of times mentioned) are:

Moby Dick (13)
War and Peace (12)
Don Quixote (9)
Ulysses (9)
Anna Karenina (8)

>98 drasvola: Funnily enough, I bet that is very similar to the "top 5" in the other thread on "least favourite" novel!

>99 Conte_Mosca:

I wouldn't be surprised at all, Michael!

I'm a bit surprised though that One Hundred Years of Solitude has not been cited more. :o

>101 Kainzow:

4 times

>102 drasvola:
Just 4 times.
I expected more! :p

>100 drasvola: To save anyone the trouble if returning to what sadly turned from an interesting to an unpleasant thread to find out, on a dull train journey I have just taken a look and totted the numbers up. Here is your Top 5 count:

Moby Dick (13)
War and Peace (12)
Don Quixote (9)
Ulysses (9)
Anna Karenina (8)

And here are the Top 5 "books we are expected to like but don't" from that thread:

1. Heart of Darkness (skewed a little because many came in on the for and against debate that would not otherwise have done)
2. Moby Dick
3. Anna Karenina
4. Ulysses
5. Don Quixote

And War and Peace did feature, but only once that I could see. And fairness Ulysses and Don Quixote were joint with a few other titles too!

Least favourite authors (or perhaps ore accurately, authors we are expected to like but don't), if you counted multiple titles and a few "anything by" posts, were Steinbeck (by quite some way), followed at a considerable distance by Hemingway, Twain and Faulkner.

>104 Conte_Mosca:

Many thanks. As it turned out, Heart of Darkness got one mention only in the '5 Best Novels Ever' thread.

>98 drasvola: >104 Conte_Mosca:
Thank you both for these interesting statistics. You both have far too much time on your hands!
It seems great books are a love it or hate it affair.

>95 Constantinopolitan: thank you. I am reading Moonstone now. My is this guy a fine mystery novelist.

Five of my favorite novels, three in Folio editions and two I have hopes for:

-War and Peace (read it again a few months ago, this time in the Society’s Pevear-Volokhonsky translation. Book Four alone—Natasha in full bloom—elevates W&P to my highest circle.)
-Never Let Me Go
-Death Comes for the Archbishop
-Lonesome Dove
-Life and Fate

108

I have been meaning to reread War and Peace ever since I had completed it 07'. I was particularly impressed by it and several parts I recall with great pathos. It is one of many books that I really will just have to just bite the bullet and go back to. Les Miserables, War and Peace, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Aeneid, Iliad, Odyssey are all due another reading.

>110 Cliff-Rhu-Rhubarb: I suppose I used Never Let Me Go as a placeholder for all the Ishiguro novels I love. In particular, I admire both his prose and his control over the pace of revelation. Never Let Me Go and The Remains Of The Day (both Folio editions) are superb examples of his art. I have read all of his novels, though, and highly recommend every one--even The Buried Giant, which doesn't resemble any other novel by anyone and which didn't win me over until near the end. I think Ishiguro is my favorite living writer, although that sort of thing changes.
The Folio Society seems to have paid more attention to living novelists in recent years (just an impression--I haven't done any counting), and I definitely support that.

>111 MarkAJohn:

Totally agree about Folio and living authors. I was thinking today I'd love to see them do some Colum McCann.

Disagree about The Buried Giant (mildly). It's my favorite work of his and maybe the best book I've read this year.

>112 Jason461: I didn't say I didn't love it. It just took me a while to get there. The fog that the characters are in at the beginning envelopes the reader as well. The ending is definitely worth the journey, though.

Well, I'm going to be the naysayer

I found "The Buried Giant" to be a bit of a slog. After so many years since his last book I was really looking forward to it. Unfortuantely it didn't make a connection.

>I'm not sure how Ishiguro writes, but a great many writers don't know what's coming next until they write it.

How I feel today. . .

Anna Karenina
Lonesome Dove
Crossing to Safety
Love in the Time of Cholera
Ship of Fools

I know there is talk regarding non-fiction going on at the moment, but I think it would be neat to have a "five best non-fiction books ever" thread soon.

