Our Five-star reads

At Kristel's suggestion, I'm starting a thread here where we can put our very top reads from the list and see how they compare to other peoples', and maybe find some of our next reads. Tastes differ, but if lots of people agree on a 5-star rating it's probably a good book! Kristel did hers as her 100 favorite books; mine are by rating; you can do your however you want.

I'm looking forward to seeing which books have been The Best for others.

Here are mine. A couple may be from the Dutch list. I read a lot of classics before I started The List and I don't have rankings for those, which is why most Defoe, Dickens, Brontes, Austen, Melville, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and some Russians are missing. I also took off a few that I honestly didn't remember well enough to know whether or not they had really been five-star books. If it's that good, one should remember it.

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (Spain)
Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (France)
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (England)
Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin (Russia)
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (USA)
Gustav Flaubert, Madame Bovary (France)
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables (France)
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (Russia)
Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (England)
Emile Zola, Germinal (France)
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (USA)
James Joyce, Ulysses (Ireland)
Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter (Norway)
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (England)
Virginia Woolf, The Waves (England)
Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March (Austria)
Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (England)
Henry Roth, Call it Sleep (USA)
Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa (Denmark)
Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children (Australia)
Sandor Marai, Embers (Hungary)
Raymond Queneau, Exercises in Style (France)
Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country (South Africa)
Joao Guimaraes Rosa, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (Brazil)
Günter Grass, The Tin Drum (Germany)
Romain Gary, Promise at Dawn (France)
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (USA)
Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (England/Scotland)
Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman (Ireland)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Colombia)
Alfredo Bryce Echenique, A World for Julius (Peru)
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (Italy)
Christa Wolf, Patterns of Childhood (Germany)
Juan José Saer, The Witness (Argentina)
Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine (USA)
Gert Hofmann, The Parable of the Blind (Germany)
Andrzej Szczypiorski, The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman (Poland)
Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire (Uruguay)
David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress (USA)
Tim O’Brien, The Things they Carried (USA)
Emine Özdamar, Life is a Caravanserai (Turkey/Germany)
Irene Nemirovsky, Suite Francaise (Ukraine/France)
Colm Toibin, The Master (Ireland)
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (England)
Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (Italy)

Honorable mention (4.5 stars, and a few 4 star goodies)

Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji (Japan)
Shi Nai’an, The Water Margin (China)
Frances Burney, Cecilia (England)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (England)
Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickelby (England)
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (Russia)
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (Brazil)
Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest (Germany)
Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (Germany)
D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (England)
Henri Barbusse, Under Fire (France)
Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (USA)
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors (England)
Nella Larsen, Passing (USA)
Jan Jacob Slauerhoff, The Forbidden Kingdom (Netherlands)
Dino Buzzati, The Tartar Steppe (Italy)
Gerard Reve, The Evenings (Netherlands)
Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (England)
Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (Italy)
Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing (Zimbabwe)
Pär Lagerkvist, Barabbas (Sweden)
Samuel Beckett, Molloy (Ireland)
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago (Russia)
Flannery O’Connor, Everything that Rises Must Converge (USA)
Willem Frederik Hermans, Beyond Sleep (Netherlands)
Jessica Anderson, The Commandant (Australia)
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table (Italy)
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (India)
J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun (England)
Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters (Austria)
Etienne van Heerden, Ancestral Voices (South Africa)
John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany (USA)
Kazuo Ishiguro, Remains of the Day (Japan/England)
Iain Banks, The Crow Road (England)
Javier Marias, A Heart so White (Spain)
Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance (India)
Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter (USA)
Arthur Japin, In Lucia's Eyes (Netherlands)
James Kelman, Kieron Smith, Boy (Scotland)
Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk (England)
Jose Saramago, Cain (Portugal)

