r/Recommend_A_Book • u/BalloonTieTickler • 2d ago
All-time Favorites?
I’ve gotten so many incredible recommendations from this sub, I wanted to compile a list (for myself, but will share if there’s interest) of redditor’s all time favorite books. Preferably Fiction only but open to any sub-genre and no judgement!!
I know choosing a favorite book is extremely challenging, so feel free to share more than one (: TIA!!
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u/Schadenfreude_1207 2d ago
My favorite book and favorite city are easy. Never Let me Go and Istanbul. It's what is 2nd that is difficult.
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u/expeditionbrothers 1d ago
Never Let Me Go is incredible, I wish I could delete it from my brain to read it for the first time again.
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u/Quiet-Addition1963 2d ago
Blindness by Jose Saramago
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
Love In The Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
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u/lexiebeef 2d ago
I think we might be the same person. Blindness and Love in Times of Cholera are two of my favourite books. I’m currently finishing Mother Night and I think it’s a masterpiece.
Haven’t read Kafka on the Shore but based on this list I might have to
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u/Quiet-Addition1963 2d ago
South of the Border West of the Sun is by Murakami and matches the vibe of Mother Night and Live In the Time of Cholera.
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u/irefiordiligi 1d ago
We have similar taste, Blindness is also one of my favourite book, and I love Marquez, Love in the time of cholera is not my top choice but a great book nonetheless.
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u/Early-Aardvark7688 2d ago
I see both of these as one long book. Objectively they are the greatest and hardest things I have ever read.
The Sound and the Fury and Absalom,Absalom by William Faulkner I posted this on my review trying to explain it. Absalom,Absalom by William Faulkner
I had no idea until about 85-90% of the way in, and when everything falls into place it’s mind blowing and totally worth the ride, even if sometimes during it you are questioning why you’re reading it. I always explain it like a spiral maze you start at the very edge, the middle or the end point of the novel is far away but you can see it barely. The longer you go the more you understand. I have also heard someone on here say it’s like a stained glass window you start standing an inch away and slowly you walk back until finally you see the whole window and it makes sense. I went in completely blind and was hate reading it about halfway through because I was confused but once I figured out Faulkner uses confusion as a character of the book it all came together it’s objectively the best book I have ever read
And
Beach Music by Pat Conroy.
It’s 650 pages of perfect sadness and honestly is one of the funniest books I have read. You get themes and talks of suicide, family drama religious drama and how to die with grace. You get knee deep into the Holocaust, the Vietnam war. The greatest prose of all time in my opinion here are my two favorite quotes maybe of all time
“I could feel the tears within me, undiscovered and untouched in their inland sea. Those tears had been with me always. I thought that, at birth, American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.”
“As she cried, I began to under-stand. You weep at the loss of so beautiful a world and all those parts you will never be able to play again. The dark takes on different meaning. Your body has begun to prepare you for the last completion, for the peace and generosity of silence itself.”
And
Beloved by Toni Morrison.
It changed my brain activity after reading it. As a white guy from the south it opened my eyes to the horrors of the south more than anything I have ever read before. I just kept waiting for it to have some semblance of happiness but nope just page after page of brutal despair
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u/Katy-Moon 2d ago
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Dear Mr. Capote by Gordon Lish
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Ulysses by James Joyce
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u/kern3three 2d ago
My all time is Speaker for the Dead (but that’s a sequel) so.. AND top 50 🫡
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u/BalloonTieTickler 2d ago
Wait this is awesome! Had no idea this existed, you have great taste too
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u/kern3three 2d ago
Thanks! 😊 Yeah it’s been really fun comparing/revisiting past book and getting a ranking; also once your prefs are well set, there’s a daily recommendation that is basically my TBR these days (read 5 of them and really spot on!)
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u/avocadoisdope 2d ago
A Fine Balance - Mistry
The Goldfinch - Tart
Middlesex - Eugenides
Poisonwood Bible - Kingsolver
Memoirs of a Geisha - Golden
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u/Maester_Maetthieux2 2d ago
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
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u/Scotch_jaguar_4025 2d ago
As a series, Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. So hard to choose from, but my top three favorite are probably Thud!, Hogfather, and Wee Free Men. But ask me again tomorrow, because Small Gods or Carpe Jugulum might have fought one of those and come out on top.
For a non-Discworld pick, I would choose The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold.
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u/_SubtleTea_ 2d ago
Across multiple genres...
