10 Absolutely Phenomenal Novels that Must be Read Immediately.. suggestions?

I'm kind of new to this site.. not sure if this topic is relevant enough to be allowed?

Anywas, I figured 1001 was a pretty hefty goal.. how about 10? What are 10 of the best novels that should be read as soon as possible. Classics, obscure, whatever you think is the best.

:)
Cheers,
Jackie

hello itsjackie, I don't know how useful (or relevant!) to your question this is, but below is a list of the first half of a series published a while ago by Marshall Cavendish called The Great Writers Collection where every fortnight you got a book and a magazine describing the book / author.
I had a similar problem of 'where to start?' with the ‘classics’ or books that are generally felt (rightly or wrongly) to be ‘must reads’ and used this as a springboard. This is just the first half and is mainly 18th / 19th century writers I think, the second half goes into more contemporary novelists of the 20th century if you're interested in that list too ...
Even if perhaps it's not what you're looking for it may be a good starting point for a discussion on what favourite books of people have been left out, whether any of these should be included in a list of ten (is it possible to get a list that small? :)) books and if you agree / disagree with the inclusions.
I don’t know how many / if any are on the 1001 list if that’s the list of books you’re mainly going for, but books like woman in white or Frankenstein should surely be read as representatives of their respective genres? But this is just a list I use, it’s not a list I’m suggesting or pushing to you … this thread is bound to provoke some debate with everyone having their own favourites :)
happy reading!

1. Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
2. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
5. The Mill on the Floss – George Elliot
6. Pride & Prejudice – Jane Austen
7. The Fall of the House of Usher & other stories – Edgar Allen Poe
8. Vanity Fair – William Thackeray
9. Moby Dick – Hermann Melville
10. Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
11. Voyage of the Beagle – Charles Darwin
12. Alice in Wonderland / Through the looking Glass - Lewis Carroll
13. Portrait of A Lady – Henry James
14. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
15. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
16. Little Women – Louisa Alcott
17. Barchester Towers – Anthony Trollope
18. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
19. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
20. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
21. Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
22. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
23. Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell
24. Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

Wow. That's a toughie. BUT I'm always ready with an opinions about...well, anything, so here are my top ten, not knowing what you've already read (in no particular order)

1. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
2. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
3. Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
4. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
5. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
6. Persuasion by Jane Austen
7. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
8. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
9. 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
10. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Ten out of the 1001 that I would expect everyone to read:
1. Pride and Prejudice
2. The Great Gatsby
3. 1984
4. Ficciones
5. Huckleberry Finn
6. Beloved
7. Absalom, Absalom!
8. Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy (This is the most read book in my workplace, and I would look like an idiot there if I hadn't read it!)
9. To Kill a Mockingbird
10. Mrs. Dalloway


Ten out of the 1001 that I think are both readable and enjoyable, thus a good place to start:
1. Cloud Atlas
2. Pride and Prejudice
3. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles
4.The Great Gatsby
5. 1984
6.Ficciones
7. The Handmaid's Tale
8. Jane Eyre
9. The Dispossesed
10. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

As far as deciding how to tackle them, I would suggest deciding exactly what you want to get out of reading them and then make a plan for yourself based on that. Recently I've decided I wanted to work on my French, so I'm going through and reading the French ones roughly in order, skipping the ones that look super boring. I read short English ones simultaneously to give myself an "easy" read now and then so that I don't feel discouraged.

Phew that's tough :) This is a great start though, you're young so hopefully you can cram in reading as much books as possible! Due to your age I'll try to think of what I enjoyed then and put some great modern ones in.

1. The Picture of Dorian Gray- Oscar Wilde (A very funny, witty book that turns terrifying).
2. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie- Muriel Spark (Spark is a favorite of mine, this one is really short but packs so much in that it's insanely potent. Discovering her other books is a hell of a lot of fun too).
3. Cakes & Ale- W. Somerset Maugham (This one is very overlooked but everything about it is fantastic, especially enjoyable if you like books about writers).
4. The Life of Pi- Yann Martel (Just crazy original, and crams in a ton of genres in one fantastic story).
5. The World According to Garp- John Irving (Another great original, it's all about families, what happens to our expectations in life and so much more.)

Just 5 for now, I have a killer migraine... please let us know what you start reading! :)

Hey, Jackie . . . here are my suggestions from the 1001 list

1. Nineteen Eighty-four, George Orwell (love it or hate it, I think it's a book everyone should read)
2. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
3. If This is a Man aka: Survival at Auschwitz, Primo Levi
4. Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel
5. Return of the Soldier, Rebecca West
6. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
7. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy (or Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James)
8. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
9. A Room with a View, EM Forster
10. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

You also need to read at least one book by Charles Dickens (I'm partial to Bleak House), Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, and Margaret Atwood.

I tried to comment over and over again, but it isn't working. There are just too many great books.

Instead, I will compile a list of ten from the ones people have already suggested:

(1) To Kill A Mockingbird
(2) Brave New World
(3) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
(4) Alice in Wonderland
(5) One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
(6) Jane Eyre
(7) The Life of Pi
(8) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(9) Treasure Island

and (10) I haven't read The World According To Garp yet, but I did read another really good Irving book A Prayer For Owen Meany, so that is my indirect 10th suggestion.

-- M1001

This is perhaps a masculinely biased list. Also, instead of ten, I give a baker's dozen.

Shogun
The Gospel According to Luke
Tales of Power
Octavio Paz Selected Poems
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Atlas Shrugged
The Fencing Master
Bombardiers
The Orchid Thief
Where Mathematics Comes From
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
Collected Fictions
Nine Hundred Grandmothers

These 13 world, I think, give one a bit of entertainment as well as an explanation for a lot of what we think we know today.

#8, okay, I'm not up on the 2008 list, but I'm pretty sure most of these books are on neither it, nor the original list. I'm sure they're great and all, but not what this group is here to discuss.

The question was 10 of the best books to read right now.
The 1001 list is sooooo over reaching...

Ah, yes, I see what you mean. I read the question to ask for "the top 10 of the 1001," which is something different than what you read. No problem with the list you provided, but this group is pretty focused on only discussing the 1001 list (okay, the two 1001 lists). There are at least a few threads though on what should be on the list, and I believe the publishers are on the look out for new suggestions too, so you might want to check those out.

Thank you all SO much! I'm heading to the library tomorrow (today? :P I stay up late) and will most definitely be checking most if not all of these books out! This website is just so useful! :)

Much love,
Jackie

I'll chip in my 2 pence.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord
The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
1984, George Orwell

Shorter than you requested.

Does anyone know if the Marshall Cavendish books where Complete and Unabridged?

hello lesmiserables, yes they are (complete etc). it's been a long time since they were sold but there are a few specialist sites that are able to sell individual / full sets of most marshall cavendish series.
if you want the links just let me know.

Hi yosarian and thanks for the info. I just picked up a few at a charity shop and wondered if they were complete editions. cheers. I will read without trepidation now! ;-)

I won't be able to tell you the top ten of the 1001 list until I finish it which, by my latest estimate will be sometime around my 50th birthday.

In the meanitime, these are the books that I've rated "superb" on my book blog in the three years I've been reviewing books and since I started reading off the 1001 list.

Cancer Ward Solzhenitsyn
A Fine Balance Mistry
Cry The Beloved Country Paton
Invisible Man Ellison
To the Lighthouse Woolf
Seize the Day Bellow
The Waves Woolf
War and Peace Tolstoy
The Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck

That's only 9 in three years so you can see I'm pretty harsh in my ratings. Superb books have to, for me, impact my life in some way as each of these has.

Some of these I've reviewed on here, but all my reviews are over at www.johnandsheena.co.uk/books