What is the best book you have ever read and why?

[Anonymous]

Barchester Towers! Because of Trollope’s pitch perfect (yet somehow tender-hearted) portrayal of human nature/foibles and the fact that it’s genuinely hilarious.

[Anonymous]

A Prayer for Owen Meany

[Anonymous]

I struggle with this question but I always come back to Atonement. If you’re looking for a book I always recommend to people in a reading rut, check out The Perfect Predator.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I struggle with this question but I always come back to Atonement. If you’re looking for a book I always recommend to people in a reading rut, check out The Perfect Predator.

Ah, you are a sadist like my DH. Every chapter he would tell me I was through the worst of the devastating bits. Finished it on the metro and cried so hard I both had snot running down my face and strangers patting me because they assumed I’d just gotten terrible news about a loved one. Very well written, though!

[Anonymous]

Exodus

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner

Gorgeous book. Maybe perfect.

[Anonymous]

The Women's Room by Marilyn French.

It described so well the life of my mother and her contemporaries.

Young women today should read it to understand that "the good old days" were terrible for anyone other than white men.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro.

Mine too.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Passage by Connie Willis.
It's about dying and the last part of the book has always stayed with me. I think about it often, and that doesn't happen to me with many books I've read as an adult being that memorable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passage_(Willis_novel)

Sounds interesting! Will check it out.

[Anonymous]

Middlemarch - shrewdly funny but with more compassion than, say, Wharton, deeply insightful about individuals and society, with a will-they/won’t-they love story that hits hard. It’s just genius.