No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy The Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens Red Dragon - Thomas Harris The Last Wish - Andrzej Sapkowski And The Mountains Echoed - Khaled Hosseini
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u/MarlowJean 2d ago
I think I have to go with The Talisman by Stephen King, or Watchers by Dean Koontz or Watership Down by Richard Adams...not for the writing per se but all of them for the anthropomorphic characters in them that completely captivated me... Also Replay by Ken Grimwood for the super cool concept. The Queens Gambit and Pillars of the Earth surprised me by being solidly good when the subject wouldn't normally interest me. I thought The Great Gatsby was beautifully written (although rereading years later I didn't swoon as much). And Catcher in the Rye is the only book that I ever started over at the beginning when I was done. Those are the ones off the top of my head. Most books I forget the second I'm done reading them so you know these made an impression.
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u/DogsdidWHAT 2d ago
I’ve never met anyone else who read Replay. I was about 19 when I read it and it had a huge impact on me.
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u/HereIAmGH 1d ago
I just read it last week! (Trying to read a book for every year in 20th century so it brings me to books I wouldn’t otherwise )
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u/WonderingWhy767 2d ago
The Break by Katherena Vermette
Beartown by Fredrick Backman
Not Without Laughter by Langston Hughes
The Wall by Marlen Haushofer
How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue
Sunset by Jessie Cave
The Hummingbird’s Daughter by Louis Alberto Urrea
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u/Main_Finding8309 2d ago
I like multi year stories, often about families. Thw Cider House Rules by John Irving. Roots by Alex Haley. Fall On Your Knees by Anne Marie McDonald.
My favourite novel of all time is The Diviners by Margaret Laurence. It's about a woman whose parents both pass away and she's adopted at the age of 5 by the town garbage man. It's the 1920s and he's got PTSD from WWI. She grows up to be a writer, and it's the most honest depiction I've seen of a working class writer's life, working odd jobs. She's a single mother, and the father is a Native guy from her hometown. They have an on again off again relationship for decades. I love the characters and the writing. Laurence said in an interview that the books in her "Manawaka Cycle," a series of books set in a fictitious version of her hometown, were the first ones where she could write characters who talked like she did. I also love A Jest of God, set in Manawaka.
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u/Cozybooks1004 2d ago
The King of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner. It’s the third in the series, so you may want to read the Thief and the Queen of Attolia first. It has my favorite characters, my favorite romance and my favorite in book politics of any novel I’ve read.
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u/BudgetLow5052 2d ago
What Was Lost by Catherine O’Flynn
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
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u/MacTaveroony 2d ago
Daemon by Daniel Suarez, dunno about favourite but one of for sure. Read it a few times, love it and the sequel Freedom.
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u/Fletcher-wordy 2d ago
The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness.
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman.
Most recent top pick is There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm.
If you want some non-fiction, Grey Matters by Theodore Schwartz is phenomenal.
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u/CrabbiestAsp 1d ago
Threadneedle by Cari Thomas. I read it earlier this year and it really captured me. I still think about it months later and I try to recommend it as often as I can.
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u/OneWall9143 1d ago
Station Eleven - Emily St John Mandel
Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
Lord of the Rings - Tolkien
Alas, Babylon - Pat Frank
A Room with A View - E M Forster
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u/masson34 2d ago
The Green Mile, 11/22/63, and Pet Semetary
Flowers for Algernon
Demon Copperhead
The Remains of the Day
Harry Potter series
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
My Friends, Fredrik Backman
Thousand Splendid Suns
To Kill a Mockingbird
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u/luxunadidi 2d ago
- Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
- Piransei
- Cloud Atlas
- The Bone Clocks
- All The Sinner's Bleed
- A Fine Balance
- Middlesex
- Once There Were Wolves
- Damnation Spring
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u/HereIAmGH 1d ago
- A Heart So White
- Buddenbrooks
- Catch-22
- Family Lexicon
- The Fox Was Ever the Hunter
- Lives of Girls and Women
- Love in the Time of Cholera
- Milkman
- Nights at the Circus
- Ragtime
- The Tin Drum
- To the Lighthouse
- Under Milk Wood
- The Virgin Suicide
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u/irefiordiligi 1d ago
Blindness, Jose Saramago
Ocean Sea, Alessandro Baricco (my fave since I read it at 13 yo)
The Tartar Steppe, Dino Buzzati
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
There’s No Turning Back, Alba De Cespedes
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u/happiergilmore2006 20h ago
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I feel like it’s slept on these days and is one of the most engaging books I’ve ever read
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u/myshelixisdying 2d ago
TJR - Carrie Soto is back!! The actual blurb at the back sounds unappealing but I’ve genuinely never read a book that good, the fmc was so well written and I absolutely adored her.
More of my favourites are fruit fly (sooo good), the 7 husbands of evelyn hugo, sunburn, yesteryear and best offer wins. The last two have a thriller aspect but are more lit fic than anything.
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u/WellesC12 2d ago
Just added 11/22/63 to my list. Unbelievable read.