Here's a list of my top (5 Star) 1001 books. (not in any particular order) I used GR to filter out 1001 books by ratings.
1. To Kill a Mockingbird (USA)
2. Les Miserables (France)
3. The Poisonwood Bible (USA)
4. Jane Eyre (UK)
5. Gone with the Wind (USA)
5. The Handmaid's Tale (Canada)
6. The Sea (Ireland)
7. Never Let Me Go (Japanese/England)
8. Of Human Bondage (UK)
9. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (USA)
10. The Reader (German)
11. Lolita (Russian/USA)
12. The Leopard (Italian)
13. Amongst Women (Irish)
14. The God of Small Things (India)
15. Things Fall Apart (Nigeria)
16. The Elegance of the Hedgehog (France)
17. Wild Swans (China)
18. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (UK)
19. Silas Marner (UK)
20. Atonement (UK)
21. The Things They Carried (USA)
22. Anna Karenina (Russia)
23. Midnight's Children (India)
24. The Twilight Years (Japan)
25. Thousand Cranes (Japan)
26. The Secret History (USA)
27. Vanity Fair (UK)
28. Of Love and Shadows (Chili)
29. Growth of Soil (Norway)
30. Alias Grace (Canada)
31. Old Wives' Tale (UK)
32. The Plague (Algeria/French)
33. Cryptonomicon (USA)
34. Half a Yellow Sun (Nigeria)
35. Absalom, Absalom! (USA)
36. The Roots of Heaven (French)
37. Invisible Man (USA)
38. Smilla's Sense of Snow (Denmark)
39. Ragtime (USA)
40. Cry, the Beloved Country (South Africa)
41. Middlemarch (UK)
42. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Scottish)
43. Candide (French)
44. The Color Purple (USA)
45. The Blind Assassin (Canada)
46. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (USA)
47. A Fine Balance (Indian/Canada)
48. The Stone Diaries (American/Canada)
49. Amsterdam (UK)
50. The Day of the Triffids (UK)
51. The House of Mirth (USA)
52. Catch-22 (USA)
53. Rebecca (UK)
54. The Three Musketeers (French)
55. Tess of the D'Urbervilles (UK)
56. The Fellowship of the Ring (UK)
57. The House of the Spirit (Chile)
58. On Beauty (UK)
59. The History of Love (USA)
60. The Marriage Plot (USA)
61. The Moonstone (UK)
62. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Russia)
63. The Godfather (USA)
64. The Heretic (Spanish)
65. A Visit from the Goon Squad (USA)
66. The Mill on the Floss (UK)
67. A Modest Proposal (Irish)
68. The Bell (Irish /British)
69. Regeneration (British)
70. Alamut ( Slovene/Italian)
71. Krisin Lavransdatter (Nordic)
72. Cancer Ward (Russian)
73. The Beautiful Mrs Seidenman (Polish)
74. The Idiot (Russian)
75. On the Black Hill (UK)
76. Pale Fire (Russian/USA)
77. Schindler's List (Australian)
78. The Dark Child (Guinea)
79. Paradise of the Blind (Vietnamese)
80. First Circle (Russian)
81. Bonfire of the Vanities (USA)
82. The Old Man and the Sea (USA)
83. The Brothers Karamazov (Russia)
84. Cat's Eye (Canada)
85. The Return of the soldier (UK)
86. Broken April (Albania)
87. That They May Face the Rising Sun, (Irish)
88. The Player of Games (Irish)
89. In a Free State (Trinidad/British)
90. Survival in Aushwitz (Jew/Italy)
91. Remembering Babylon (Australian)
92. The Mayor of Casterbridge (UK)
93. Buddenbrooks (German)
94. Empire of the Sun (UK)
95. Woman at Point Zero (Egypt)
96. The Siege of Krishnapur (UK)
97. Sula (US)
98. Moll Flanders (UK)
99. Born in Exile (UK)
100. Brave New World (UK)

So only 2 German books made my top 100. Definately heavy for USA and UK authors. My ratings have changed over time. I probably rate differently now than I did when I first started the 1001 list.

