List ten books that...

I like the threads you start desideo!
I'll probably come up with more and better ones right after I've posted this list, but here it goes:

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: Millennium Edition
Das Parfüm by Patrick Süskind
Der Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
Die unendliche Geschichte by Michael Ende
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
Silk by Alessandro Baricco
Sophie's Choice by William Styron

Okay, so the first is non-fiction and an encyclopaedia/dictionary, but I couldn't do without...

Yes, I loved it. I wanted to include it too, but then went for the Neverending Story.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles got me into Haruki Murakami. What a wild ride that has been so far! Hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world is a very close second.

No, I haven't. But you have just added another book to my wishlist...

I just ordered a big pile of books yesterday so I'm going to include it in my next order. In a week or so ;-)
Have you read L'Ecume des jours in French? My French is getting worse every year because I barely ever use it and if it's too complicated I'd rather get a translation.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Iliad
The Odyssey
The Hobbit
Wyeth At Kuerners
The Longest Day
Beowulf
The Ancestor's Tale
The Demon-Haunted World
Naked

The Tale of the Heike (Heike monogatari)
The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
The Lais of Marie de France
The Shrinking of Treehorn by Florence Parry Heide
Vilette by Charlotte Bronte
Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos
Out by Natsuo Kirino
The Chronicles of Clovis by Saki
The Rebels by Sandor Marai

desideo, I second Thalia's sentiments re your thread-starting talents.

#10 enheduanna, why Out? Just curious. I think that's a book I will never forget.

Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll
Le Comte de Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
Harriet the Spy - Louise Fitzhugh
The Art of War - Sun Tzu
A Room of One's Own - V. Woolf
Lolita - Nabokov
Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
The Witching Hour - Anne Rice
The Joy of Cooking - Rombauer
Les Fleurs du Mal - Baudelaire

OK, limiting this to just ten is the difficult part. I'm sure there is another book standing out there, jumping up and down, waving it's arms and yelling,"Pick Me, pick me!" But this is what I settled on:
1. Anne of Green Gablesby L.M. Montgomery
2. The Once and Future King by T.H. White
3. The Ghost of Blackwood Hall by Carolyn Keene
4. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
6. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
7. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
8. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
9. The Hobbit byTolikein
10.The Case of the Black-eyed Blonde byErle Stanley Gardner

Hmm, I didn't list Rebecca because I though it didn't "qualify" for this list. Like Lolita, The Odyssey and The Hobbit. I picked books that aren't really considered classics or great literature. Okay, P&P would be one of those... Well, I'm going in circles. I think I should log off and finally go to bed ;-)

#13, citygirl:

Well, it's difficult to explain, but I guess the short answer is that it was so real. The women, their personalities, their lives and the way each was imprisioned within them was shockingly realistic. I was astonished by Kirino's vivid insight into so many very different personalities and her deft depiction of the way their personalities conflicted with their enforced roles in society. The plot device she used was extreme, but it was brilliant as an external symbol of their internal lives and their desperation to escape. I first encountered the story when I was watching a Japanese tv drama they made out of it, and despite the total poverty of my Japanese I was rivited. It was only later on that I ran across the book and realized it was the same thing. It just blew me away.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The Crimes of Charlotte Bronte by James Tully
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Onion Girl by Charles de Lint
Widdershins also by Charles deLint
The Wood Wife by Terri Windling
Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

Opps. My computer said it didn't go through. Very sorry. :)

Danke schön und gleichfalls!
Maybe I'll go over to the Green Dragon for a while and complain about not being able to fall asleep first... I do have to get up again in 6 hours though.

I'll stick with my list though. There are tons more I'd love to include, but I'm pretty happy with the way it is now.