This month's favourite five:

The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins)
Of Human Bondage (W Somerset Maugham)
L'Etranger (Albert Camus)
Go Tell It from the Mountain (James Baldwin)
Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow (Peter Høeg)

Off the top of my head (and by no means my definitive choices):

1. Wilkie Collins' "The Woman in White"
2. Somerset Maugham's "The Moon and Six Pence"
3. Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day"
4. Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird"
5. David Eddings' Belgariad and Mallorean series (i know they're derivative but...)

Only five?

Gee...

1. Watership Down, always and forever.
2. The Handmaid's Tale
3. LOTR trilogy, and I'm counting it as one, nyaah!
4. Salt: A World History
5. The Uncommon Reader

The first three were easy, but after that, there are just too many I love as equally as #s 4 and 5.

I will visit my post a year from it and see if it changes much. This actually I might want to record and look back over the years and see how my views differ which is a good reflection on what my interest are at that time.

Thereʻs a Melville on my list, but it isnʻt
Moby Dick! Still, I hate to leave MB off
the list.
_______ The 5 (Tentatively):
War and Peace

The Confidence Man: his Masquerade

Les Miserables

Don Quijote

Vanity Fair

Proust
Master and Margarita
The Sheltering Sky
War and Peace
Anna Karenina

if I could have a sixth it would The Invention of Morel
and a seventh would be Absalom Absalom
and - eight - for entertainment and in memoriam The Name of the Rose

>13 terebinth:

Interesting to see that you have The Antiquary in your five. I would be grateful if you might say why it made it there and in relation to the other Scott novels, which I assume you have read to a greater or less degree, what was it about The Antiquary that impressed you above the others.

Since I've read so little fiction, I'm ill qualified at best, but I'll add:

1. The Hobbit
2. War and Peace
3. In a Glass Darkly
4. Huck Finn
5. Dracula

Have not seen this thread before. Great idea first poster!

1. Tai Pan - Always my favorite book. Never been lower then #1 on my list. Dirk Struan is still my hero.

2. Dune - Nuff Said

3. The Black Company, Chronicles of the Black Company. - I've loved this book and this series since reading it first when I was 14. Not great literature but this is one of the books and series that made me love books.

4. The Aeneid - Robert Fagles translation - A genius translation of a genius work. It carries you along so effortlessly and you can find the genesis of so much literature in it.

5. The Leopard - This is a new addition and to be perfectly honest I haven't finished it yet. I'm taking it slowly(around ten pages a night) trying to savor this one. I am in love with it and would not be surprised to find it further up the list at some point.

Honorable Mentions:

Hornblower Series - Pushed out by The Leopard.
Don Quixote
Dragonlance Chronicles - Another childhood love.
Cryptonomicon
Bonhoeffer- Eric Metaxes - The best biography I've ever read. Brilliant work.

>128 Sorion:

Yes it is a good thread and as I was resurrecting it today from the archives, although not my primary intention, I did think nonetheless what some years since the contributors first shared their favourites, if indeed their views have changed at all.

1. Moby-Dick
2. Huckleberry Finn
3. Don Quixote
4. The Sound and the Fury
5. Gulliver's Travels

My caveat is the same as that of some others who have here played this game: I hold dramatic works written for the stage to be different beasts—and I'm discounting long poems, too. If I compiled a list of my five dramatic favorites, you'd find King Lear (small surprise) and a bit of Beckett listed at the top. If I crafted a list of my five poetic favorites, The Divine Comedy and The Odyssey would certainly make the grade. And I'll add that I applaud Sorion's strong recommendation of Robert Fagles' translation of The Aeneid. It's absolutely wonderful!

Always difficult to make a list, and mine may be a bit controversial seeing other entries. As far as I'm concerned (and not counting a huge TBR pile including many classics mentioned here already), in order of preference:

1. Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials (and also honorable mention for The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ)
2. Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451
3. Isaac Asimov - Foundation Trilogy
4. JRR Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings
5. Terry Pratchett - Going Postal

Other books that almost made the list (in no particular order):

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
George Orwell -1984 or Animal Farm
Roald Dahl - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Danny Champion of the World
William Golding - Lord of the Flies
Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange

This month's* five:

(1) Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner
(2) Henry James - The Portrait of a Lady
(3) W. G. Sebald - The Emigrants
(4) David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas
(5) Trollope - The Last Chronicle of Barsetshire