In chronological order (by date of publication) I gave the following 5 stars (like annamorphic there were quite a few read before I started rating them, so some classics are missing). Looking through the list, the top ratings have to have originality (The Handmaids Tale, Cloud Atlas), vividly described scenes (The House of Mirth, The Untouchable), unflagging entertainment (Le Reine Margot, The Long Goodbye), the ability to move me (Silas Marner, The Things They Carried, Germinal, The Remains of the Day), or dry humour (The Information) or a combination of all of these. I do wonder about a few of them now, but here they are....:

Dumas, Alexandre - Le Reine Margot
Collins, Wilkie - The Woman in White
Eliot, George - Silas Marner
Hugo, Victor - Les Miserables
Turgenev, Ivan - Spring Torrents
Zola, Emile - Germinal
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Canetti, Elias - Auto-da-Fe
Faulkner, William - Absalom, Absalom!
Hemingway, Ernest - For Whom the Bells Toll
Paton, Alan - Cry, The Beloved Country
Carpentier, Alejo - Kingdom of the World
Thurber, James - The 13 Clocks
Chandler, Raymond - The Long Goodbye
Bulgakov, Mikhail - The Master and the Margarita
Atwood, Margaret - The Handmaid's Tale
Ishiguro, Kazuo - Remains of the Day (possibly my favourite of all of these)
O'Brien, Tim - The Things They Carried
Amis, Martin - The Information
Banville, John - The Untouchable
Llosa, Mario Vargas - The Feast of the Goat
Franzen, Jonathan - The Corrections
Tremain, Rose - The Colour
Mitchell, David - Cloud Atlas

I've definitely raised the bar over time so the 4 1/2 star books are really five stars that at the time didn't quite tick all the boxes of some of the earlier books:

Voltaire - Candide
Scott, Sir Walter - Rob Roy
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
de Balzac, Honore - Le Pere Goriot
Trollope, Anthony - Phineas Finn
Dostoevsky, Fodor - The Brothers Karamazov
West, Rebecca - The Return of the Soldier
Wharton, Edith - The Age of Innocence
Mitchell, Margaret - Gone with the Wind
Borges, Jorge Luis - Ficciones
Linna, Vaino - The Unknown Soldier
White, Patrick - The Tree of Man
Nabokov, Vladimir - Lolita (really five stars, but the subject matter lost half a star)
Amado, Jorge - Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon
Borges, Jorge Luis - Labyrinths
Kesey, Ken - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Le Carre, John - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Laurence, Margaret - The Diviners
King, Stephen - The Shining
Walker, Alice - The Colour Purple
McCarthy, Cormac - Blood Meridian
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia - Love in the Time of Cholera
Irving, John - A Prayer for Owen Meany

Five star reads, from most recently (re)read:

Pride and Prejudice
The Satanic Verses
The Brothers Karamazov
The Passion According to G.H.
The Age of Innocence
Lolita
Moby-Dick, or, The Whale
On Love
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
The Hours
1984
The Things They Carried
Jealousy

And since I am obviously stingy with the five stars, here are the 4.5 stars:

The Magic Mountain
The Book of Disquiet
Anniversaries
Orlando
Indigo
Persuasion
Underworld
Doctor Faustus
The Sea, the Sea
What a Carve Up!
London Fields
The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories
Eva Trout
Germinal
The Bridge on the Drina
Rituals
Buddenbrooks
How Late it Was, How Late
A Suitable Boy
Ulysses

It is interesting to see everyone’s lists. I tend to be hesitant to give out 5* ratings. I think I’ve gotten a little more lenient with them over time. Here is my list starting with the most recent. I will also list my 4.5* since there are not a lot of 5s. This is out of 287 books read so far.

1. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
2. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
3. Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset
4. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
5. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
6. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
7. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
8. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
9. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
10. Howard’s End by E. M. Forster
11. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
12. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
13. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
14. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
15. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
4.5*
1. Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
2. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
3. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
4. The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham
5. A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
6. Villette by Charlotte Bronte
7. The Cider House Rules by John Irving
8. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
9. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
10. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
11. Unless by Carol Shields
12. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
13. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
14. The Body Artist by Don DeLillo
15. Ivanhoe by Walter Scott
16. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
17. The Purloined Letter by Edgar Allen Poe
18. Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne

A quick overview of five peoples' lists suggests that The Things They Carried is almost universally beloved. We are also very fond of:

Kristen Lavransdatter
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Age of Innocence
Germinal
Buddenbrooks
Cry, the Beloved Country
The Brothers Karamazov
Lolita
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
A Prayer for Owen Meany
and
The Handmaid's Tale

Now, a challenge: what are your five-star books that nobody else loved and that you really, really think we should either read, or reread, because they are truly fabulous?
I'm already thinking that I need to reread The Brothers Karamazov. I was way too young when I read that (like, in high school) and did not appreciate it.

