These are some of my all-time favorite books:
Many of my favorite books are the ones I grew up with, so there is a deep sense of attachment with them. Every time I read them or just leaf through their pages, I almost bring back my childhood or my adolescence. There are some books that have shaped my psyche, that have helped me battle my crises and have guided me with a certain wisdom, they too have invariably been my favorites. And there are also, rather oddly, some classics, which I have been able to associate with a profound manner, the reason they are celebrated classics is perhaps because readers can resonate with characters' feelings and they never date, even after centuries, and I have been no exception, I too have grown fond of them. So this is a list of favorites, which a reader may find maddening, irritated to find no semblence of order or classification, but I am undone, it is yet another list of personal preferences and hence no attempt has been made to be methodical; there are books of fiction and non-fiction, books meant for children, young adults and strictly for adults. A random listing from a voracious reader who is in love with the printed word.
Fire Child - Sally Emerson
Esmond in India - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
The Client - John Grisham
Love Story - Erich Segal
Jonathan Livingston Seagull - Richard Bach
The Night Train at Deoli and Other Stories - Ruskin Bond
A Quiver Full of Arrows - Jeffrey Archer
The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Stories for Children - Oscar Wilde
Pinocchio - Carlo CollodiA Pocketful of Rye - Agatha Christie
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
The Swimming-Pool Library - Alan Hollinghurst
Howards End - E. M. Forster
An Immaculate Mistake: Scenes from Childhood and Beyond - Paul Bailey
New Boy - William Sutcliffe
Ice-Candy Man - Bapsi Sidhwa
The Bridges of Madison County - Robert James Waller
The Enchanted Wood - Enid Blyton
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
5 comments:
Quite an eclectic mix, I must say!!!!!!!!
Vast variety of choices. Gr8 combination. For my part mine great expectations is only gr8 book I have ever read among hundreds of books i've read so far.
Just as Book lovers from across India are getting an opportunity to browse through millions of books and broaden their horizon of knowledge at the 18th New Delhi World Book Fair, and as the fate of the Kolkata Book Fair still hangs in the balance, it was nice to read your blog post on BOOKS!
Thanks for the beautiful listing of your favorite books...... however, I must say that many of the massive tomes are amiss from the titles listed.
Do you mean to say that these books constitute a definitive collection of yours that you can't do without? I guess not....... maybe their inclusion has more to do with the fact that you fell in love with them either as a kid or as a young adult, when our mind is at its impressionable best.
A splendid listing no doubt. But I would have preferred a bit on them - especially on the ones that I am yet to read - and know first hand what made them special for you.....
Here's a list of five of my own favorites:
1) Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke. [ For the brilliant space visions of a child in this beautiful novel.]
2) The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. [So complex, yet so very identifiable!]
3) The Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov. [My first Science Fiction favorite!]
4) The Master and Margarita by Vladimir Nabokov. [A book against tyranny, against mean bureaucracy, against moral cowardice; poetic, philosophical and satirical!]
5) The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. [A satire on clichèd revolution, an existential rite of passage.]
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