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-   -   What is your favourite book? (https://www.askmehelpdesk.com/showthread.php?t=732608)

  • Feb 6, 2013, 10:25 AM
    Story Writer
    What is your favourite book?
    This question is to all the members of this forum. Please write the name of the book, literary or otherwise, which you have ever read and relished a lot. If you are a voracious reader like me, tell me which book attracted and entertained you the most.

    If you want me to write down my favourite book, let me tell you, only after some replies to my query.

    All the repliers will get appreciation, in terms of greenies!

    Come on, guys and girls and all others!!
    The game starts now...
  • Feb 6, 2013, 10:45 AM
    Wondergirl
    I don't have a favorite author. I go through phases -- my gothic phase during which I read authors such as Daphne du Maurier; my horror phase during which I read authors such as F. Paul Wilson, Robin Cook, and Stephen King; my police procedural phases during which I read Ed McBain's books; my detective phase with Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner; my thriller/suspense phase with Ken Follett, Nelson DeMille, and David Morrell (and too many others to mention); my classics phase with George Eliot and John Steinbeck; and my just-ending phase with Anita Shreve and Lee Child and Jodi Picoult.

    Once I find an author I like, I tend to read all his or her books in existence, one after the other, devouring them hungrily. I just finished The Mirror by Marlys Millhiser, a time-travel adventure I first read 30 years ago -- a young woman in modern times looks into an antique mirror and is transported back in time into the body of a woman who turns out to be her grandmother. The setting is in Boulder, Colorado, my favorite city/state.
  • Feb 6, 2013, 10:49 AM
    Story Writer
    O Wondergirl

    Thanks so much for the reply. Can I know what your age is? I presume you must have read all these works during so much period? Do you read chic-lit? Do you read Shakespere? What about poetry? What about the Indian authors? Have your VS Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lehiri, Khushwant Singh and last but not the least Chetan Bhagat? Have you read all the English works only?

    What about books on beauty, cooking, life or motivation? And, newspapers, magazines or stories?
  • Feb 6, 2013, 10:55 AM
    Wondergirl
    I'm a former schoolteacher and retired librarian, am 67, and read anything I can get my hands on, even the text on cereal boxes. I worked with several Indian women (from Delhi and Kashmir), so yes, have read a few Indian authors recommended to me. I like classic poets such as D!ckinson and Poe and Whittier and Longfellow, many of whose poems I had to read and even memorize as a schoolgirl.

    I love to do research and have written non-fiction material that has gotten traditionally published, as has my short fiction.
  • Feb 6, 2013, 10:58 AM
    Story Writer
    Wondergirl,

    Wonderful! Where can I read your literature from? Can you let me go through your stories and other works? It is nice to meet a reader here, as I want to be a great reader, even as I write too, but when I meet readers, I feel so excited. People love authors, and I too do so, but the readers are a rare species in this world today, and when I meet a genuine reader, I feel exhilerated. Thank God, AMHD made it possible. What is your opinion on it?
  • Feb 6, 2013, 11:12 AM
    Wondergirl
    Read blogs. One of my favorites is by someone who is a member here (but she has been too busy with real life lately to be posting) -- Horses in the Yard

    I have a blog about my rescued cats. Start a blog about something that interests you.
  • Feb 6, 2013, 11:34 AM
    tickle
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Wondergirl View Post
    I don't have a favorite author. I go through phases -- my gothic phase during which I read authors such as Daphne du Maurier; my horror phase during which I read authors such as F. Paul Wilson, Robin Cook, and Stephen King; my police procedural phases during which I read Ed McBain's books; my detective phase with Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner; my thriller/suspense phase with Ken Follett, