Your all time favorite books

[threebikesmcginty]

Asterix books.

 

[Richard A Thackeray]

Bill Brysons new book 'Road To Little Dribbling', as he writes about Hebden Bridge & Manchester in it

Stuart Maconies books are always worth a read (eg; 'Pies & Prejudice')

At the mountains of madness, hp lovecraft. 1920's gothic horror novel.

Lovecraft is a fantastic writer, he had an absolute abhorrance of the cold, & it really comes out in his writing, in 'Mountains Of Madness' itself

Anything by the late great Sir Terry Pratchett...everything is is a social/political commentary when you look in to it.....

Agreed, & even fairy tales (eg; Witches Abroad)

Anything with the City Watch in, gets my vote

 

[cisamcgu]

My all time favourites
Iain M. Banks - The culture novels - nothing comes close to these for a galaxy spanning sequence - simply stunning.

Other I have enjoyed recently
Vikram Seth - An Equal Music - a love story with violins.
Raymond E. Feist - The Magician series - a marvelous romp in a medieval fantasy

 

[Yellow Fang]

There's also Winged Victory by VM Yeates, although I'm not sure if it's in print at the moment.

That is on my Amazon wish list. I'll ask my mum to buy it for me for my birthday.

 

[John the Monkey]

Henri Barbousse - Under Fire
Jim Thompson - The Getaway
Stephen Volk - Whitstable
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness
China Miéville - Perdido Street Station
Alexander Solzhenitsyn - Cancer Ward
Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian
Primo Levi - If This is a Man / The Truce
Mervyn Peake - Titus Groan
Marcel Pagnol - The Water of the Hills
W. Somerset Maugham - Of Human Bondage
Emile Zola - Germinal
Dashiell Hammett - Red Harvest
Arthur Koestler - Darkness at Noon
George Orwell - Essays

 

[mrandmrspoves]

Mine too! "Snorkers - Good-oh!"

Perhaps he's got a bun on the oven?

 

[marknotgeorge]

Here's a couple of my all-time favourites:
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Chickenhawk by Robert Mason
Return to Auschwitz by Kitty Hart-Nixon
Stardust by Neil Gaiman

 

[Dayvo]

Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
The Rider - Tim Krabbe
Broke Through Britain - Peter Mortimer

The Bernie Gunther series by Philip Kerr
The Harry Hole series by Jo Nesbo
Alan Furst's war/espionage stories set in the Balkans.

 

[cyberknight]

Dune series -Frank Herbert.

 

[Flying_Monkey]

Dune series -Frank Herbert.

Although the middle volumes are poor. It's a shame he died when he did because the sequence was just picking up again with Chapter House Dune. I will not speak of the ones written by anyone else other than Frank Herbert...

 

[Flying_Monkey]

Henri Barbousse - Under Fire
Jim Thompson - The Getaway
Stephen Volk - Whitstable
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness
China Miéville - Perdido Street Station
Alexander Solzhenitsyn - Cancer Ward
Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian
Primo Levi - If This is a Man / The Truce
Mervyn Peake - Titus Groan
Marcel Pagnol - The Water of the Hills
W. Somerset Maugham - Of Human Bondage
Emile Zola - Germinal
Dashiell Hammett - Red Harvest
Arthur Koestler - Darkness at Noon
George Orwell - Essays

Nice list, most of which are also on my shelves, and the couple that aren't I'm going to look up.

 

[Flying_Monkey]

I was going to do non-fiction, but I got stuck on just history, so here's five books of history that I love:

Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294-1324 by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages by Norman Cohn
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II by Fernand Braudel
The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg
Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s by Mark Mazower

 

[User169]

Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann - sadly, I can't read this in German, but even in translation you sense the ambiguity and irony.
Black Lamb Grey Falcon by Rebecca West - encyclopedic, beautiful, but dreadfully long- winded. Factually prescient, physically intimidating.
A Time of Gifts/Between the woods and the water by Patrick Leigh Fermor - should be essential reading for any European teenager. Very rich, needs to be consumed carefully.
Nose to Tail Eating by Ferguson Henderson - cheerful, sensible, local and convivial.

 

[Kestevan]

American Gods - Neil Garmin
Assassins Apprentice - Robin Hobb
Saga of the Exiles - Julian May
Galileos Daughter - Dava Sobell

 

[SpokeyDokey]

Coasting - Jonathan Raban
The Escape Artist - Matt Seaton
The Noise of Time - Julian Barnes
The Ascent of Man - Jacob Bromowski
Chaos - James Gleik
His Dark Materials - Phillip Pullman
Worlds in Collision - Immanuel Velikovsky
What goes around - Emilly Chappell

To name but a few .....

EDIT: Spike Milligan's War memoirs that made me chuckle throughout my childhood and still do today.

@Fab Foodie

Great book and I found it a moving read. I can still hear Bronowski's voice from the TV series. Early 70's I think.