TPAYT

Thanks teacherlady. I've never heard of Mayday, but I will look it up. I,ve read all of DeMille's books. Some were better than others.

Belledame

*1. The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
2. The Lords of Discipline - Pat Conroy
3. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
4. Tuck Everlasting - Natalie Babbitt

And in no particular order: Wicked and Son of a Witch - Gregory Maguire; It - Stephen King; The Islanders - Helen Hull; Intensity - Dean Koontz; The Vampire Lestat - Anne Rice; The Gift of Fear (nonfiction) - Gave de Becker; HP and the Prisoner of Azkaban; HP and the Goblet of Fire - by J. K. Rowling

carolyn

Gone with the Wind
James Michener's Hawaii (and Centennial)
To Kill a Mockingbird
Cynthia Harrod-Eagles' l-oo-n-g Morland Dynasty series
Colleen McCullough's series on Rome
I love China Court, too.

Some other favorite authors:
Susan Hill
Helen MacInnes
Anya Seton (especially Green Darkness)
Charles Todd
Elswyth Thayne

So many books; so little time. I read more than two books a week, too. Retirement is the best job I've ever had!

zohngalt

#1 for me also is Atlas Shrugged.

I do not understand why a book, whose hero(ine)s refused to surrender their individual integrity and purpose, should be burned.

Harry Potter books for fun.

noe847

Mine would be:

<i>The Shipping News</i> - Annie Proulx

<i>In this House of Brede</i> - Rumer Godden (agree with Underhill and others)

<i>Crossing to Safety</i> - Wallace Stegner
(agree with Taitai; actually this may be my favorite book ever)

I used to love <i>Animal Dreams</i> by Barbara Kingsolver, but I don't think I would now. I really found her later novels annoying (<i>Prodigal Summer</i> was lame, lame, lame).

As a child I loved Burnett's <i>Secret Garden</i> and <i>Little Princess</i>, and the Narnia series by C.S. Lewis.

When they were in high school my daughters really liked <i>The Monkey Wrench Gang</i> and <i>The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</i>. They are voracious readers and leave me in the dust with the volume and breadth of their reading. My 22 yo has a bumper sticker: &quot;My other car is a Pynchon novel&quot;

Gardyloo

LOTR
Burr (Gore Vidal)
Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
Foundation trilogy (Isaac Asimov)
Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck)


Love Harry Potter and also Michael Chabon (Esp. Kavalier and Clay and Yiddish Policemen's Union)

snorkelluvn

Excellent thread!

I have to add seconds to:
*Pillars of the Earth (history, descriptions, great characters,plot)
*Grapes of Wrath (so brilliantly-written)
*Lonesome Dove
*Kite Runner

and two new ones:
*Peace like a River
*Under the Tuscan Sun

NaxosTravels

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is genius. Laughed out loud in public when reading it - see? It spreads joy-lol!

Naxos

mebe

The Secret Garden

semiramis

Too hard to narrow it down to one book! But some of my favorites are:

Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (basically any of her novels but these two are my favorites).

The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner by George Elliot (Mary Ann Evans)

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Light in August by William Faulkner

Oryx and Crake and The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood

A Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez

L'Etranger by Albert Camus (I had to read it &quot;en francais&quot; for a course and if one has a working knowledge of French I HIGHLY recommend reading in French as opposed to in translation.)

Favorite Sci-Fi:

Up the Walls of the World by James Tiptree jnr (Alice Sheldon)

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin

Historical Fiction:

I Claudius by Robert Graves

The Once and Future King by T.H. White

Kristin Lavransdatter(sp?) by Sigrid Undsett

non-Fiction:
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

Political:
The Prince by Machiavelli (sp?)

Diaries:
Samuel Pepys - The favorite ('and so to bed&quot
Although I also loved Dorothy Wordsworth

noe847

Oh, I agree with Kristin Lavransdatter.

smetz

teacherlady &amp; TPAYT, have you read Up Country by DeMille? personally I enjoyed that one the most.

azzure

Loving this thread. I am by no means unique in my choice of &quot;To Kill a Mockingbird&quot;; though I also love the &quot;Trees, Fields and Town&quot; trilogy by Conrad Richter.

My husband's all time favorite is &quot;How Green was my Valley&quot; -- one reason why we have spent time (and plan to spend more!) in Wales.

wellididntknowthat

Still Germinal by Zola. Only book I remember that had me crying at the end and with a sense of desolation that was repeated when I first travelled in France just South of Paris.

AMV

Love in the Time of Cholera by Marquez
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende.
Anything by Dorothy Dunnett, including her Johnson Johnson mysteries.
Bill Bryson's travelogues -- guaranteed to make you laugh out loud.
For fun: the Angelique series by Sergeanne Golon.
The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte.
Boris Akunin's The Winter Queen.

hanl

Lots to choose from, but my favourites would probably include:

Lord of the Rings (one of the few books I can read over and over again and find something new each time)

The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy (some of the most beautiful, evocative prose I have ever read)

The Mosquito Coast - Paul Theroux

Atonement - Ian McKellan (a &quot;modern classic&quot; if ever there was one)

Kitchen - Banana Yoshimoto (a perfect novella, beautifully translated into English)

_jinx_

Hemingway's my man.

Jinx Hoover

GSteed

Has the' Bible been mentioned..or maybe the Koran?

Cathinjoetown

Small point, Atonement is by Ian McEwan. Great escapist books--the Maisie Dobbs series. Great recently-written books, The Namesake, John Adams, Remains of the Day (the last one not so recent).

jcoz23

I absolutely love The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain. Great book! Obviously much has changed, but I think it's also amazing how much has remained unchanged from when he visited Europe!