Your Favorite Book(s) of all time

Mine has to be "Shop Girl" by Steve Martin. Seriously. He shows an amazing understanding of how men and women can talk without really communicating because they take a completely different meaning from the same conversation. I also love "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" by Carson McCullers. It's about how we basically are all lonely and longing for someone to understand us, something which people really can't find.

Mine has to be "Shop Girl" by Steve Martin.

I love steve Martin.  I liked Shop Girl but I absolutely LOVED The Pleasure of Your Company.

I have many "favorites", it just depends on my mood.  I have always been a voracious reader.  As I sit here now, one of my favorites that pops into my mind is The Education of Little Tree by Forrest Carter.  I have read it several times.  Each time it made me cry, laugh out loud, and question my own beliefs.  There has always been a lot of controversy about this book.  So, I copied the following directly from Wikipedia.  I would hope that anyone who enjoys a good, quick read would pick it up...

The false memoir of Forrest "Little Tree" Carter begins in the late 1920s as the protagonist is given over into the care of his Cherokee grandparents, at the age of five years. The book was originally to be called "Me and Grandpa," according to the book's introduction. The story centers on a clever child's relationship with his Scottish-Cherokee grandfather, a man named Wales (an overlap with Carter's other fiction).

The boy's "Indian thinking" 'Granpa' (sic) and Cherokee 'Granma' (sic) call him 'Little Tree' and teach him about nature, farming, whiskey bootlegging, mountain life, society, love and spirit by a combination of gentle guidance and encouragement of independent experience.

The story takes place largely during the sixth year of the boy's life, as he comes to know his new home in a remote mountain hollow. Granpa runs a small whiskey operation during Prohibition, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. The grandparents and visitors to the hollow expose Little Tree to supposed Cherokee ways and "mountain people" values. Encounters with outsiders, including "the law", "politicians", "guv'mint", city "slickers" and "Christians" of various types add to Little Tree's lessons, each phrased and repeated in catchy ways. Which can be annoying after a while. (One of the syntactic devices the books uses frequently is to end paragraphs with short opinionated phrases starting with the word 'which', such as the sentence preceding this parenthetical remark.)

The state eventually removes Little Tree to an orphanage, where he stays for a few months. He is "rescued" by an old Indian friend who intimidates the Reverend in charge into allowing Little Tree's release.

I have many favorites but the first one that came to mind when I saw this thread was "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde.  I can't exactly pin-point what it is about this book that grabbed me so much but I thought it was just genius.

Another book I really liked was "Timeline" by Michael Crichton.  The movie sucked but the book was just mindblowing, I just couldn't put it down. 

I am at times apprehensive about picking up books from the new releases or any other of modernish books because I'm a classic lit kinda girl but I'm trying to get passed that.  So far it's been hit and miss but the ones I enjoyed the most were "Bridget Jone's Diary" and "Good in Bed".  Chick lit, I know but it was fun, light reading.

June

I just went back into the archives and was reading about other's favorites.  I love the fact that many posted a list for favorite children's books.  I know lots of you here are young mothers.  My favorite children's book was given to me when my son was about 1 year old.  It is titled "Love You Forever" by Robert N. Munsch.  I can hardly even think of the book now without my eyes welling up.   :\\\'(  I don't think I was ever actually able to read it to my son because I would always get so choked up.

It's a sweet (albeit a bit weird) story of a mother's love for her son.

I just went back into the archives and was reading about other's favorites.  I love the fact that many posted a list for favorite children's books.  I know lots of you here are young mothers.  My favorite children's book was given to me when my son was about 1 year old.  It is titled "Love You Forever" by Robert N. Munsch.  I can hardly even think of the book now without my eyes welling up.   :\\\'(  I don't think I was ever actually able to read it to my son because I would always get so choked up.

It's a sweet (albeit a bit weird) story of a mother's love for her son.

Pretty much anything by Robert Munsch.  He's a Canadian Icon.  One of his absolute best and mandatory reading for any child, IMO, is Paperbag Princess.

I have to say that my favorite books of all time were:

My number one will always be Atlas Shrugged...Ayn Rand.  I have about 100 pages dog-eared and highlighted so that I can go back and read them over and over again.  I'm excited b/c it's supposed to be a film in 2008.  If it's half as good as the book, it'll be a great movie. 

For Whom the Bell Tolls...Ernest Hemingway.  My husband got me to read it...the way he writes a story and describes his characters is incredible.  Quite possibly the best and most powerful "war scenes" ever!

