This is one of those questions where I have strong opinions and can out talk about anyone. If you ask me about hot button topics or current events, I'm much less opinionated and more curious about what you think of those things. Though with books, I want to know what you're reading too. Only you might have to shout to be heard over my tirade about the books I love.
As a child I fell in love with The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner. That was my first grade love and the first stories I remember fan-fic rewriting endings to in my head. At some point around then I found a copy of The Forgotten Door by Alexander Key—that was my first fantasy story. It's about a boy who falls through a doorway into another world. It's a thin book and a worthy read for adults too.
Yes, I loved the Little House books. There was something slow and peaceful about life on the prairies that calmed me when times were rough. I read and reread those. E. Nesbit books are also a childhood favorite. Five Children and It is delightful but I also adored The Railway Children which may or may not have inspired The Boxcar Children. Feel free to fight with me about that in the comments.
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R. Tolkien and why The Hobbit is my most beloved of them could surely ignite some scorn among the bibliophile crowd. Though I read the Harry Potter books as an adult, and I loved them. J.K. Rowlings book The Casual Vacancy is brilliant in my opinion. If I could, I'd replace all copies of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorn taking up space in high school curriculums with it.
My reading in high school tended toward more popular novels from the New York Times bestseller list books than the classics. The classics I hit harder as time moved on. I love Dickens, D.H. Lawrence, Edith Wharton, Twain, Austen, although another controversial opinion is Tolstoy. I'll never forgive those sixty or so pages about Vronsky's horse and when Anna Karenina threw herself under the train (oopsie spoiler alert) my only thought was honestly, well, thank god, because if I had to spend another minute in her brain I might have done the same). Sorry. Not sorry.
My favorite Stephen King book is The Body (it's retitled Stand by Me when they made it into a movie), although The Stand is neck and neck there. So good. My favorite Dean Koontz is (Sorry Mr. Koontz, you know what I'm going to say here) Watchers. Give me a good futuristic science experiment with a human level intelligent Golden Retriever and I am compelled to purchase all your books forever, but I do keep going back to read Watchers again.
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon is a book I've loved since the 1990's when it came out in one of those old Book of the Month clubs where you actually got a little catalog in your snail mail and picked the titles that appealed. She's written so many sequels with such rich story that I've long suspected that she is in fact Claire and her husband is Jamie and they're here from the 1700's. Prove me wrong. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley is another fabulous read. It's the King Arthur story from the point of view of Morgan Le Fay. Though I think the writer was posthumously cancelled. I always like to tell people to read that little story (it's a tome of epic proportions). It's brilliant story.
On top of my popular book loves are all of Michael Crichton's (Jurrasic Park, Timeline, Andromeda Strain) and even his posthumously written book Eruption, I incorporated piles of non-fiction in my book love-a-thon too. Stephen Hawkins A Brief History of Time (every time I reread it I make a mental note to do that again because I can almost follow this time), or The God Particle by Leon Lederman, anything by Brian Greene and Neil deGrasse Tyson too because when it comes to science, I am a fan.
Although The Ends of the World by Peter Brannon makes me want to get a PhD in Geology and spend a lifetime with fossils and rocks. It's a story about the five mass extinctions and I found it incredibly uplifting and fascinating, and I will never stop tormenting my husband about the fact that scientists found the missing link lizard somewhere around Hyner Mountain, Pennsylvania because his people kind of hail from there. We've been married since about the day after those lizards crawled out of the ooze so I'm always shopping for such information to torment him with.
Speaking of lizards, War with the Newts by Karel Chapek is one of the best stories I've ever read. This Czech writer and his brother were on Hitler's public enemy number one lists when the Nazi's marched into Prague. It is astonishing to me how what might be considered older books are possibly more relevant today than when they were written. Another couple favorites are All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doer, and having watched it on Netflix is not the same. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini astonished me because growing up in a small town in Ohio in the 70's and 80's was apparently incredibly similar to Afghanistan about that time. That realization really stretched my brain.
Now, I'm going to add only Art /Spiegelman's Maus Books because it's thundering outside and here in The Shire that means the power is going DOWN, plus my husband since the Devonian Period keeps interrupting and my brain is hitting bumpy tracks like that one in Anna Karenina. So, to the book club that asked me what my favorite book is, this is my answer. Sometimes I don't exactly follow directions as you can see.
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