Taran Wanderer by Lloyd Alexander
The Voyage of the Dawntreader by C.S. Lewis
Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres
The Sarantine Mosaic by Guy Gavriel Kay
The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice
Wicked by Gregory Maguire
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay
Round the Year Storybook
Gnomes by Wil Huygen

Quite a few are great literature but that's just because that's my genre of choice. :)

Les Miserables Victor Hugo
Blindness Jose Saramago
Portrait in Sepia Isabel Allende
The Things they Carried Tim O'Brien
Les racines du ciel Romain Gary
Le fusil de chasse and Shirobamba Yasushi Inoue
Memoirs of a Geisha Arthur Golden
On ne s'endort jamais seul Rene Fregni
Stupeur et tremblements Amelie Nothomb
Soie Alessandro Baricco

That was kind of hard. I tried to limit it to where I had a different author per book.

I am going to lead with my favorite non-fiction, loving statistics:

World almanac and Book of facts
Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau
Life: a user's manual by Georges Perec
Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin
Cornish Trilogy by Robertson Davies
Raj Quartet by Paul Scott
Deep River by Shusako Endo
River Sutra by Gita Mehta
The Greater Trumps by Charles Williams
Great Indian Novel by Shashi Tharoor, or maybe I should try reading the Mahabharata after which it is humorously patterned.

The Little Prince
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Generation X
Slaughter-House Five
Love in the Time of Cholera
The Bell Jar
Catcher in the Rye
My Antonia
Maggie Cassidy
Mere Christianity

>23 lilisin:, lilisin - wow, Blindness...I'm about 3/4 of the way through it and while it is definitely a smart, well-written book, I cannot say I am 'enjoying' it. It is traumatic and exhausting. I find that I feel isolated from the normal world after reading it. (sigh...I want to finish it tonight, but I don't know if I'm up to it...)

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie (I read this most recently the night before I got married when I couldn't get to sleep. It didn't send me to sleep but did calm me down!)
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
Watership Down by Richard Adams
The Solitaire Mystery by Jostein Gaarder
A Song for Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay
Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett
The North Western Fells by A. Wainwright because his books are an amazing work of art and love letter to the Lake District.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (I don't know why this isn't classic literature, but someone else had it so I'm going to!)
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (Similarly...)
Under Plum Lake by Lionel Davidson

Silly touchstones, some of them are somewhat broken but I dare say people won't struggle with the notions of Jane Eyre and Mansfield Park!

ETA: I think I misinterpreted the original post to mean that it *couldn't* include great classics but now I get it (and why, e.g. P&P was allowed!). So consider A Song for Arbonne replaced with The Brothers Karamazov. Now there's a classic :-D

The Voyage Of The Beagle - Charles Darwin
Guns, Germs And Steel: The Fates Of Human Societies - Jared Diamond
Walden - Henry David Thoreau
National Geographic Field Guide To The Birds Of North America: Fourth Edition
The Demon-Haunted World - Carl Sagan
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
Prospero's Cell & Reflections On A Marine Venus - Lawrence Durrell
The Colossus Of Maroussi - Henry Miller

my Bible,
Little Grey Men by B.B.,
The Black Fawn by Kjelgaard,
The Hobbit by Tolkien,
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Smith,
The Old Man & the Sea by Hemenway,
The Little Princess by Burnett,
Dr Zhivago by Pasternak,
Journey to the Center of the Earth by Verne

and Evangeline by Longfellow

In no particular order, here are 10 of my favorite books. Works of great literature included just happen to be among my favs.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Devil in Winter by Lisa Kleypas
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Unleash the Night by Sherrilyn Kenyon
Poison Study by Maria V. Snyder
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
Romancing Mr. Bridgerton by Julia Quinn
The Misted Cliffs by Catherine Asaro

Not necessarily "great literature" but of great personal value:
The Mapp and Lucia series by EF Benson;
The Gormenghast trilogy by Peake;
Lord of the Rings series by Tolkien;
any of the Alexander McCall Smith books;
The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks by Robertson Davies
Northrop Frye literary criticisms;
Jeeves by Wodehouse;
Wind in the Willows by Grahame;
Sherlock Holmes;
The Oxford English Dictionary

I would have happily included any of Jane Austen's works, the Iliad, the Brontes, etc., but I think of those as great works of literature. ;)

Edited to fix a tupo

in no particular order...

