top five on your TBR list?

[abecedarian]

yes, ma'am.
*goes into corner with TBR notebook, counts quickly*

I have approximately 550 titles on my list. If I read one book a week, it would take me 11 years to read them all!! I told you I didn't want to know!

Ha! I KNEW I liked you!! We should trade lists..I keep mine in a 9x6 three ring binder, and it goes on for sheets and sheets..and like everyone else around here, I'm always on the lookout for more titles to add~

 

[G4G]

If I think too much about my tbr list, it seems like it's all too much to get through, and that I'll never find the time. It's in fact a little bit scary.

 

[ions]

Don't you find with a list that long you can forget why you added a book to the list? I have 104 titles in my list of books to be read. I don't own all of them unfortunately. For the most part I can look at any one of those 104 on the list and remember why I added any particular title. I do think I would forget why I added some if that list grew any longer.

 

[cajunmama]

Yes, I do tend to forget why a title is on there, but I trust myself, and know I put it on there for a reason. I won't promise to read every title, I frequently start books I don't finish, or return them completely unread, and I am always adding to my list. It is in a small 4x5 spiral notebook that is getting more wear than I had anticipated.

And I must add, I fortunately don't own them. I wouldn't have the money to buy them, nor the space to house them. I mainly borrow from the library (Hooray for a good public library system).

 

[abecedarian]

Don't you find with a list that long you can forget why you added a book to the list? I have 104 titles in my list of books to be read. I don't own all of them unfortunately. For the most part I can look at any one of those 104 on the list and remember why I added any particular title. I do think I would forget why I added some if that list grew any longer.

I do forget sometimes. But I go over the list fairly regularly, and that helps. Sometimes I'll go to Amazon and look up the titles I've forgotten about. I've found lots of books from my list at libary sales lately. This summer I found a boxload at an estate sale that were on my list-or at least the authors were..If the we ever get the snowstorm of the century, I'm set for reading material! Now, if I could just get a rick or two of wood and some groceries stockpiled; let it snow!!

 

[abecedarian]

The whole TBR list is just a list of Candidates, or Possibilities..not a "have to read or I go crazy" list. I don't own them all either. Usually I know ahead of time I don't want to buy a certain title. I use the library for all its worth. Interlibrary loan via computer is a Godsend!

 

[CattiGuen]

I always have a difficult time deciding what to read next. But, if I stick to my current mood, here's the list. These are all patiently waiting on my bookshelf.

1. Naked Lunch-Burroughs

2. Welcome to the Monkeyhouse-Vonnegut

3. Brass-Walsh

4. The Losers' Club-Perez

5. The Fountainhead-Rand

 

[ja9]

Yes, that really was my whole fiction list - I somehow missed the part about only showing the top 5 and put in the whole thing. Sorry about that!

My non-fiction list has about 100 titles, so when you take that into account I seem to be on a par with everyone else.

Now all we need to do is live for 150 years so that we can read all this!

 

[abecedarian]

Yes, that really was my whole fiction list - I somehow missed the part about only showing the top 5 and put in the whole thing. Sorry about that!

My non-fiction list has about 100 titles, so when you take that into account I seem to be on a par with everyone else.

Now all we need to do is live for 150 years so that we can read all this!

Yup, no excuses for boredom for folks like us!

 

[MonkeyCatcher]

Don't you find with a list that long you can forget why you added a book to the list? I have 104 titles in my list of books to be read. I don't own all of them unfortunately. For the most part I can look at any one of those 104 on the list and remember why I added any particular title. I do think I would forget why I added some if that list grew any longer.

I've forgotten why I put about 1/5 of the books on my list, or forgotten which belong to which series etc. I think that when I start a "Books Read" book next year, I'll also buy another matching notebook where I can list all my TBR books, with a little piece of info on each to help me remember. I'll still keep my little 8B3 spiral notebook up to date also, as it's handy to carry with me to the library or bookstore.

 

[WoundedThorns]

hm just five? i have quite a few on my mind

finish Fight Club
re-read Lovely Bones by the 10th or so (due back to the library)
get my hands on a copy of Junky before reading Queer

i have a bunch of books at home to read. i never finish Farienheit 451 so i might just re-read it from the beginning.. i also never finished reading The Fountainhead, but i want more entertainment.

oh yeh, and The Green Mile by Stephen King

theres a bunch more, but they're just laying around my room anyhow. its the library books that are read quicker

 

[Stewart]

Not a top 5, but a selection of ten of the books on my list with the summaries from the back (or sleeve) and a link to Amazon should any interest you and you want to read reviews:

Fullalove, Gordon Burn (Amazon)
-----
Norman Miller used to be one of Fleet Street's finest. Now he's a middle-aged, burned-out hack with a gift for the sensational story, the shouting tabloid lead. But as he reports on a series of brutal murders and sex crimes, he's forced to wonder whether he is just a witness - or part of some deeper pattern of cause and effect...

The Harmony Silk Factory, Tash Aw (Amazon)
-----
This is the story of Johnny Lim, textile merchant, petty crook and inventor of the Amazing Toddy Machine, and his marriage to the beautiful Snow Soong.

In 1940, with the Japanese about to invade Malaysia, Johnny and Snow embark on their honeymoon to the mysterious Seven Maiden Islands, accompanied by a mercurial Japanese professor and Peter Wormwood, an Englishman adrift. Many years later, Wormwood looks back on this defining journey, while Snow's son goes in search of the truth of his mother and the infamous Chinese man she married.

Small Island, Andrea Levy (Amazon)
-----
It is 1948, and England is recovering from a war. But at 21 Nevern Street, London, the conflict has only just begun.