(*none actually read this month, just beneficiaries of this month's mood and memory)

>126 LesMiserables:

I'm still some way from having read the whole of Scott, but have read quite a few of the novels once or twice and The Antiquary probably upwards of ten times. I do often find that his last hundred pages or so, depending on the edition of course, are a masterly drawing together of elements that were often not very gripping and/or downright perplexing earlier in a book. The Antiquary - well, largely on account of its central character, opinionated, gullible, curmudgeonly, but radiantly pure in intention and fearless when occasion demands - but also for a wonderfully drawn supporting cast, I find the journey through the book at least as compelling as its denouement. It was Scott's own favourite of his books, containing as it does much detail transposed from his early life, and Scott's own character and compulsions I'm sure helped him give life to Oldbuck. Probably too my usual habit of reading five or six books at any given time matters less with The Antiquary than with many others.

Looking at my list in post 13 above, there's little or nothing I'd change. Perhaps today the Snaith would make the final cut, it's a book I've only known for a few years which sets it at a disadvantage in an exercise like this, and the Rilke would have to be demoted to the honourable mentions, which I might augment with I. Compton-Burnett's A House & its Head and James' The Ambassadors.

It's all objective (i.e. pick a frame of reference -- yourself -- and go from there.)

1)Dune
2)In Search of Lost Time
3)The Book of the New Sun
4)The Trial
5)One Hundred Years of Solitude

>134 EclecticIndulgence: It'll no doubt disappear again next month ;)

>133 terebinth:

I do often find that his last hundred pages or so, depending on the edition of course, are a masterly drawing together of elements that were often not very gripping and/or downright perplexing earlier in a book.

That is a very succinct and accurate reflection of Scott for me: well put!

As far as The Antiquary goes, I have ordered it via inter-library loan service and should be with me in a week or two. I have Scott's works in 9 volumes in a late 19th Century - early 20th Century edition, but the text is irritatingly small and I would prefer to read this as a standalone copy.

I do have of course the e-text but I'm of the opinion that my maiden read would be a lesser experience in that mode.

>137 LesMiserables:

Yes, I do wonder whether The Antiquary would have dominated my reading of Scott to nearly such an extent if it hadn't for about thirty years been the only one of the novels that I owned in what has become my favourite edition, the little Constable one from the 1890s - 48 volumes all told, in red cloth with paper spine labels, adequate print size and good thick paper yet each volume is light enough to be easily held in the hand and/or taken on a journey. I'd gathered odd novels in a variety of editions then bought a, to me, less inviting set, all long ago, That set will always have an honoured place here as I met my best friend through turning up on his doorstep to buy it, but denying myself access to the full Constable for the rest of my days came eventually to seem distinctly silly.

I hope the reading brings you many joys. I think I remember you have some Latin, and even my own little Latin I'm sure has helped give me a better impression of the Antiquary's preoccupations than I would have had without it.

I like my old choices (2 years ago!) and was surprised I feel much the same today.

So, I'll exercise my right of free speech to nominate another list of 5 all-time bests.

Love in the Time of Cholera
The Age of Innocence
Buddenbrooks
Cousin Bette
Dream of the Red Chamber

>139 terebinth:

Thank you Paul. I'm sure I will enjoy it as I have yet to come across anything that Scott wrote to which I did not take to.

My digression into studying both Greek and Latin was first kindled by another Scot, James Boswell, when I read his biography of Samuel Johnson. The whole tome was peppered with copious footnotes in Latin, and I suddenly realised how thoroughly unschooled I was.

>19 kcshankd:

I might edit my top 5 to change Heart of Darkness to Joseph Conrad. Not sure which one I would nominate in its place, today it is The Secret Agent.

My second five would also vary a bit, such a tough exercise.

1. Alice in Wonderland
2. Master & Margarita
3. The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr together with a fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler on Random Sheets of Waste Paper
4. Marketa Lazarova
5. The Cremator

But honestly I would put Alice in Wonderland as all my top 5!

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy (love to see a Folio LE of this one day)
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler - Italo Calvino
Against the Day - Thomas Pynchon
Riddley Walker - Russell Hoban
The Prospector - J. M. G. Le Clezio

I'd have put Borges in there in a heart beat, but you asked for novels. Also The Living Mountain by Nan Shepard, but again not a novel.

