The Road is amazing. Best book written in the last ten years.

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay
The Diary of Virginia Woolf (my TOP favourite)
Frost in May by Antonia White
The Journals of Sylvia Plath
Tom's Midnight Garden by Phillipa Pearce

and loads, loads more!

Yes, quite agree on The Road.

Here's my list:

Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Love in the time of Cholera - GG Marquez
My Cleaner - Maggie Gee
In a land of plenty - Tim Pears
Behind the scenes at the museum - Kate Atkinson

Gawd, that's hard. I want to do about 25.

Here's my list:

The Secret History by Donna Tartt
The Dissident by Nell Freudenberger
Darkmans by Nicola Barker
Disgrace by JM Coetzee
The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry


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Nessie - Picnic at Hanging Rock is a great book too!

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I struggled with The Road!

Oscar and Lucinda - Peter Carey

Ooh, good call Cherys!

Ooh, there are so many on here that I've loved...

I do intend to read Picnic At Hanging Rock - but if it's as creepy as the movie, I might be sleeping with the hall light on!

I wonder if David would be up for compiling the list when we reach 100? Presumably ranking in order of preference would be too finnicky...

Trilby - now I understand how to do it it's much easier. I will try to choose one out of every decade, leaving out the first ten, in the hope we can have a children's thread, later:

"The L-Shaped Room" by Lynne Reid-Banks
"Mapp and Lucia" by E.F. Benson
"The Raj Quartet" by Paul Scott
"The War Between the Tates" by Alison Lurie
"Our Mutual Friend" by Charles Dickens

I wanted to put
"Unless" by Carol Shields but that gives six, plus Olivia Manning's books, Jean Rhys and Carson McCullers and "Middlemarch" and "Jane Eyre".
God, this is impossible.


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Nessie, I was very tempted by Antonia White

Would be great if we could vote because some others have chosen books I might have gone for if they weren't taken already!

Jem, I ADORE Alison Lurie. Hardly ever come across a fellow Lurie-lover.

Picnic at Hanging Rock traumatised me as a child. It's all that 'not knowing'. It bugged me for days.

It's hard to limit to three, but I've done it on the grounds of which books have probably affected me the most, even though the list is interchangable and a lot, lot longer than this in reality:

The Hobbit J.R.R Tolkien
Brief Lives Neil Gaiman
The Compleat Traveller in Black John Brunner
The Dancers at the End of Time Michael Moorcock
Swords & Deviltry Fritz Leiber

JB




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*limit to 5 even!

The Raj Quartet is fab. I've been trying to find the TV adaptation on YouTube, to no avail...

I suspect quite a few people would choose Jane Eyre! It's one of those turning-point novels for teenage girls, isn't it?

I loved Alison Lurie as a teenager.

And the L-Shaped Room!

Funny, I nearly went to Hanging Rock today.

Yes, I don't love some of these now nearly as much as I did when I was, say, thirteen.

The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgeson Burnett
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkein
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
The Pursuit of Love - Nancy Mitford
I Capture The Castle - Dodie Smith

And actually, the authors I read over and over are people like Jaclyn Moriarty. Hmm. Maybe I should rethink those lists.

What's so great about The Road? I thought it was okay, but not nearly as good a post-apocalyptic novel as, say, On The Beach or Day of the Triffids.

Pride & Prejudice: Jane Austen
Middlemarch: George Eliot
The Weather in the Streets: Rosamond Lehmann
Gaudy Night: Dorothy L Sayers

then it was a real toss-up for no.5. I dithered between Woman in White by Wilckie Collins or One Good Turn Deserves another by Kate Atkinson. I think I will go for the Kate Atkinson 'cos I'm ashamed by how recent my choices are not!

Trilby, here is a virtual Easter present from me
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jewel-Crown-Complete-DVD/dp/B00075141W/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1238066017&sr=1-1