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20 Books Everyone Should Read!


Nollaig

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Most official best lists make me cringe and really are not to be taken too seriously.Fyodor Dostoyevski- The Brothers Karamazov (imo any official list without this on it is embarassing) one of the best books ever, possibly thee best.Victor Hugo- The laughing man.Franz Kafka- The trial.Alain Fournier- Le Grand Meaulnes.Moliere- Tartuffe.Impossible really to conduct a top 5, you could go on and on.Ben Mines- Good list! just bought Hypnerotomachia Poliphili & Don Quixote. Monuments of literature.

 

Thanks Bookologist.

 

I posted a review of the English translation of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili here. It didn't attract much attention, but then again (at least, so I tell myself) it's not a book that many people read. :D

 

(Warning: plot spoilers a gogo).

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Ben- replied to the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili thread, couldn't find a way to PM you?

 

Just one thing, Bookologist. When you order this book, be sure to order the hardback edition! The cover of the paperback edition is a gaudy commercial farce, with a loud plug for The Rule of Four, which horribly mars the value of the book as an aesthetic object, which is something it was emphatically intended to be.

 

See for yourself. (I couldn't find a bigger image of the softcover edition, but you can probably see from this thumbnail that it's hardly what the creator of this supremely elegant book had in mind).

 

The softcover cover:

 

t_1m_4fa8a5f.jpg

 

The hardcover cover:

 

t_2m_fcc3dfe.jpg

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  • 2 weeks later...

okay here goes..

 

1. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

2.Harry Potter Series - J.K Rowling

3.The Memory Keeper's Daughter - Kim Edwards

4. My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult

5.Let The Circle be Unbroken - Mildred. D Taylor

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I was curious to see how the top books had changed, so I thought I'd help Roxi out and tally up the new top books :lol:

 

To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee (10)

Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling (8)

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (7)

My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult (6)

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (5)

The Stand - Stephen King (5)

His Dark Materials trilogy - Phillip Pullman (5)

Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (4)

Twilight saga - Stephenie Meyer (4)

1984 - George Orwell (4)

Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger (3)

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (3)

Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (3)

Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card (3)

A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini (3)

Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (3)

The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (3)

Watership Down - Richard Adams (3)

Noughts and Crosses - Malorie Blackman (2)

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Hadden (2)

Crimson Petal and the White - Michael Faber (2)

Discworld series - Terry Pratchett (2)

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller (2)

5 People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom (2)

The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne (2)

The Book Thief - Markus Zusak (2)

The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde (2)

The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (2)

Animal Farm - George Orwell (2)

Isles/Rizzoli series - Tess Gerritsen (2)

The Memory Keeper's Daughter - Kim Edwards (2)

The Colour Purple - Alice Walker (2)

The Book of Lost Things - John Connolly (2)

Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (2)

The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett (2)

The Good Earth - Pearl S. Buck (2)

The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon (2)

The Odyssey - Homer (2)

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (2)

The Giver - Lois Lowry (2)

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And all the rest of the books that were voted for are:

 

Hamlet - Shakespeare

Earth's Children - Jean Auel

Angels Watching Over Me - Jacky Newcomb

Slash - Slash

Die For Me - Karen Rose

Deja Dead - Kathy Reichs

Dead Man's Footsteps - Peter James

The Sleeping Doll - Jeffery Deaver

The Plucker: An Illustrated Novel - Brom

Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen

Hangover Square - Patrick Hamilton

In Cold Blood - Truman Capote

The Hacienda - Lisa St Aubin de Teran

Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides

Karl Marx - Francis Wheen

The Collector - John Fowles

The Missionary Position - Christopher Hitchens

The House on Mango Street - Sandra Cisneros

Chronicles of a Death Foretold - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy

If This is a Man - Primo Levi

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

The Bridge Over the Drina - Ivo Andric

Buddenbrooks: Decline of a Family - Thomas Mann

Ten Little Niggers - Agatha Christie

The Sorrows of Young Werther - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Betty Blue - Philippe Dijan