Interesting to see the Dune novel featured quite strongly on member's lists. I picked this up in pb yesterday. I had read it meant many years ago, but I was struck today by a quote on the front cover of this 'Hodder Great Read' Edition by Arthur C Clarke...

"Unique among SF novels... I know nothing comparable to it except The Lord of the Rings"

The issue of genre aside, I can't recall really anything about Dune which I would have read at roughly the same age as my first ever read of the Lord of the Rings, of which I could recall almost all.

So I'm a wee bit doubtful of the strength of Clarke's comments. Fair enough, I'm not at all sure what actual part of it he was comparing, but as a whole Dune cannot come close to Tolkien's masterpiece.

I've only read the first book in the Dune series. It was good but it hardly compared to the Lord of the Rings in scope or scale. Perhaps Clarke was comparing the whole Dune series (6 volumes, I believe) to the Lord of the Rings? Has anyone here read both? Would/could the whole Dune series still compare when you add in the Hobbit, the Silmarillion, and the other back story volumes?

>146 treereader:
Technically no, since “Silmarillion” begins from the moment of creation, and the Dune series – in several thousand years from now.

The first three-part series covers roughly 40 years, but the developments in the fourth book take place in three thousand years since the first events recorded in Dune. In my opinion, the subsequent three books (Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune) are better than the first one, and in the books 2 and 3 there are surprising plot twists and the story takes an entirely new turn.

Is it comparable to “The Lord of the Rings”? I wouldn’t say so, but to each their own, I suppose.

>145 LesMiserables:
>146 treereader:

I find Lord of the Rings pedantic and dull. And it's had a baneful influence on the fantasy genre. Unless your name is Gene Wolfe, I don't need to inhale a new lexicon every time I pick up your book.

Dune, on the other hand, is still one of a kind. It's an anti-power fantasy in a genre that's too often about
giving the protagonist an excuse to be a dick (think 'Ender's Game'). Unfortunately, most people stop at the first book
and don't realize where Herbert is going with it. Spoiler: Paul is not the hero.

> 148 "Spoiler: Paul is not the hero."

Oh, now you've piqued my interest. Maybe I'll have to add these to the TBR pile.

Tolkien should still get credit for setting the standard against which all world-building authors are compared to.

As for my original question, I think answer must be that Clarke was comparing total story and total world building, not one book against a trilogy. Otherwise, the comparison doesn't make much sense.

Interesting article here http://www.quarterly-review.org/middle-earth-v-duniverse/ on Middle Earth and Duniverse

>148 MobyRichard:
>151 treereader:
>152 LesMiserables:

A fascinating discussion I've often wondered on myself. I think Dune is ... grittier, more explicitly human, while Tolkien is of course more... legendary. Different sides of the human coin, mythos/logos...

This is an interesting discussion.
I read Lord of the Rings when I was 11 and was blown away, as I had only previosuly read fairy stories which might be classified as fantasy. I read Dune several years later, age 13-14, and was mightily impressed, but by that time I had read a reasonable number of SF novels, and so it was not a game changer for me; not a best novel.
I have reread Lord of the Rings a number of times over the years, initially as THE book, but more recently as it is a wonderful comfort read. I only reread Dune when FS published it, although Dune may actually have been better in the rereading than originally, as I did not expect to still be so impressed.

However, I suspect it all depends upon when you read the books.
Mu daughter loves fantasy, but read Lord of the Rings after many others, and so to my disappointment it is only one amongst many for her. She also read Dune, but it was only a vague memory for her when I mentioned the FS publication.

Thinking like a writer in order to comment on how I interpret Arthur C Clarke's judgment, I'd suggest he meant in the creation of a fictitious world that is as thoroughly constructed and complex as our real one.

I think he's paying homage to the imaginations and minds of two giants of fantasy fiction.

>154 CarltonC:

I have reread Lord of the Rings a number of times over the years, initially as THE book, but more recently as it is a wonderful comfort read.

I completely agree with you on the comforting aspects of reading The Lord of the Rings. I believe it to be, for the most part, down to the essential truths it carries, very much like the Biblical parables.

The Lord of the Rings and JRR Tolkien is the gift that keeps on giving. It is an Enchiridion of sorts.