Queenie Bligh's neighbours do not approve when she agrees to take in Jamaican lodgers, but with her husband, Bernard, not back from the war, what else can she do?

Gilbert Joseph was one of the several thousand Jamaican men who joined the RAF to fight against Hitler. Returning to England as a civilian he finds himself treated very differently. Gilbert's wife, Hortense too, had longed to leave Jamaica and start a better life in England. But when she joins him she is shocked to find London shabby, decrepit, and far from the city of her dreams. Even Gilbert is not the man she thought he was.

The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro (Amazon)
-----
Ryder, a renowned pianist, arrives in a Central European city he cannot identify for a concert he cannot remember agreeing to give. But then as he traverses a landscape by turns eerie and comical - and always strangely malleable, as a dream might be - he comes steadily to realise he is facing the most crucial performance of his life.

A Long Long Way, Sebastian Barry (Amazon)
-----
Barely eighteen years old, Willie Dunne leaves Dublin in 1914 to fight for the Allied cause, largely unaware of the growing political and religious tensions festering back home.

Told in Sebastian Barry's characteristically beautiful prose, A Long Long Way evokes the camaraderie and humour of Willie and his regiment, the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, but also the cruelty and sadness of war, and the divided loyalties that many Irish soldiers felt. Tracing their experiences through the course of the war, the narrative brilliantly explores and dramatises the events of the Easter Rising within Ireland, and how such a seminal political moment came to affect those boys off fighting for the King of England on foreign fields - the paralysing doubts and divisions it caused them.

Notes on a Scandal, Zoë Heller (Amazon)
-----
From the first day that the beguiling Sheba Hart joins the staff of St. George's, history teacher Barbara Covett is convinced that she has found a kindred spirit. Barbara's loyalty to her new friend is passionate and unstinting and when Sheba is discovered to be having an illicit affair with one of her young pupils, Barbara quickly elects herself as Sheba's defender. But all is not as it first seems in this dark story and, as Sheba will soon discover, a friend can be just as treacherous as any lover.

Martha Peake, Patrick McGrath (Amazon)
-----
In vast, ancient Drogo Hall, young Ambrose Tree is told a tale by his dying uncle. By the light of a crackling fire he hears of flame-haired Martha Peake and her grotesquely misshapen father Harry, of the tragedy which took them from the rugged coast of Cornwell to hellish Cripplegate in London, and of the strange and terrible events which tore them apart, forcing Martha to flee to the New World - a turbulent place in the throes of revolutionary ferment, where her name would become the stuff of legend...

The Algebraist, Iain M. Banks (Amazon
-----
It is 4034 AD. Humanity has made it to the stars.

Seconded to a military-religious order he's barely heard of, Fassin Taak must travel amongst the Dwellers of the gas giant Nasqueron, in search of a secret hidden for half a billion years. Any help they offer will be on their own terms and in their own time.

But time is one thing Fassin Taak doesn't have, with each passing day bringing the system closer to war - a war that threatens to overwhelm everything and everyone he's ever known.

Arthur & George, Julian Barnes (Amazon)
-----
Arthur and George grow up worlds apart in late-nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur becomes a doctor, then a writer; George a solicitor in Birmingham. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, while George remains in hard-working obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events which made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages.

The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Amazon)
-----
Hidden in the heart of the old city of Barcelona is the 'Cemetery of Forgotten Books', a labyrinthine library of obscure and forgotten titles. To this library, a man brings his ten-year-old so, Daniel, one cold morning in 1945. Daniel is allowed to choose one book and from the dusty shelves pulls The Shadow of the Wind by Julián Carax. But as Daniel grows up, several people seem inordinately interested in his find. What begins as a case of literary curiosity turns into a race to find out the truth behind the life and death of Julián Carax and to save those he left behind.

 

[steffee]

Time to resurrect a great thread

My next five, in order, at the moment:

1. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
2. Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
3. Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller
4. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
5. The World According to Garp by John Irving

 

[bluecaffeine]

I guess my top 5 will be 5 I borrowed from the library today.

1. Saturday by Ian McEwan
2. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
3. A Million Little Pieces by James Frey
4. The Geographer's Library by Jon Frasman
5. Secret Life of Laszlo, Count Dracula by Roderick Anscombe

 

[steffee]

2. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

I just finished that. It's next months book of the month, here at TBF!

 

[Stewart]

At the moment, though highly subject to change:

1. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. Soul Mountain, Gao Xingjian
3. A High Wind In Jamaica, Richard Hughes
4. Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan
5. Cider With Rosie, Laurie Lee
​

 

[Balmy Westwind]

The books on the top of my TBR stack are

1. Rebecca Daphne DuMaurier

2. A Breath of Snow and Ashes Diana Gabaldon

3. Middlesex Jeffrey Eugenides

4. The Historian Elizabeth Kostova

5. Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha Roddy Doyle

This combination of course may change, since three of the above are library books.

 

[Stewart]

Move 3 & 5 to the top of the list, Balmy.

 

[tartan_skirt]

My currently planned next 5 are

1. The Wing Singer - William Nicholson
2. Slaves of the Mastery - William Nicholson
3. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
4. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
5. Wild Swans - Jung Chang

That could all change by the weekend though (going book shopping).

 

[abecedarian]

Here's my current top five list. The first 4 on 14-day loan, which is why they've been scooted up the mountain:

1.Shalimar the Clown-Salman Rushdie

2. The Hidden Family-Charles Stross

3. Grave Sight-Charlaine Harris

4. Knitting-Anne Bartlett (fiction)

5. The Reader's Choice: 200 Book Club Favorites-Victoria McMains( since I'm comtemplating starting a local reading group) If any of you have personal experience with f2f groups, please pm me.