My Favorite Books of All Time - 2023 Edition!

my copy of The Last Hurrah just arrived, one of the last books i bought from book depository. I'm looking forward to it.

Commenting before watching so I'm influenced! My 10 favorites in no particular order:
1) Canterbury Tales
2) Vanity Fair
3) Julius Caesar by Shakespeare
4) Mrs. Dalloway
5) Herodotus' Histories
6) Iliad
7) Moby Dick
8) Shropshire Lad
9) Emma
10) The Scarlet Letter

Moby Dick was such a revelation for me. So unique, hilarious, epic, tragic. So good.

Brilliant! My three favourite books are on your list. Moby Dick, Ovid and Herodotus..but I still need to read some of your favourites.. Dante, for example, which I find intimidating and get hung up on translations, but I WILL read.

1. The Lord of the Rings
2. A Bend in the River, by V.S.Naipaul
3. Eyes of the Overworld, by Jack Vance
4. Inferno, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
5. The Faerie Queene, by Edmund Spenser
6. Huckleberry Finn
7. Paradise Lost
8. Pride and Prejudice
9. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
10. Every single "Biggles" book, by Captain W.E.Johns

Orlando Furioso and War and Peace not there anymore!!?

I love this kind of video but I don’t know if I could tell which books are my favourites (Definitely Moby-dick would be one of them though)

Love this, thank you! Moby Dick very nearly made mine, I've got an edition which doesn't have a boring cover though so wouldn't have worked 😂

Half of the books on your list are on my TBR! (Currently reading Herodotus).

Ok here’s my list, the numbers don’t mean anything though! And fair warning, it might give you an aneurism!

1. Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien (duh)

2. Farseer Trilogy, Robin Hobb (I’ll count it as one, it is one story)

3. Complete Stories, HP Lovecraft (I don’t like them all, but most of them)

4. Empire of the East, Fred Saberhagen (I’m not trying to cheat, it’s been published as one book so…)

5. Time out of joint, PK Dick (yes, PKD, fight me Donoghue!)

6. Dune, Frank Herbert

7. Legion of Space, Jack Williamson

8. Necroscope, Brian Lumley

9. Collected stories, CA Smith (ok this is 5 volumes but it could, in theory, be one very big volume…)

10. Bug Jack Barron, Norman Spinrad

Ok I hated this and I’m changing my mind already! No REH, Glen Cook, Van Vogt, other writers Steve Donoghue probably doesn’t like… not sure why I included Necroscope… hmm.

I cannot stop thinking about War and Peace. It is in your own words almost perfect.

I’m going to be really predictable and boring and include Donna Tartt’s The Secret History in my all-time favourite books.

I read it before the cool kidz and their dark academia core on its first publication in paperback if that protects me from The Master’s ire?

I just read Middlemarch for March of the Mammoths and my god, it's just such an amazing book. It creeps up on you and it's just full of life, everything that is life is in that book and it's quietly woven in there. I fell in love with it and a part of me will always be in Middlemarch because I feel as if I've lived there with them all.

I just Iove Steve that’s all I have to say

Thank you, Steve🌷I liked Ben’s video too. This is quite a challenge and, I agree, such a list is not set in stone. My ten favourites could be (in no particular order): Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar, The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni, Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, History: a Novel by Elsa Morante, Canti by Giacomo Leopardi, Sappho’s Poems, Within a Budding Grove by Proust, The Garden of the Finzi Continis by Giorgio Bassani, and… all Shakespeare’s Plays😊By the way, I’ll be following some of the read alongs with Classics and Company. I’ll be rereading (again!) Memoirs of Hadrian and also try The Tale of Genji (it was a favourite of Marguerite Yourcenar’s and I’ve had it on my shelves, unread, forever). I’ll be looking forward to your comments on Genji.

Hi Steve. I watched Ben’s video too and it prompted me to see if I can build up My Top 100 fiction books on goodreads, so I created a shelf and started adding to it. If I picked 10, I think you might think it’s a terrible list haha - hard to pick 10….but I’m often tempted to do something like this.

1. The World as Will & Representation by Schopenhauer
2. King Lear
3. Ecclesiastes
4. The Canterbury Tales
5. Jane Eyre
6. Uncle Tom's Cabin
7. The Wanderings of Oisin by Yeats
8. The Interior Castle by St Teresa of Avila
9. Plutarch's Lives
10. Plato's Republic

It definitely shifts over time but most of these have remained in place.

My top ten list would certainly contain a few in common with Steve's excellent list (Moby Dick, Herodotus, Metamorphoses), but the similarities would end with James Joyce's Ulysses sitting right at the top, godlike and paring its nails.

You've convinced me, Steve. I'll be making my list soon!

This will be fun!

The Lord of the Rings
Pride and Prejudice
Wuthering Heights
The Claverings
Lonesome Dove
Crime and Punishment
Dracula
The Witness by Juan José Saer
Moonglow by Michael Chabon
All the short stories by Borges

You loose all credibility for having the audacity to leave off Sally Rooney from this list.

I'm tempted to make my own video like this.

What are you talking about? I love Funeral Games. I especially liked the trick Mary Renault played on me, when I myself forgot all about the second wife heading for Babylon to her doom, because all the other events were so gripping. But as for The Persian boy, I simply couldn't put it down.

Tom Holland the famed Spider Man actor 😂😂😂. Careful Steve, some people might buy into it

I agree, Edwin O’Connor created great characters in Mayor Frank Skeffington and all the satellite characters in his orbit. However, I read it back to back with The Edge of Sadness which for me was the better novel. Mayor Skeffington also appears in that story.

By coincidence I’m reading “Genji “ right now

Excellent video, I knew I'd find some new gems here thanks.
Was Gibbon close?

My top three books are: War and Peace, Les Miserable and A Tale of Two Cities. After that it's negotiable

I find myself more eager to discover Moby Dick thanks to you, although that book still scares me... And as for Dante, I tend to prefer the Purgatory, even though one has to embrace the whole story to enjoy it.

Speed reading Canterbury Tales sounds like a mouthful

Interesting list. Here's mine for now: 1. The Iliad. 2. Paradise Lost. 3.Pamela. 4.Moby Dick. 5. Theory of the Leisure Class. 6.Decline and Fall. 7. How to Do Things with Words. (I know. Well three more white males) 8. The Power Elite. 9. The Rise of the Meritocracy..10. The Shield of Achilles.

So many folks have recommended "Middlemarch" that I finally decided to borrow a library copy. I also felt compelled to read SOMETHING by George Eliot, because our birthdays fall on the same day. I got the library copy, and I read the ladies' conversations of the first few chapters. And I thought: You know what? I don't care. I can't see myself caring about ANY of this. And back to the library it went.

I trust that saying the Tom Holland who translated Herodotus is the Spiderman actor was a joke.

1) Brothers Karamazov
2) War and Peace
3) Crime and Punishment
4) Anna Karenina
5) Les Miserables
6) Count of Monte Cristo
7) Picture of Dorian Gray
8) Frankenstein
9) Dracula
10) Jane Eyre