American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis

All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque

The Art of Racing in the Rain - Garth Stein

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson

Xenogenesis/Lillith's Brood - Octavia Butler

An Absolute Scandal - Penny Vincenzi

P.S. I Love You - Cecelia Ahern

The Pre-Nup - Beth Kendrick

Bartemeus Trilogy - Jonathan Stroud

Eragon - Christopher Paolini

Shardlake series - CJ Sansom

The Borgia Bride - Jeanne Kalogridis

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

The State of the Union - Douglas Kennedy

The Far Pavilions - M M Kaye

Fortune's Rocks - Anita Shreve

Midwives - Chris Bohjalian

The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

The Power of Five series - Anthony Horowitz

The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer

The Virgin Suicides - Jeffrey Eugenides

The Reader - Bernhard Schlink

The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

The Art Spirit - Robert Henri

Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

Ordinary People - Judith Guest

For One More Day - Mitch Albom

Ulysses - James Joyce

Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

The Man Without Qualities - Robert Musil

Collected Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges

An Instance of the Fingerpost - Iain Pears

The Eyre Affair - Jasper FForde

Consider Phlebus - Iain M. Banks

When the Lion Feeds - Wilbur Smith

The Damage Done - Warren Fellows

19 Minutes - Jodi Picoult

The Gilgamesh Epic - Andrew George

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

Light Years - James Salter

Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf

Keeping Faith - Jodi Picoult

The Day of the Jackal - Frederick Forsyth

Outlander/Crosstitch - Diana Gabladon

Touching the Void - Joe Simpson

Black Beauty - Anna Sewell

The Enchanted Wood series - Enid Blyton

Black Like Me - John Howard Griffin

Mister God This Is Anna - Fynn

One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest - Ken Kesey

A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde

One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights) - Various Authors

Inferno - Dante Alighieri

Dracula - by Bram Stoker

The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis

The Lord of the flies - William Golding

Captain Correli's Mandolin - Louis de Burnieres

Chocolat - Joanne Harris

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - Robert Tressell

Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens

Gulliver’s Travels - Jonathan Swift

Middlemarch - George Eliot

Narcissus and Goldmund - Hermann Hesse

The P

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Whoa! Nice job, Kelly! Impressive work.. I have no idea how you kept all that straight to come up with the tally. :lol: Thanks for doing it; very cool to see how it's all shaped up so far.

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Yeah :lol: The top 20 books have changed a lot from the original list, although To Kill A Mockingbird is still the top book, I'm going to have to read some of these now though to see how good I think they are :roll: Good job I already have To Kill A Mockingbird on my TBR pile :)

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Not wanting to be rude, but "Everybody should read" Harry Potter, Twilight and Jodi Picoult? Really? They might be peoples' favourite books, but I'm hard pressed to believe everybody should read them, that there's any merit beyond entertainment...

 

 

Why not? People judge and have different opinions on books,its all about preception and obviously a lot of people have come to the same conclusion about a lot of these books..anyway whats wrong with just reading these books for entertainment?:lol:

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Not wanting to be rude, but "Everybody should read" Harry Potter, Twilight and Jodi Picoult? Really? They might be peoples' favourite books, but I'm hard pressed to believe everybody should read them, that there's any merit beyond entertainment...

 

I'd like to add King, Pullman and Gerritsen to the list of "what on Earth for??"

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Not wanting to be rude, but "Everybody should read" Harry Potter, Twilight and Jodi Picoult? Really? They might be peoples' favourite books, but I'm hard pressed to believe everybody should read them, that there's any merit beyond entertainment...
I agree with your sentiments. Under normal circumstances, I'd be appalled if people were told they should read Stephanie Meyer or Dan Brown, but there aren't any rules set down here. I'd struggle in good conscience to list five books/series that people should read. I can only think of two books:

 

1. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

 

and, despite the errors, the Katherine Woods translation of

 

2. The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery.

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