The Top Ten Best Ever Books!

The Top Ten Best Books Ever!

It's difficult to choose a top ten best ever books, as there are so many great ones out there (and some not so good ones too!) - but I'm going to give it a try, let's see which ones you've read. Will you agree with my choices???

1) I read Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in one day and found it hard to sleep afterwards. JK Rowling is a genius.

2) 1974 by David Peace is an exceptionally dark book that kept me awake for different reasons (but Peace should still take credit).

3) All Quiet on the Western Front (EM Remarque) was may favourite book as a teenager and made me think about the 'other side' of a story.

4) The Lord of the Rings I read on buses, in restaurants, even at the place I was working at the time! Brilliant how Tolkein switched between characters in a way that kept me even more hooked (also try reading the Silmarillion - it gives you a whole new appreciation of a 'balrog'!):

5) Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams: if I was more talented and less knackered, this is the book I wish I could have written! A humorous concept of cluelessly 'hitchhiking' the way across the galaxy - something we probably all wish we could try...

6) A Short History of Nearly Everything. Bill Bryson, as good a travel writer as he is, stunned everyone with this highly educational, funny and interesting history of science as we know (and also don't know) it! Perhaps the book I have read and listened to the most (though I still can't remember most of it! - a shorter, illustrated version is also available):

No.6: A Short History of Nearly Everything

7) Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. With some of the best character descriptions you will ever read, this story drew me into a world that felt very real despite having a minimal frame of reference for it.

8) Lord of the Flies; William Golding. An expose of human nature that nearly made me cry reading it as a child. Having taught children for a long time I can see that this storyline could be all too realistic:

9) Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: Haruki Murakami. This tale was so bizarre, but the way the author links two opposite worlds to one drew me in until I couldn't put the book down.

10) Are you Experienced? by William Sutcliffe - not a classic by any means, but still hilarious. One of the few books to have actually made me laugh out loud in public (a good way to get to sit alone on the bus).

Honourable mentions must go to:

Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins - it's not so much the writing as the depressingly true content.

A People’s History of the Vietnam War, by J Neale. It is as informative as it is heartbreaking...

To be honest I could quite easily change my mind about the top ten - no opinion is ever fixed is it? Which books would make it into your top ten?

Coming soon: The Top Ten Best Ever Children's Books..!