Top 5 Favourite Books

D

Drroly

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In no particular order mine are:

Child of God by Cormac McArthy
Mort by Terry Pratchett
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C Clarke
The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi

Btw, any type of book counts, not just novels.
 
No Mean City by H Kingsley-Long and A McArthur
Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser
Angry White Pyjamas by Robert Twigger
Steaming in by Colin Ward
Guiness Book of Records
 
Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy-Douglas Adams
The Dice Man-Luke Rhinehart
Catch 22-Joseph Hellier
The Little Girl in the Radiator-Me
The Grand Design-Stephen Hawking

Apologies for the fourth one, but I'm kind of proud of it!
 
Not sure how to get it down to five...this list would probably change hourly!

Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson (could pick any of his, pretty much)
Forty Signs Of Rain, Kim Stanley Robinson (ditto)
Black Man, Richard Morgan (ditto - but that is the best)
Memory, Lois McMaster Bujold (ditto)
Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers (or any Wimsey book)
American Gods, Neil Gaiman
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

That's already seven, and I haven't mentioned Banks or Vinge or Flashman or Jonathan Strange or Charlie Mortdecai or...
 
Only five? The first two are easy:

Herman Melville : "Moby-Dick"
Thomas Pynchon : "Gravity's Rainbow"

The rest are a random choice from an extensive list of favourites:

Percy Wyndham Lewis : "The Human Age" (that's three, but they're inextricably linked)
Henry Fielding : "Joseph Andrews"
Arthur Conan Doyle : "The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes" (but I'd like all of them, please).

Honourable mentions for John Buchan, Cormac McCarthy, William Faulkner, Umberto Eco, Don DeLillo, Henry Fielding, Charles Dickens ... and a host of others.
 
Hard to pick 5, so here's the first ones that came to mind:

Stormy Weather - Carl Hiaasen. I could include anything by Hiaasen, but this one is particularly enjoyable.
Snow Crash, or Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
The 'Eden' trilogy - Harry Harrison
Dear Boy: The Life of Keith Moon - Tony Fletcher
To Reach The Clouds - Phillipe Petit. There he is in my avatar. If ever there was a man for whom the word 'impossible' has no meaning, it is Petit.
 
The long Walk.......................Slavomir Rawicz
Travis Magee series...............John D MacDonald
Exploration Fawcett................Col., Percy Harrison Fawcett
Flashman series.....................George MacDonald Fraser
Sherlock Holmes all of 'em......Arthur Conan Doyle
 
Re: RE: Top 5 Favourite Books

Francorelli said:
Stormy Weather - Carl Hiaasen. I could include anything by Hiaasen, but this one is particularly enjoyable.
Click to expand...

Yes. Have you tried Christopher Brookmyre? He strikes me as a sort of Scots cousin of Hiaasen.
 
Dr Rick said:
Francorelli said:
Stormy Weather - Carl Hiaasen. I could include anything by Hiaasen, but this one is particularly enjoyable.
Click to expand...

Yes. Have you tried Christopher Brookmyre? He strikes me as a sort of Scots cousin of Hiaasen.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip :icon_smile:. Anyone that compares favourably with Hiaasen has got to be worth a read.
 
The Unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro
Dominic - William Steig
The Asterix Series - Goscinny & Uderzo
Watership Down - Richard Adams
Matter - Iain M Banks (plus the other Culture novels)
 
Some of the books I truly like are graphic novels. Do they count? Combining them results in:

Job - Robert Heinlein, the only book I know where a gillette plays a role
Darkroom of Damocles - Willem Frederik Hermans
De Ijstrein (graphic novel) - Rochette/Lob
De dorpsgek van Schoonvergeten (belgian g n) - Comès
Mort - Terry Pratchet

Quite diverse in style
 
dont know if this counts - Audiobooks

Terry pratchet - Discworld...37 volumes
sherlock holmes - complete stories
sebastian faulks - birdsong
 
Excellent topic but I honestly don't think I could pick a top 5.

Some of my favourites are:

Stephen King - It, The Dark Tower series
All the James Herriot books
Pretty much all the PG Wodehouse 'Jeeves' books
George Orwell - Down and out in Paris and London, The road to Wigan Pier, 1984, Homage to Catalonia
Bill Bryson - Notes from a small country, The lost continent, Neither here nor there
All the Harry Potter books
Robert E Howard - The complete chronicles of Conan
Hanif Kureishi - Intimacy
The Max Arthur 'Voices' books
JRR Tolkien - The Hobbit
John Steinbeck - The grapes of wrath
 
In no particular order; and not necessarily my favourites, but the ones that made the greatest impact at the time they were read;
The Women's Room by Marilyn French (probably saved my life)
On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates
The Dice Man by Luke Reinhardt
Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
Jonathon Livingstone Seagull by Richard Bach

And as Tall Paul has already broken all the rules, I'll add Grapes of Wrath, and pretty much anything by Annie Proulx.
 
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