Lovely Bones...Alice Sebold.  The first chapter shocked me...wasn't anticipating the way it started...sucked me in and it's one of the few books I've read over and over.  This one is supposed to a movie in 2007...sweet!

I just went back into the archives and was reading about other's favorites.  I love the fact that many posted a list for favorite children's books.  I know lots of you here are young mothers.  My favorite children's book was given to me when my son was about 1 year old.  It is titled "Love You Forever" by Robert N. Munsch.  I can hardly even think of the book now without my eyes welling up.   :\\\'(  I don't think I was ever actually able to read it to my son because I would always get so choked up.

It's a sweet (albeit a bit weird) story of a mother's love for her son.

I was lucky enough to inherit several boxes of very old books from my grams before she died.  There are a bunch of childrens books from the late 1800's/early 1900's.  My favorites out of that bunch are two sets of children's poems, one is titled  Poems for the very young child and the other is Silver Pennies.  I think they're both collections of different authors. 

I also was lucky enough to get an original copy of Memoirs of a London Doll which is told from the perspective of a doll and all her travels and trials.  Very good read for a young girl.  This one you can find reprinted in some specialty  book shops or online.  It's a wonderful story and i remember loving it so much as a child that i read it over and over.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. The best reading had to of been when I was actually in Kerala India (where the book takes place.)

Fantastic book - that is in my top 10!

In addition to The God of Small Things, my remaining top 10 fave books are, in no particular order:

1.  A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole (the story of how this book came to be published is very interesting.)

2.  The Great Gatsby

3.  Gone With the Wind

4.  The Fountainhead

5.  Atlas Shrugged

6.  The Sound and the Fury

7.  Jude the Obscure

8.  Tess of the D'Urbervilles

9.  Middlemarch

Other honourable mentions:
- The Mayor of Casterbridge
- Far From the Madding Crowd
- Under the Greenwood Tree
- We The Living
- Darwin in Malibu (the script of the play, which the Hampstead Theatre ran in October 2004)
- The Origin of Species
- The Selfish Gene
- The Ancestor's Tale
- A Prayer for Owen Meany
- Great Expectations
- The Alchemist
- The Magus
- Immortality
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- The London Embassy
- The Pillars of Hercules



(I was interested to see how many of these I had in common with other posters here.)

(I was interested to see how many of these I had in common with other posters here.)

I recently had to come up with a list of my 15 favourite books in order to join a LiveJournal reading community. (They bombard you with questions, and you have to defend your choices before being voted in. Quite frightening!) Anyway, my 15, in no particular order, were:

1.    Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
2.    Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
3.    Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
4.    A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas
5.    Empress of the Splendid Season by Oscar Hijeulos
6.    Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
7.    Atonement by Ian McEwan
8.    Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
9.    The Grass Harp and A Tree of Night by Truman Capote
10.  The Far Cry by Emma Smith
11.  Barrel Fever by David Sedaris
12.  Trilby by George du Maurier
13.  Babylon Revisited and Other Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald
14.  A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
15.  The Inimitable Jeeves by P.J. Wodehouse

So we both picked A Confederacy of Dunces, and I also have some Fitzgerald on my list but went for his short stories instead.

I recently had to come up with a list of my 15 favourite books in order to join a LiveJournal reading community. (They bombard you with questions, and you have to defend your choices before being voted in. Quite frightening!) Anyway, my 15, in no particular order, were:

...

So we both picked A Confederacy of Dunces, and I also have some Fitzgerald on my list but went for his short stories instead.

That's really cool - another "Confederacy of Dunces" fan!

I went for an interview for a bookseller job in the States many years back, and the assistant manager who interviewed me wanted to suss out my true interest in reading (as they wanted passionate reader booksellers, not just someone looking for a retail job selling just anything!).  She asked me what my favourite book was, and that's the one I mentioned (as it was my absolute favourite at the time) and I could see the gleam in her eye when I said that, and I was immediately hired.   

I know I'll probably sound like a total dork saying this, but my absolute favorite book of all time is Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising, closely followed by the fifth book in the set, Silver on the Tree.     Ever since I was seven I've been a little bit in love with Will Stanton.

I know I'll probably sound like a total dork saying this, but my absolute favorite book of all time is Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising, closely followed by the fifth book in the set, Silver on the Tree.     Ever since I was seven I've been a little bit in love with Will Stanton.

What are these about? I've never heard of this series.

That's really cool - another "Confederacy of Dunces" fan!

There are a lot of us out there! I just came across this quiz which you might enjoy (particularly question #30): http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17506646/site/newsweek/

Another of my all-time favourites is Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence.