Top Ten Favourite Books

[lady_windermere]

I joined bookworms_cafe which is for people who love discussing books. People with many interests in books are there, but I thought I would make a list of my ten favourite books.

Thought I would start a little Meme, listing my favourite books. They are in no particular order, as it can depend on my mood where each are at any one time.

Rules
1) No poems
2) No plays
3) Only one book from each author

So here goes

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
The Kinky Friedman Crime Club by Kinky Friedman
Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O'Neill
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig
Love on the Dole by Walter Greenwood

Anyone else?

Comments

[gillo]

Only

ten

? That's hard.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper
Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

But I want plays and poems too! (Isn't

Mourning Becomes Electra

a play? Oh well.) I

need

Hamlet

and

A Midsummer Night's Dream

and

Paradise Lost

and

The Waste Land

and

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

! And that's just for starters...

[http://users.livejournal.com/woman_of_/]

Oh good choices! Mourning Bexomes Electra has been adapted for the stage, but the original is in book form. Love on the Dole has also been adapted for the stage as Men Should Weep.

I couldn't do plays, because choosing just one Oscar Wilde would have taken weeks!

[gillo]

For Wild

Importance

is head and shoulders above the others. Ask me to choose a Stoppard or a Shaw, though - that would be hard!

[http://users.livejournal.com/woman_of_/]

For Wilde, I am a bit of an expert on. I usually beat the Mastermind contestents.....really impressed my dad!

Or a Sheridan....to choose a Sheridan!

[gillo]

I've taught

The Rivals

seven times in the last eight years at Upper Sixth level, and I've directed

The Critic

twice as a school play. I don't know the others quite so well.

As for Wilde, I know his stuff pretty well, though I've only directed

Lady Windermere

and

Importance

. I can quote very large chunks of the latter off the top of my head!

[http://users.livejournal.com/woman_of_/]

Oh very good choices, I love those plays. My user name comes from an Oscar Wilde play, A Woman Of No Importance. I really pretty much like all his works. His Fairy Tales were great as well.

[gillo]

I love

The Selfish Giant

particularly - I used to read that to my girls when they were little.

Such a talented, tragic figure. Did you know they even changed the surnames of his children so they wouldn't be tainted after his trial? And even so, one of them was rejected by Oxford because of the link? (But his great-grandson Lucien went to Magdalen and was given Oscar's rooms in college. Some justice eventually.)

Sorry - Wikipedia-induced wittering there.

[http://users.livejournal.com/woman_of_/]

My favourite fairy tale was "The Remarkable Rocket", I even managed to get a reference into my Higher English story.

He had quite a life, and tragic as well as short. He had the same condition as my husband Malfran's Syndrom. Some of the symtomes are tall with enlongated etremities. Can cause an early death, as the blood is prone to clot, and rupture the heart.

I enjoy reading about authors lives, I sometimes find them more interesting that the author's themselves. I know you like him, but I find Dickens Life more interesting than his stories.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Changes every day, but... an attempted all-time top ten:

Master and Margarita, Bulgakov
Foucault's Pendulum, Eco (though Name of the Rose is one hell of a book, too)
The Stand, King
American Psycho, Ellis
The New York Trilogy, Auster
Crime And Punishment, Dostoevsky
The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Adams
Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut
Blonde, Oates
Lolita, Nabokov

*winces at amount of books that didn't make the cut*

[http://users.livejournal.com/woman_of_/]

Great choices. Couple I must check out! American Psycho, Ellis was really big when I was at University, all the guys were talking about it. I was spoiled so badly, even to the end, that I didn't read it. Alex was going to give me his copy after Jim read it, but Jim never stopped talking to me about it....I got a blow by blow account. I kinda feel I read it now.

I loved Adams' work. Each and every one of them. He was a sad loss.

[petzipellepingo.livejournal.com]

Only ten? "sigh"

1. Into the Wilderness by Sara Donati
2. Holy Disorders by Edmund Crispin
3. The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King
4. The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers
5. Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters
6. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
7. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
8. A Cold Mind by David L. Lindsey
9. The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis
10. Iron Lake by William Kent Krueger

[http://users.livejournal.com/woman_of_/]

You know, this is a really great way to get recs! :-).

Must read some of those, new ones, wonderful!

[mwrgana.livejournal.com]

another squee - you're a fellow Kinky lover!
SQUEEE!!

[http://users.livejournal.com/woman_of_/]

Oh yes, I was reading him, when I should've been reading text books!