In fact in terms of a manual or moral compass to guide oneself outside of Scripture, The Lord of the Rings wouldn't be a bad choice. There is a wonderful essay in Beauteous Truth titled Faith and Popular Culture by Joseph Pearce on what I call the Shire test. Well worth a read.

A really interesting discussion.

I'm not generally a fantasy or SF reader, but I read both LoTR and Dune in my early teens, have reread them both since as an adult, both remaining firmly on my favourites list. My problem is that for me very little in these genres has lived up to either, which may partly explain my positive dislike for most things fantasy (rather more positive on SF).

In light of the above, I must get around to reading the other Dunes. I have to say that both The Hobbit and Silmarillion did absolutely nothing for me. I couldn't even finish the latter.

It's funny -- I've read the core Tolkien plenty of times and for me the only work that stands up as more than adolescent time-wasting (albeit pleasant time-wasting) is the Silmarillion.

> 157

The Hobbit is more of a gateway drug to lead you into reading the Lord of the Rings. It's best first read prior to your teens.

I, too, am now considering adding the remaining Dune chapters to my TBR list. I'm just wary of warnings from other threads lamenting the political digressions those books supposedly go into (yawn).

>154 CarltonC:
It's an interesting question regarding one's age when one first reads or hears something and how much it impacts on one's world view. I've heard many radio pieces and read many newspaper articles about how the music one listens to or the books one reads as an adolescent shape one's world view.

I'm sure there's an element of truth there but I don't know that I'm totally convinced.

It's a while since I read the Dune or LoTR series but I first encountered them during adolescence and have reread them since. My memory of them is that both are beautifully written, emotionally enthralling, and stand repeated reading. (Although I do find Sam Gamgee a bit annoying at times.)

Conversely, when I was an adolescent I was a big Asimov fan but I find it difficult to read him now (and consequently passed on the Folio edition of the Foundation trilogy). I tend towards Douglas Adams' view of him as having great ideas but the actual prose was pretty awful.

And, again, I didn't discover Richard Dawkins until I was an adult but he has been a big influence on my thinking (or perhaps helped me to articulate ideas that I already had lurking subconsciously).

I suspect good writing may win out over adolescent infatuation.

(edit: okay, I know, Dawkins hasn't written novels, but I think you'll get the point.)

>160 Cat_of_Ulthar:
I also don't think a book read early has some unchangeable brainwashing influence on a persons life. Books expose us to new ideas, and the rarity of finding new & unique ideas increases over time; think of it like a pyramid getting narrower - we can get rocked to one extreme side or the other, but the more books we read the more balanced our world view becomes - it doesn't matter if you swap the fourth book someones read with the 400th, only that they read all 400... So, for sure, the first book seems like it has a bigger impact but only because there is more adjustment between each book read.

>161 Santas_Slave:

I suppose it depends. I'm remembering the poet Peter Riley making an observation regarding the difficulty of getting past the age of 40 without becoming a museum. Certainly we can become further informed at any age, but there seems to me an inevitable tendency for early influences to coalesce into beliefs and values which set limits to the range of alternative beliefs or values we're able to take quite seriously. Books are only a part of that process of course, along with other media, the people we live among, solitary reflection and so forth. and I don't think of it as all good or all bad bv any means, just something to watch and of which to try to stay mindful.

Given the pitfalls, I'm not at all persuaded that reading many books leads dependably to a balanced world-view: the books may be selected by us to reinforce our existing prejudices, or our values may be so ingrained that any expression of alternatives to them will reliably strike us as shallow, misguided, false or evil no matter how disparate our reading. How we read at age 50 is open to being in some measure determined by what we read at 15, whereas the reverse doesn't apply. Then, there are many books that are likely to have more influence if read at 50 than read at 15...

>162 terebinth: "I'm not at all persuaded that reading many books leads dependably to a balanced world-view"

Interesting to think how a 'balanced' reading list could be constructed...

>162 terebinth:
Good point that the age you read a book can have a different impact due to your experiences. Also, the benefit of classic literature is they say different things to different people. Of course there is a problem of self selection - but I would assume those who have read more are generally more well informed.

>163 StevieBby:
A balanced reading list would be composed entirely of books I personally like!