What are your most favourite books ever?

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Zach said:
Short story: Melville - Bartleby the Scrivener
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I remember that well! A great short story. “I’d prefer not to”, was his line.

My favourite short story is James Joyce The Dead.
 
I absolutely love Frost in May by Antonia White (favourite book ever and let’s say that it certainly didn’t hinder my becoming a Catholic) and I can also recommend Rachel’s Holiday by Marian Keyes…it’s not about a holiday and don’t let any silly ‘chick-lit’ covers deter you!

Why not join Goodreads online? I’ve found so many books I want to read I might not live that long lol!
 
Leaving out religious books…

I like true crime.
My favorite true crime books are “Bad Blood” by Richard M. Levine and “The Dead Girl” by Melanie Thernstrom. The latter one is not like a normal true crime, as the author is writing about the murder of her best friend.

I also like mid-century humorists. I loved Erma Bombeck’s first four or five books from childhood and can quote a lot of her first book, “At Wit’s End”, from memory because I liked it so much. I was probably too young to understand all what I was reading when I first read her books but her writing style just cracked me up. I loved her work so much I visited her grave and the street named after her when I was in Dayton. I also love Betty McDonald’s books a lot even though I agree with her critics that it sounds like she used snark and black humor to make light of her sufferings in life, such as a bad first marriage, job instability during the Depression, and catching TB from a coworker and ending up in a TB asylum for a couple of years at which many people died.

I also always really loved Francis Hodgson Burnett’s “A Little Princess” (don’t like her other stuff, just “A Little Princess”) and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books.

I’m not really big on fiction, true stories are almost always better. If I have to pick a fiction book it would be some old bestseller like “All the King’s Men” by Robert Penn Warren - the original ONLY, not the “restored” version, I absolutely hate when publishers put out other drafts or versions of famous books and I hated it when that happened to “To Kill a Mockingbird” also, ruins the book for me - or “Seven Days in May” by Knebel and Bailey. Both of which were also made into great films.
 
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Quite a few. I love C.J. Box, Michael Connelly, Sue Grafton when it comes to mysteries. I love Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte when it comes to classics. I love Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. I think P.G. Wodehouse was a master of English prose and if he hadn’t been a comedian, he would have won the Nobel Prize for literature.
 
I’m going to assume the Bible is out of consideration.

In that case The Catcher in the Rye has been my favorite for a long time. I read it back in highschool and really identified with the main character, and rereading it always takes me back to that time in my mind. A very well constructed look into the brain of an irritated 16 year old.

As a big Dickens fan, I’ve also always loved Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, and A Christmas Carol (which I just reread, as I try to do every year). Page-for-page, I don’t think there’s much in literature that can go up against A Christmas Carol.
 
Non-religious? The Stranger by Albert Camus.

Overall, though, can’t beat Sacred Scripture.
 
Just read Dracula for the first time in 2018. Very well written. Definitely one of my new favorites.
 
Thom18 said:
Non-religious? The Stranger by Albert Camus.
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I find this interesting, given that when we were forced to read this for a literature class in high school, I found it to be the most boring, pointless waste of paper I had ever seen in my life. I did not care at all what happened to the protagonist. The only redeeming quality of the book was that about a year later I discovered The Cure who were brand new and had just released their first US album and when I got to the track “Killing an Arab” I immediately recognized that it was about “The Stranger”.

Just goes to show how one person’s great art is another person’s fish wrap.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
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Thom18:
Non-religious? The Stranger by Albert Camus.
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I find this interesting, given that when we were forced to read this for a literature class in high school, I found it to be the most boring, pointless waste of paper I had ever seen in my life. I did not care at all what happened to the protagonist. The only redeeming quality of the book was that about a year later I discovered The Cure who were brand new and had just released their first US album and when I got to the track “Killing an Arab” I immediately recognized that it was about “The Stranger”.

Just goes to show how one person’s great art is another person’s fish wrap.
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I read it on the recommendation of a friend, a fellow philosophy major. I think all philosophy majors enjoy it, or at least all of them at my uni, because it’s insanely popular among us.
 
I have always disliked philosophy and found most of it to be a very dull waste of time, so that’s likely why I did not like the book.

I just looked up that Cure track on youtube for nostalgia’s sake and found that a whole lot of people who never read the Camus book apparently thought it was a racist song about white Europeans killing Arabs. :roll_eyes:
 
If I had to pick a single favorite Dickens book, it would be Barnaby Rudge, mainly for the unusually large cast of villains – seven, I think – each one of whom ends up meeting an appropriate fate. For a Catholic reader, it has the added interest that it’s a historical novel dealing with the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in 1780.
 
That’s one of the ones I haven’t read yet (I also have too many books to get to them all when I’d like). I will bump that one up on my reading list.
 
KyPerson said:
I think P.G. Wodehouse was a master of English prose and if he hadn’t been a comedian, he would have won the Nobel Prize for literature.
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Agreed. Pigs Have Wings, one of my personal favorites, must rank as one of the best English novels written in the twentieth century.
 
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Fiction: “Pride and Prejudice” Jane Austen (for the wit and elegant style of narrative)

Non Fiction: “The Histories” Herodotus (although I have only read the translation by Robin Waterfield, for the delight I experience in comparing what he amazingly recorded correctly and what he recorded wrongly, in the light of our modern historical knowledge)
 
Here are a few…

Catherine of Siena - Sigrid Undset
Centennial, Chesapeake, Poland and Texas all by James Michener
Davy Crockett - Constance Rourke
Our Lady of Fatima - William T. Walsh
The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
The Song of Bernadette - Franz Werfel (Great movie too)
 
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Nah…wasn’t interested in Hawaii. Maybe I’ll get around to it but then again it will be a tired repeat lol
 
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Travels of Jaimie McPheeters
Journey to Matecumbe
Hie To The Hunters
The Education of Little Tree
Gone To Texas (made into the Outlaw Josey Wales)
Watch For Me On The Mountain
When The Legends Die
A Wrinkle In Time
 
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