What's your favorite book?

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Imitation of Christ - remains my go to.
I love reading it out loud.
It comes in large print also.
The little edition has these great black and white drawings.
Even the recital of it, on liberbox YouTube, is fantastic.

After that - the 4 volume set of the Philokalia
 
Dante’s Divine Comedy. One of the finest pieces of world literature.
 
I have a boatload of favorite books (mostly from back in the days when I had more of an attention span to read) so I’ll just name a few:

The Dead Girl by Melanie Thernstrom - I bought this book decades ago at Kmart expecting it to be a true crime nonfiction book. it ended up being much more than that, and a life-changing book for me. I understand the murder victim’s family was upset about the author, who was the victim’s best friend, writing the book, which is a shame because it is such a good and deep book about death, crime, relationships, being a young woman in college in the 80s, and other things.

Seven Days in May by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II - The movie version of this book is excellent too, but I actually read the book a long time before I saw the movie. I was on the edge of my seat through the whole last third part.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe - I read this as a teenager and thought the writing style was amazing and it contained a lot of useful life lessons too.

Encyclopedia of Rock by Logan and Woffinden (1st edition) - First edition of this was fantastic, I learned so much and it was a time capsule of the pre-New Wave era of 70s rock, especially British bands, which were somewhat hard to learn about in the USA then. Later editions started removing old bands to put in new bands and in general just got worse and worse. I never recommend any edition of any rock encyclopedia or rock history past the first one, for that reason (the Rolling Stone History of Rock n’ Roll had the same problem).

At Wit’s End by Erma Bombeck, and several of her subsequent books - Her stuff is getting a little outdated now but was very funny and true when written and some of it still applies today. I can still remember and in some cases quote verbatim sections of her first few books.

And Ladies of the Club by Helen Hooven Santmyer - Huge fat historical novel set in Ohio and written by an author in her 80s. It’s a huge book and covers an era of US history (post-Civil War to just after WWI) that is generally overlooked by authors. As a history buff who grew up in Ohio, I found it fascinating and I always wonder why it was never made into a miniseries as it has plenty of drama.

I could go on and on but that’s probably enough.
 
Till We Have Faces by CS Lewis and The Little Prince by that guy whose name I can’t spell or pronounce… Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
 
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Cash by Johnny Cash
The Last Lion by William Manchester
The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan
 
Maybe True Devotion to Mary. There a bunch of other books that I like, but Saint Louis de Monfort’s writing style is really good.
 
That’s…

That’s like asking me to pick my favorite child (if I had any children).

To list some:

Anything Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn Trilogy, Mistborn Sequel series, Stormlight Archive, Warbreaker, Elantris, etc.)
Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine (my absolute favorite childhood book)
The Green Rider Series by Kristen Britain (until the more recent books when she’s really beginning to tick me off as an author, she’s beginning to torture her main character just for the sake of it at this point)
Crown Duel by Sherwood Smith
The Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss (the third book will probably never come out, jk)
Introduction to the Devout Life by St. Francis de Sales

(One of these things is not like the others. 🤣 )
 
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I share @Entwhistler’s enthusiasm for The Divine Comedy, particularly (for me) in Dorothy L. Sayers’ translation. Also in the poetry department, Browning’s The Ring and the Book.

Some books in the field of New Testament studies:
Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses
Helen K. Bond, Pontius Pilate in History and Interpretation
Harold W. Hoehner, Herod Antipas
Joachim Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus
N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God

Fiction: Too many to list, but here are just three.
P.G. Wodehouse, Pigs Have Wings
John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl
Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

General Nonfiction: Again, too many to list. Maybe later.
 
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Non-Religious

Anna Karenina by Count Leo Tolstoy
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Any Inspector Lynley mystery by Elizabeth George

Religious

Holy Bible
The Imitation of Christ
Treatise on the Love of God
Dark Night of the Soul

@Tis_Bearself I’ve always meant to read And Ladies of the Club but haven’t yet. I love those big sprawling books with lots of characters.
 
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I was particularly fascinated by the parts of And Ladies…. that dealt with political events, such as elections, that virtually everyone in USA outside of history professors have completely forgotten about/ didn’t care about. People at the time were really worked up over these elections, just as they get today when we have an election.
 
I expect I’d get lost in the lives of the characters. I tend to do that in the big books. I almost hate to see the book end! I was that way with Anna Karenina. I really wanted to stay with Kitty and Levin. I have family in Ohio, too, and I visit there regularly, so a book set in that state would not be all the foreign to me. I checked Amazon, and it’s available from third parties.
 
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Hello.

I like Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear.

And always Jane Austen’s books.

Been really scared though to read some things as time goes on because some have had profound effects on my life - and I get emotional. I always prefer things that end with “…and they lived happily ever after” but it doesn’t have to be explicitly stated.

Lately I’ve been reading The Imitation of Christ and I just started reading Fr. Chad Ripperger’s book Lincoln and Omaha Sermons because it was mentioned on another thread.

I just don’t want to be traumatized by what I read any more.
 
crenfro said:
And always Jane Austen’s books.
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How could I have forgotten those? I LOVE them! Emma is my favorite.

The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt is another favorite.
 
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Actually, it is/was Esop’s Fables from when I was a small child, sick and in the hospital. And the Bible of course.
 
When I was little it was a large, thick book, bright green, with colorful animals on it titled: My Big Book of Jungle Stories. Made an animal lover out of me.
 
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