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry
Circle of Friends by Maeve Binchy
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
and anything by Roald Dahl

#35
As I read other people's 10 favorite submissions, I realize that I could extend mine. I really liked Northrop Frye's The Great Code : the bible and literature and his Blake study is very good.
Also, I couldn't do without the OED.
And , I loved the Wind in the Willows as a kid.

Oh, tiffin and vpfluke, do you have an OED?!?! I'd love to have one. I priced them and they're a little out of my budget presently. But to come home everyday and see it.... I'm envious.

tiffin, I also love Lucia. It's been years since I read any of the books, but I have very fond memories. I considered Gormenghast for my list, but I could only choose ten....

And for the record, I do consider several books on my list "great literature," but as other LT threads show, the definition of that term varies widely and probably changes to an individual over the years. But I have noticed that Danielle Steel and James Patterson haven't made it onto anyone's lists.

Boy, not an easy task ... ask me another time and I'm sure the list would change, but right now it's:

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
Zod-Wallop by William Browning Spencer
The Stand by Stephen King
Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
La Bete Humaine by Emile Zola
The man in the high castle by Philip K. Dick
Music for Torching by A.M. Homes
Lights out in the Reptile House by Jim Shepard
A canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
White Noise by Don Delillo

Sophie's Choice by, William Styron
A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
A Short History of a Small Place by, T.R. Pearson
Rebbeca by Daphne Du Muir
Risk Pool by, Richard Russo
Reflected Glory by, Sally Bedell Smith
The River Why by, David James Duncan
The Brothers K by, David James Duncan
Andersonville by, MacKinlay Kantor
Tao Te Ching by, Lao-Tzu

Not including classics & in no particular order
Kristin Lavransdatter
Sigrid Undset
Raintree County Ross Lockwood
Dr. Zhivago Boris Pasternak
A Tree grows in Brooklyn Betty Smith
The Poisonwood Bible Barbara Kingsolver
To kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee
Thousand Acres Jane Smiley
Time travelers Wife Audrey Niffenegger
The God of Small things Arundhati Roy
The Awakening Land trilogy - The Trees, the Fields, The Town
Conrad Richter

No particular order:

The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley gave me the basis for my personal moral code: do unto others as they would be done by.
Time Enough for Love by Robert A Heinlein is not great literature, but it gives me more basis for day-dreaming than Stranger in a Strange Land.
The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks, which I read in the early 70s pretty much ensured I would not become a parent!
The Ashley Book of Knots by Clifford Ashley (yes, its really readable!) is my desert island book.
Welcome to Mars by James Blish is just a charming story which I can always reread with pleasure.
The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger is a book I had bypassed in the bookshop, but my book group read. Extraordinary and agonising.
Getting Rid of Bradley by Jennifer Crusie - I just like it!
The Lonely Silver Rain by John D MacDonald is the last of the Travis McGee series.
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell still makes me laugh at the 40th reading.
Neuromancer by William Gibson is probably responsible for me going back to university to get a degree in computing.
The Marathon Photograph by Clifford Simak - the story about the cave paintings is pure Simak, though very unusually not set in Wisconsin.

Oops, I've just counted and I've gone over, but I can't bear to take any of those off!

Most of mine are YA books...

Heartlight by Marion Zimmer Bradley
Emily of New Moon by L.M. Montgomery
Welcome to the Ark by Stephanie S. Tolan
The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle
The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
Magic's Pawn by Mercedes Lackey
The Music of Dolphins by Karen Hesse
Xenocide by Orson Scott Card

fannyprice

Yes, Blindness is quite mentally exhausting and challenging but it tackles on dystopian literature like I've never seen before and it was just too eye-opening not to include it! As the original post says, it has become of great personal value to me. I always reference it, always recommend it and always go back to it as a way to remind myself what the world is like. But yes, one does enjoy going back to their little bubble of happiness and love after that. :)

Oh Darn !! I missed The God of Small Things and The Mists of Avalon
Also missed The Education of Little Tree and The Golden Compass

How can one possibly narrow the list down to ten ?

