I have noticed that my list of favorite.books tends to be about half books that I read in the past year. Over time, new books replace older ones among my favorites but some older books stay on my list. I'm looking for books that you enjoyed but also that stuck with you, that you still recommend regardless of how long ago you read them.
I don't care whether they are in your top ten or twenty or thirty but they should have made a lasting positive impression for intriguing plot or depth of character.
I don't read horror but otherwise any genre or literary style is fair game.
I'm hoping this will be fun.
by boxer_dogs_dance
15 Comments
{{The last Unicorn by Peter S Beagle}}
– The Nix by Nathan Hill
– The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
I literally just recommended the Namesake this morning!
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott.
You ever read one of those books, and think it’s really modern, and then you look at the publication date and you realise how ahead of it’s time it is?
It’s pretty out there for a book written in 1884.
The Magus by John Fowles
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
The Wall by Marlen Haushofer
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Inkheart by Cornelia Funke
Captain Nemo’s Library by Per Olov Enquist
Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg (might be slightly under 5 years ago though… but I can assure you that it will remain a favourite of mine 🙂
The Shining Girls – Lauren Beukes (SF/mystery, somewhat horror-adjacent)
The Collapsing Empire – John Scalzi
Gideon the Ninth – Tamsyn Muir
– Stephen Donaldson’s first Covenant trilogy. I’d been a Lord of the Rings fantasist till then, but a friend suggested Covenant to me and it kind of turned me to the dark side.
– Same with Gap series, but sci-fi.
Dune
The Daughter of Time
Northanger Abbey
The Discovery of Witches Series by Deborah Harkness….so much better than the TV series
I don’t know if it’s considered horror – I call it more suspense/thriller, but The Silence of the Lambs.
Middlemarch.
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
*Ingathering: The Complete People Stories* by Zenna Henderson. SF about peaceful aliens whose Home is destroyed. One ship comes to earth and breaks up in our atmosphere in the 1800s and the refugees are scattered. This is the collected stories of them finding each other over the decades.
*The Heliand,* translated by G. Ronald Murphy. A translation of the Gospels originally written in the 9th century in Saxon. The Saxon original doesn’t just translate the Gospels into Saxon, it transforms them into a story Saxons could better relate to. (The high status Thengs Joseph and Mary go to the Hill Fort of Bethlehem and lay a richly dressed Jesus in a manger. The Angel Gabriel comes down to announce the Good News to Joseph’s horse herders.)
*The Dispossessed* by Ursula LeGuin. A Physicist raised in an anarchist society exiled to the moon of a planet is the first of his people to visit the planet in 200 years. That’s a really bald explanation of a very profound book.
Two that stick with me are Chocolat but Joanne Harris (the sequel was good too) and The Girl You Left Behind by JoJo Moyes