I have a lot of 5 star reads! I think I'm dramatic in my ratings - lots of 5s but also lots of 2s as I looked through. Also, the ratings are a reflection of the time in life that I read the book - I expect some would have dropped if I read them now and some that aren't on this list might be.

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Diviners by Margaret Laurence
Independent People by Halldor Laxness
The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing
Remembrance of Things Past by Proust
Eline Vere by Louis Couperus
The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Poisonwood Bible by Kingsolver
Memoirs of a Geisha by Golden
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
The Reader by Schlink
Wild Swans by Jung Chang
Possession by A. S. Byatt
Beloved by Morrison
The Handmaid’s Tale by Atwood
The Name of the Rose by Eco
Song of Solomon by Morrison
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
The Bluest Eye by Morrison
The Master and Margarita
In Cold Blood by Capote
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien
Excellent Women by Barbara Pym,
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Gone With the Wind by Mitchell
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Alberta and Jacob by Cora Sandel
The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald
Kristin Lavransdatter by Undset
The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
Germinal by Emile Zola
Anna Karenina by Tolstoy
Middlemarch by Eliot
The Last Chronicle of Barset by Trollope
Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
The Woman in White by Collins
The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne,
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Vanity Fair by Thackery
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
A Christmas Carol by Dickens,
Persuasion by Austen
Emma by Austen,
Mansfield Park by Austen
Pride and Prejudice by Austen
Sense and Sensibility by Austen
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

>6 annamorphic: One book that no-one else had as a 5 star read was David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. I enjoyed this very much with the different tone/styles of stories, and the cleverness of having each story connecting to the one before (and after) it.

I read Don Quixote as a teenager (a LONG time ago) and intend to revisit that one as it seems to be admired by many.

I rated Cloud Atlas as 5 stars, and House of Leaves- not seeing that at a quick glance on others' lists.

A book I didn't rate at 5 stars, but would likely now upon recollection is The Kindly Ones. It wasn't fun to read, but wow, has it stuck with me over the years.

I found this thread form a while back, and just thought I would add my own list to it.

So far I have 17 five-star books from the list. Some were read before I started grading books, so I suspect there would be a few more, if that had been the case.

Jane Austen: Persuasion (English, England)
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice (English, England)
Pat Barker: Regeneration (English, England)
Saul Bellow: Henderson the Rain King (English, USA)
Truman Capote: In Cold Blood (English, USA)
J.M. Coetzee: Disgrace (English, South Africa)
Fyodor Dostojevsky: Crime and Punishment (Russian)
Knut Hamsun: Hunger (Norwegian)
Joseph Heller: Catch-22 (English, USA)
Franz Kafka: The Trial (German)
Imre Kertèsz: Fateless (Hungarian)
Thomas Mann: Death in Venice (German)
Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks (German)
Haruki Murakami: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Japanese)
Erich Maria Remarque: All Quiet on the Western Front (German)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Russian)
Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina (Russian)

I guess 19th century books, Russian books and books on war and holocaust are more prevalent here than in the average book on the list. I don't think I have any especially odd books - though neither Murakami or Hunger by Knut Hamsun are usually rated that high.

>10 Henrik_Madsen:, Hendrik, I would add that most people I know hated Henderson the Rain King. I haven't read it yet so was happy to see that you liked it. I liked Hunger but liked Growth of Soil better.

>11 Kristelh: I read it a long time ago, and it is probably the one I remember the least about now. I just went and re-read my review, though, and apparently I was especially fascinated with the main character who was interesting but also self-righteous and annoying.

>12 Henrik_Madsen: I am looking forward to reading it, Henrik. I generally do like Saul Bellow and self-righteous does sound intriguing,