I had to leave The Mists of Avalon off, too, but I just can't imagine living without The Joy of Cooking or something like it.

Oh goodness, The Education of Little Tree! I've tried very hard to erase that book from my memory. That is the only book I have every stopped reading!

I do agree that Mists of Avalon was excellent, however. The rare fantasy I've ever read.

Can I add Lonesome Dove?

message # 48
lilisin,
Really ?? You didn't like The Education of Little Tree? Gosh I read it at least three times. We did read it for one of my face2face groups and it was one of those few books that everyone liked.

Oh well........different strokes for different folks.(does that date me or what ?)

51: I followed the url. Ugh! I don't remember the book, so maybe I've never heard of it.

I'm glad I'm not the only one finally.
Maybe someday I'll try again but for now I buried the book somewhere so that I wouldn't see it again. Not in the ground but in a section of my mother's bookcase that has all the books she read to learn English and that I don't particularly care for.

But this is not about what we don't like.
So, off this topic and let's get back to the ten books people are really close to! (Sorry to steal the thread like that.)

Well, I was going to contribute, but I could only talk about myself for nine lines...

great list idea, I'll have to go stare at the bookshelves for a bit. Off the top of my head some MUST HAVES would be the Hitchhiker's Guide, Return of the King, Prayer for Owen Meany, Bill James Historical Abstract, Cannery Row and To Kill a Mockingbird....

also, glad to see Time Traveler's Wife on several lists; any idea if there's a movie in the works? Yes, I know the book is always better, but still....

Clayhanger by Arnold Bennett
Riceyman Steps by Arnold Bennett
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe
The Inheritors by William Golding
Small Island by Andrea Levy
Dirt Music by Tim Winton
The Secret River by Kate Grenville
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby

Next week, the list could be different!

How about...

- The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
- To The Lighthouse
- The Snow Leopard
- Civilwarland in Bad Decline
- Melancholy of Anatomy
- Salt: A World History
- The Dream Eater
- A Wrinkle In Time
- Brave New World
- 1984

This discussion has given me reading suggestions and then some. Thanks!

There are hundreds of others these were just some that popped into my head...
Here they are in no particular order:

All the King's Men
by Robert Penn Warren
Something Wicked This Way Comes
by Ray Bradbury
Demian
by Hermann Hesse
The New York Trilogy
by Paul Auster
Moonshadow
by J.M. DeMatteis
The Rachel Papers
by Martin Amis
The Sound of Waves
by Yukio Mishima
High Fidelity
by Nick Hornby
The Man Who Fell to Earth
by Walter Tevis
The Lord of the Rings
by J.R.R. Tolkien

#56 - I first heard about the book through a friend who's really into movies, and she first heard about it because Jennifer Aniston's production company was interested in the rights. I don't know if she actually bought them or not, though.

inkdrinker, may I ask why New York Trilogy? I'm interested in your experience with it. It was an odd reading experience for me. I felt like I ought to have liked it more than I did. I appreciated it aesthetically, but emotionally it left me cold.

The Time Traveler's Wife
Little, Big
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Eyre Affair
Jane Eyre
Little Women
Ender's Game
Fahrenheit 451
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
The Stand

CITYGIRL

This is the first book I read by Auster and it absolutely blew me away. I picked it up after seeing the movie SMOKE. In SMOKE one character tells a story about taking a picture in the same place at the same time everyday for years on end and that concept of art and time just really got under my skin. I couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks. There was also a story that went along with that in which the character tells about how he got the camera. That story also really caught me off guard and left me ruminating on it for a long time. After that I really wanted more of that same feeling. The first story in this book delivered. The other two were good, but City of Glass was one of my all time favorite books. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the twists Auster played on the concept of identity. However, there was one scene in the book which made this an unforgettable read. When the Auster character sits on the bench with the old man and he talks about the tower of babble and how our language isn’t good enough. He tells Auster that if we could discover a perfect language it would be basically divine, it stirred something up inside me. I’m not even sure I can make it clear why it hit me so hard, but I couldn’t stop picking at the idea for a very long time. Even now when I write about it, I can feel the excitement. All that stuff about how we use the same word for an object when it’s whole as we do when it’s broken and how it’s no longer the same thing anymore. WOW! The fact that the narrator at that point is no longer the same person he was at the beginning of the book and how he has taken a name which isn’t his and how all that ties together….

Well, I could go on and on and on and on. All the layers and intricacies that were packed into what in some way was a very simple novella… it made my heart ache for more. Sadly Auster has never quite reached that height again. Many of his books are GREAT and at times he has some moments which come very close, but he has never quite hit that note again. (Music of Chance came very close with the whole building a wall Promethean thing.)

Well, I’ve babbled enough (no pun intended). I hope that makes it a little clearer, but I fear I may have only waxed ecstatic and muddied the waters.

No, no, inkdrinker, thank you! That is exactly why I asked. Maybe you've seen something in the work that I missed and it's worth knowing. One great thing about LT is that everybody here is passionate about books and that's not always easy to find in the "real world." Maybe I'll take another look at New York Trilogy.

I just realized that I never said why I picked up an Auster book after seeing SMOKE. Auster wrote the script for SMOKE. Also, I should say that I would highly recommend checking out the movie, If you haven’t already. It’s a great film. (It gets a tiny bit overly sentimental at times but it’s very good.)

#38
I have the OED in the small print edition with two volumes and a magnifying glass -- the one done about 25 years ago. Even then it was pricey at maybe $75.

I liked Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, but it is in maybe my second 30. Gripping, but not transformative.

I know I am going to change and re-change my list but here it is, including handicapper's notes:

The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, Alvaro Mutis (In a class by himself.)

Birdy, William Wharton (Elegy to adolescence)
New York Trilogy, Paul Auster (Auster, my hero)
Music of Chance, Paul Auster (one of his best)
The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, (Worth the Effort)
The Trees, Conrad Richter (I see someone else listed the trilogy, I am surprised)
Cosmopolitans, Somerset Maugham (Maugham's Short Stories)
Dubins Lives, Bernard Malamud
Kaputt, Curzio Malaparte (The Eastern Front as seen by an Italian Reporter)
Reading Lyrics, Robert Gottlieb & Robert Kimbal (the Great American Songbook, useful when writing love letters)
Hunger, Knut Hamsum (Well, I'm half Norwegian, and think this is the worst of all possible worlds)

A random list of ten, in no particular order...

Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot
The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers
The Hobbit
Jane Eyre
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Attwood
The Harvester by Gene Stratton-Porter (also A Girl of the Limberlost)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Grimm's Fairy Tales
The Riddle Master of Hed by Patricia McKillip

vpfluke

Like I said, there are probably a hundred or more I could have listed here, but I just put down the first 10 which came to mind. I Don't know that I could actually name a top ten or favorite all time book if my life depended on it.

As to transformative... Well, I doubt you and I have lead the exact same lives, seen the same events in our lives as important, or even had the same exact education in style or content. Any one of those (and many other factors) could drastically alter our view of a book.

#67 vpfluke, Maybe I should consider the Compact OED. My plan was to deprive myself until I could afford the multi-volume set. But perhaps I should be reasonable.

Just found this post, and it's been awhile since anyone picked up the thread, so here we go...

These are books that touched me deeply for whatever reason.
In no particular order (no authors where obvious or the touchstone works):

Wuthering Heights
Lonesome Dove
A prayer for owen meany
I was Amelia Earhart
We speak no treason (I'm a Richard III freak
Bel Canto
A Game of Thrones (1st that started me on the series)
The agony and the ecstacy
Pride and Prejudice
The Far Pavillions

And one bonus for mainstream lit:
The Gold Coast just because it was such a fun book.