Who are your favourite authors/books?

[Lustymarriedmomcantgetenough]

Hello bookworms!!
My inquiring mind would love to know:

Who are your favourite authors? (Not necessarily on lit or even erotica)
What are your favourite books? (any genre, not just erotica)

I hadn't added mine. The responses are wonderful. I don't think I'm very well read! But now I have lots of books to explore. Thanks guys!

I love books, not sure what genre I could fit them all into:

Coming of age stories e.g. She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb
Fiction that takes me to another culture e.g. A Fine Balance Rohintin Mistry Midnight's children by Salman Rushdie
Female protagonist classics: Anna Karenina, Tess of the D'Ubervilles
Scandalous banned books: Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Story of O
Shakespeare, but only if I'm rehearsing it.

 

[rae121452]

off the top of my head, i can say my favorite book is "play it as it lays" by joan didion. i'll come back after i think a bit.

 

[Hypoxia]

The Joy of Cooking

 

[SimonDoom]

off the top of my head, i can say my favorite book is "play it as it lays" by joan didion. i'll come back after i think a bit.

It's always puzzled me why it isn't "Play It As It Lies", which, grammatically, it should be, because the right verb is "lies" not "lays." It's idiomatic, obviously, but it's not clear that before Joan Didion's novel "lays" was preferred to "lies." It's a golf idiom, and I'm familiar with golf, but I don't recall "lays" being used consistently more often than "lies." Curious.

 

[Emirus]

Any story with a good plot and well written. Preferably a thriller written by authors like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle through to David Baldacci.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

History, biography, sci-fi. Heck, anything ink-on-paper.

 

[ElectricBlue]

John Banville turns a sentence in most extraordinary way, probably my current favourite, although Haruki Murakami and his magical cats is right up there too.

(This guy isn't Murakami, but has a similar power over cats.

http://zenigata.tumblr.com/post/176307936751 )

Favourite book? I return to Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy every five or six years, have done so since I first read it, at sixteen. Fuchsia in her read dress, also sixteen, was my first literary crush.

http://www.mervynpeake.org/gallery/0106.jpg

 

[beachbum1958]

My de-stress list

The Tao of Pooh, & The Te of Piglet, (Taoism simplified for bears of little brain...) Benjamin Hoff
Winnie Ille Pu (A Latin translation of 'Winne-the-Pooh') Alex Lenard
The Wind in the Willows (unabridged)
Swallows & Amazons ~ Arthur Ransome
The Railway Children ~ E. Nesbit
5 Children and It ~ E. Nesbit
The Coral Island ~ R.M. Ballantyne
The Lacquer Lady ~ F. Tennyson-Jesse (unabridged)
Across The Nightingale Floor ~ Lian Hearn
The Moonstone ~ Wilkie Collins
Oroonoko ~ Aphra Behn 1688
Lorna Doone ~ R.D. Blackmore
The Mummy! ~ Jane Wells Webb-Loudon 1827
'Tis Pity She's A Whore ~ John Ford 1633
A Literary History of Women's Writing In Britain 1660 -1789 ~ Susan Staves
The Letters & Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 1689 - 1762
The Defence of Lucknow - A Memoir of the Indian Mutiny 1857 ~ T.F. Wilson
Crucible of Honour: The Battle At Rorke's Drift ~ James Mace

 

[ChloeTzang]

The entire Swallows and Amazon series.
The Far Pavilions by M M Kaye
Fire From Heaven, The Persian Boy and Funeral Games by Mary Renault
Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliffe
All of Georgette Heyer’s regency romances
Lusts of the Borgias by Marcus van Heller
Venus in India by Capt Charles Devreaux

 

[Lustymarriedmomcantgetenough]

The entire Swallows and Amazon series.
The Far Pavilions by M M Kaye
Fire From Heaven, The Persian Boy and Funeral Games by Mary Renault
Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliffe
All of Georgette Heyer’s regency romances
Lusts of the Borgias by Marcus van Heller
Venus in India by Capt Charles Devreaux

I read schoolies week and another of your Aussie stories. I enjoyed both. I've moved from central coast NSW back to Canada last year.

 

[SimonDoom]

I like too many authors and books to be able to make a really meaningful top 10 list, but a few that come to mind off the top of my head:

Jane Austen, especially Emma and Pride and Prejudice
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist
George Orwell, Animal Farm
Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
Roald Dahl, James and the Giant Peach

Two erotic books I liked quite a bit are Molly Weatherfield's Carrie's Story and Catherine Millet's The Sexual Life of Catherine M.

 

[Gemma_0]

My top five book list:

1. Portrait of Jennie - Robert Nathan

2. The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson

3. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

4. The Time Machine - H.G. Wells

5. Look Homeward Angel - Thomas Wolfe

My favorite erotic work:

Pleasures and Follies of a Good-Natured Libertine - Gustave Brentonne

 

[CoffeeWithMonkeys]

I haven't read a book in years. My memory is shit these days, and well there's no time to sit and read a whole book. If I can get through a couple chapters, I set the book down, come back to it a month or two later and have to start it over because I've forgotten the plot.
Oh wait I did start the Maddaddam trilogy last year so I finished the first book last year.

