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50 favourite books!?

K

Kenji

New Member
The Wind in the Willows (Grahame)
The Little Prince (St Exupéry)
House of the Spirits (Allende)
The Pillow Book (Sei Shonagon)
Jacques le Fataliste (Diderot)
Tom Jones (Fielding)
Life of Pi (Martel)
Nature Diary (Whiteley)
Madame Bovary (Flaubert)
The Garden of Forking Paths (Borges) - short
Manon Lescaut (Prévost)
Master and Margarita (Bulgakov)
Evening Clouds (Shono)
The Little Town where Time Stood Still (Hrabal)
Tales (Miyazawa)
Snow Country (Kawabata)
Slaughterhouse 5 (Vonnegut)
Macbeth (Shakespeare) -play
Jude the Obscure (Hardy)
Our Mutual Friend (Dickens)
The Owl Hoots Twice at Catfish Bend (Burman)
The Summer Book (Jansson)
1984 (Orwell)
The Speckled Band (Conan Doyle)- short
The Rock of Tanios (Maalouf)
The Alchemist (Coelho)
The Sound of Waves (Mishima)
A Child's Christmas in Wales (Dylan Thomas)- short
Dangerous Liaisons (Laclos)
The Tale of Mr Tod (Potter)
The Cricket in Times Square (Seldon)
Phedre (Racine)- play
The Tightrope Men (Bagley)
The Rainbow (D.H.Lawrence)
Treasure Island (Stevenson)
Kensuke's Kingdom (Morpurgo)
Landslide (Bagley)
Cat's Cradle (Vonnegut)
Under Milk Wood (Dylan Thomas)- play
As I Lay Dying (Faulkner)
The Day of the Jackal (Forsyth)
When Eight Bells Toll (Maclean)
Siddhartha (Hesse)
101 Dalmatians (Smith)
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (Sterne)
Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass (Carroll)
The Giving Tree (Silverstein)
Around the World in 80 Days (Verne)
The Outing (Dylan Thomas)- short
The Nun (Diderot)

My top 50 (some from earlier times in my life), by way of introduction. Your favourites, please!
 
Welcome!

I've never thought of making a Top 50 list. Could be fun! Have you read Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? If you liked Around the World in 80 Days, you'll love some of his other work too!
 
Sell Sword: no, i don't think i've ever been to that forum. Must be an imposter! Or else i've got a split personality with an alter ego i don't know about- perhaps a werewolf?

Dele: thanks for the welcome. Canada is a great friendly country. we had a lovely holiday there, thanks. I've read Journey to the Centre of the Earth but only seen the film of 20,000 Leagues.

Novella: actually i really don't read that much, i'm just getting on a bit. I gave up novels for years (many of my favourites are from my school or student days) but started again after reading Life of Pi. The other thing is i like to try things from different countries not just the latest blockbusters. I'm sure with lots of other people's lists i'd only have read a minority. New York state is the only part of the US i've been, crossing over at Niagara falls for a couple of hours. I understand the train journey in one of my favourite films, Hitchcock's North by Northwest, was filmed along the Hudson river.
 
I can't list 50 books here, but a few favorites by particular authors whose complete (or near) works I've read.

Hardy--Jude the Obscure
Dickens--Great Expectations
Lawrence --Women in Love
Woolf--To the Lighthouse
Thomas Wolfe (NOT Tom Wolfe)--You Can't Go Home Again
Shakespeare--Henry V
LeCarre--The Honourable Schoolboy

Lighter reads:
Nick Hornby
Mary Karr
Susan Minot
Amy Tan
Gish Jen
Peter Dexter
Georges Simenon

Short story writers:
Jean Stafford
Raymond Carver
T. Coraghessan Boyle
Ring Lardner
Salinger
Robert Graves
Wodehouse

Poets:
Hart Crane
Carolyn Forche
Theodore Roethke
Adrienne Rich
Robert Lowell
Richard Wilbur
Elizabeth Bishop
W. B. Yeats
Wordsworth, especially Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey
(I cannot paint
What then I was, The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite: )

Unlike you , I don't read a lot of stuff in translation. Just here and there.

Authors whose work I do not like:

Norman Mailer
John Updike
Philip Roth


Bad books I have wasted my time on:
Cold Mountain
Snow Falling on Cedars
The Nanny Diaries
Bridget Jones's Paranoid Rant



I adore the poetry of Dylan Thomas--we have him in common as I used to frequent The White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village where he spent many an hour. My favorite is probably The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower
 
Where are you from, if you don't mind my asking? I wholeheartedly agree that Canada is a wonderful country. I couldn't imagine a more beautiful place to live!
 
I'm from Wales. I only wish i'd seen more than a speck of your country- Toronto and Niagara, and the drive in between. I was delighted with the friendliness of the people. Wales has plenty of variety for a little place, and very green and pretty it is too. But i was still surprised when a Canadian woman on holiday here said she'd always longed to visit Wales as she'd heard it was so beautiful! I was thinking more like the other way round.
 
I guess the grass is always greener on the other side. I an understand her longing to see Wales if she's from the GTA. I'm originally from several hours north of Toronto, which is much nicer than the area you visited.
 
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