Best novels to read

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invisiblewitnes

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Hi,
I am looking for good novels to read. Does anyone have suggestions for the best novels to read. Doesn’t matter what kind or subject. Just looking for good literature to read and share with others.

God bless.
 
I recently read The Late Mattia Pascal by Luigi Pirandello. Definitely worth reading! It quickly made its way to my list of favorite novels.
 
The Island of the Day Before; Umberto Eco.

Foucault’s Pendulum; Umberto Eco

ICXC NIKA
 
Diary of a Country Priest
North of Hope
The Edge of Sadness
Things as They Are
All Quiet on the Western Front
 
Island of the world - Michael D Obrien
Theophilos - Michael D Obrien
any Michael D Obrien novel
Iscariot - Tosca Lee
The Assyrian - Nicholas Guild
Mortal - Forbidden - Sovereign -Ted Dekker
 
My daughter is currently reading 80 books around the world. She’s started with an alphabetical challenge, but my grandson misunderstood her so once she has completed the alphabet she will continue reading without regard to alphabetical order. The idea is to choose books from different parts of the world. She is currently reading the No. 1 Lady’s Detective Agency, a very quick read from Botswana.
I like books by Elizabella Allende, daughter of the south American dictator–House of Spirits, James Michener, Jack London, and many other excellent authors.
 
I agree with James Michener-interesting reads, read a lot of John Steinbeck, especially East of eden, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, almost any book by Edna Ferber-great American epics, Giant to name one of her most popular, I loved that little book called The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (or something close to that), Marilyn Robinson’s Housekeeping has a great clarity in its descriptions. Jane Austen’s books,

Mc Teague is a good novel. Takes place in old San Francisco. Great adventure ,

Giants in the Earth is about the Scandinavian immigrants in Minnesota area.

Christy Brown’s books about his life are like novels.

Gone with the wind -Margaret Mitchell, and its sequel: Scarlet by Alexandra Ripley.

“Trinity”
 
Off the top of my head:
  1. The complete works of Jane Austen, especially Emma.
  2. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (The Prague Cemetery is also good, but ugly…)
  3. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  4. The Song of Bernadette by Franz Werfel
  5. The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles (The Collector is also quite good)
  6. Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Old-fashioned, but I love it!)
  7. The original Foundation Trilogy and Robot Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
  8. Rilla of Ingleside by L.M. Montgomery (a forgotten classic for younger and older readers; if you like her, make sure you try The Blue Castle too…)
  9. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (all-time favourite)
  10. Apres la pluie, le beau temps by Sophie, Comtesse de Segur (the French did inspirational romance in the 19th century far better than anyone in the 20th.)
    😃
 
Gone with the Wind
Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy

I tried to read Diary of a Country Priest, and I couldn’t really understand it. Is there a particular translation that is good??
 
Auntie_A said:
I agree with James Michener-interesting reads, read a lot of John Steinbeck, especially East of eden, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, almost any book by Edna Ferber-great American epics, Giant to name one of her most popular, I loved that little book called The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (or something close to that), Marilyn Robinson’s Housekeeping has a great clarity in its descriptions. Jane Austen’s books,

Mc Teague is a good novel. Takes place in old San Francisco. Great adventure ,

Giants in the Earth is about the Scandinavian immigrants in Minnesota area.

Christy Brown’s books about his life are like novels.

Gone with the wind -Margaret Mitchell, and its sequel: Scarlet by Alexandra Ripley.

“Trinity”
Click to expand...
My daughter started with Anna Karenina for her alphabetic trip around the world. Her objective is to read different novels without visiting the same country twice.
Most of the books posted on this thread are all good reads. My tendency is to find an author I like and to read books by that same author for a while. I enjoyed reading many of Taylor Caldwell’s books like Dear and Glorious Physician. The only author I can truly say that I’ve read everything he’s written (published) is James Clavell. He did not publish not many books. His most known is Shogun, part of his Asian saga. His books do have a lot of sex and violence. My least favorite was Whirlwind. I wrote an author study on James Michener for honors English while in high school. My daughter read Journey, set in Canada, as part of her novel trip around the world.
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry is a Pulitzer Prize winner. It’s interesting how the conversational tone changes when he moves between the different communities he portrays. I read the complete series.
 
Les Miserables is worth reading also, the signet classics translation. A long book but easy to read, and IMO, the greatest novel ever.

One of my other favorite authors is Walker Percy. The Moviegoer and Second Coming are favorite novels.
 
You can find lists of the great novels on the internet.
Here’s one:
greatbooksguide.com/OneHundredGreatestNovels.html
  1. Marcel Proust Remembrance of Things Past
  2. Fyodor Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamozov
  3. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
  4. Henry James The Ambassadors
  5. Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote
  6. Herman Melville Moby Dick
  7. William Faulkner Absalom, Absalom!
  8. Leo Tolstoy War and Peace
  9. Henry Fielding Tom Jones
  10. Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  11. Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude
  12. Henry James The Wings of the Dove
  13. Fyodor Dostoevsky Crime and Punishment
  14. Charles Dickens Great Expectations
  15. Victor Hugo Les Misérables
  16. Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice
  17. Fyodor Dostoevsky The Idiot
  18. Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises
  19. Hermann Broch The Sleepwalkers
  20. Franz Kafka The Trial
  21. James Joyce Ulysses
  22. Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary
  23. F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby
  24. William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury
  25. George Eliot Middlemarch
  26. Ralph Ellison Invisible Man
  27. Henry James The Golden Bowl
  28. Stendhal The Red and the Black
  29. Henry James The Portrait of a Lady
  30. Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina
  31. Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness
  32. Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse
  33. William Thackeray Vanity Fair
  34. Ivan Turgenev Fathers and Sons
  35. Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire
  36. Saul Bellow The Adventures of Augie March
  37. Charles Dickens Bleak House
  38. Ian McEwan Atonement
  39. George Eliot Silas Marner
  40. Fyodor Dostoevsky The Gambler
  41. Honore de Balzac Le Pére Goriot
  42. John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath
  43. J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye
  44. Jane Austen Emma
  45. Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre
  46. Emily Bronte Wuthering Heights
  47. Joseph Conrad Nostromo
  48. Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
  49. Truman Capote In Cold Blood
  50. Henry James The American
  51. Charles Dickens Oliver Twist
  52. Nathaniel West Miss Lonelyhearts
  53. John Fowles The French Lieutenant’s Woman
“We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.”
  1. Jonathan Franzen The Corrections
  2. Laurence Sterne Tristram Shandy
  3. Nathanael West The Day of the Locust
  4. John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men
  5. Joseph Conrad Lord Jim
  6. George Orwell 1984
  7. E.A. Poe The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
  8. Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited
  9. Stendhal The Charterhouse of Parma
  10. Willa Cather Death Comes for the Archbishop
  11. George Orwell Animal Farm
  12. James Fenimore Cooper The Last of the Mohicans
  13. Graham Greene The Power and the Glory
  14. Kingsley Amis Lucky Jim
  15. Raymond Chandler The Big Sleep
  16. J.K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
  17. Arthur Conan Doyle The Hound of the Baskervilles
  18. Jack Kerouac On the Road
  19. Rudyard Kipling Kim
  20. Thomas Hardy Tess of the d’Urbervilles
  21. Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities
“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far
better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
  1. Philip Roth American Pastoral
  2. Robert Heinlein The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
  3. Mary Shelley Frankenstein
  4. Jonathan Lethem The Fortress of Solitude
  5. Zane Grey Riders of the Purple Sage
  6. William Gibson Neuromancer
  7. Martin Amis Money
  8. Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter
  9. Agatha Christie The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
  10. William Faulkner As I Lay Dying
  11. Henry James Daisy Miller
  12. Thomas Hardy The Return of the Native
  13. David Foster Wallace Infinite Jest
  14. Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls
  15. Fyodor Dostoevsky The Possessed
  16. Leo Tolstoy The Death of Ivan Ilych
  17. Thomas Mann Buddenbrooks
  18. Leo Tolstoy The Kreutzer Sonata
  19. Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
  20. Charles Dickens David Copperfield
  21. Henry James The Spoils of Poynton
  22. V.S. Naipaul A Bend in the River
  23. Frank Herbert Dune
  24. Thomas Hardy Jude the Obscure
  25. Philip K. Dick Valis
  26. Thomas Pynchon Gravity’s Rainbow
 
Some of my favorite novels are:
  1. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
  2. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
  3. And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
  4. The Kindness of Strangers by Katrina Kittle
  5. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
 
The list of novels my daughter has read so far on her literary journey around the world:
A = Anna Karenina (1800’s Russia)
B = Bridge of Birds (Ancient China)
C = Clan of the Cave Bear (Ice Age Ukraine)
D = Daughter of Time (1400’s & @1950’s England)
E = Exodus (@1940’s-50’s Palestine/Israel)
F = First Eagle (@1990’s Navajo Nation)
G = Garden of Evening Mists (@1940’s-50’s & Modern @2010’s] Malaya/Malaysia)
H = House of the Spirits (@1900-1980’s Chile)
I = Irish Gold (@1920’s & @1990’s Ireland)
J = Journey (1890’s Canada)
K = Kalevala (mythical Finland)
L = Like Water for Chocolate (@1910’s Mexico)
M = Midnight’s Children (1947-1970’s India)
N = No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency (mostly @1990’s Botswana)
 
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