Favorites
To Kill A Mockingbird, probably my favorite book.
Maddaddam-Margaret Atwood although all I've read was all of book one, most of two.

My memory is so bad I can't even think of any others.

 

[ChloeTzang]

I read schoolies week and another of your Aussie stories. I enjoyed both. I've moved from central coast NSW back to Canada last year.

Thanks and whoa, NSW to Canada? That’s from one climatic extreme to another.

 

[Handley_Page]

Almost anything by Terry Pratchett, but particularly "Men at Arms".

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Welcome Lusty...

Any book by...

Heinlein
Dickson
Reynolds
Drake
Lumar
McCaffrey
and any number of other Sci-Fi authors along with...

Parker
MacDonald

and myself

 

[pmichael]

Just having found out about RPGs and being picky with accepting new genres.
I thoroughly enjoyed the series "The Land" by Aleron Kong.
As well, I enjoyed "The Adept Series " of novels by Piers Anthony.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

After more time to think:

Biography

The 100 - A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History by Michael H Hart.

Amazing insight for anybody interested in history and how the world works. For instance, Hart rated Muhammed as #1 because he both 'invented' a religion and got it to spread. #2 was Newton (big surprise), #3 was Christ, #4 Buddha, #5 Confucius, #6 St Paul (primarily responsible for turning Christianity from a Jewish sect into a major religion) and #7 a total unknown for many - Ts'ai Lun, the Chinese who invented paper (think on that one for a moment). Lots of surprises here.​

History

Shelby Foote's three-volume series The Civil War

Anybody who's been bitten by the Civil War bug needs to have read these.​

OK, I also have to acknowledge Will and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization in 11 volumes.

Just amazing that so much could be done by so few.​

Sci-Fi

(By a hair) Dhalgren by Samuel R Delany.

Edging out his Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand and only a barely ahead of classics like Heinlein's Time Enough for Love and Stranger in a Strange Land, Herbert's Dune and others by Pratchett, Pohl, Farmer and some others. Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar came very close, too.​

General Fiction

Yup, The King Must Die by Mary Renault.

Close to it, the Earth's Children series by Jean Auld, almost anything by Robertson Davies. Yeah, and the entire Hornblower series by CS Forester.​

Humour

Robert Benchley was remarkable, as was the Canadian Greg Clark, but the comic strip Pogo by Walt Kelly still amazes, amuses and embarrasses after all these years.

Current humourists? Well, P.J. O'Rourke is as much a commentator as a humourist, but his stuff is just wicked.



Politics, Philosophy and Social Commentary (I account them much the same of the same muchness...)

O'Rourke aside, Politically Incorrect by George Jonas.

Charles Frankel's The Pleasures of Philosophy however opened my eyes (a little) to that field of interest.

 

[rjordan]

All time favorites:
Cormac McCarthy
Larry McMurtry
Isabel Allende (en Español)

rj

 

[rae121452]

for books:
i used to re-read "the great gatsby" at least once every couple of years because i loved it.
the "jalna" series by mazo de la roche are wonderful in my opinion, a combination of downton abbey and dynasty.
john galsworthy's forsyte series kept me up till all hours because i didn't want to stop reading, i'd finish one and have to start the next immediately.
glenway wescott's "the grandmothers" is an under-appreciated gem.

for authors, i seem to gravitate to the more obscure to admire:

arnold bennett, edith wharton (not obscure, just neglected), warwick deeping.

current writers would be led by toni morrison....she's never written a bad book.

alan bradley's flavia de luce series always entertain me.

 

[davybyrne]

A Confederacy of Dunces still makes me laugh out loud.

Anything by Joyce, obviously.

Ender's Game was the first real sci-fi novel I read as a child and still has a special place in my heart.

I also love Vonnegut, particularly Mother Night and The Sirens of Titan.

 

[ElectricBlue]

A Confederacy of Dunces still makes me laugh out loud.

Yes, what a monstrously good creation, and what a tragedy for the writer.

TarnishedPenny - I just re-read Stand on Zanzibar, "Christ, what an imagination I've got," thought Shalmanezer.

 

[Hypoxia]

Mary Renault
Samuel Delaney
Mary (Andre) Norton
Robert Heinlein
Barbara Tuchman
John Varley
Mary Shelly

 

[KeithD]

The entire Swallows and Amazon series.
The Far Pavilions by M M Kaye
Fire From Heaven, The Persian Boy and Funeral Games by Mary Renault
Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliffe
All of Georgette Heyer’s regency romances
Lusts of the Borgias by Marcus van Heller
Venus in India by Capt Charles Devreaux

The Far Pavilions. Yes
Fire from Heaven. Oh, damn yes.

Georgette Heyer. I just read one of her mysteries, which I thought was just a bit too cutely written

Graham Greene. Any of them.

 

[KeithD]

Barbara Tuchman

Yes, I devoured them all.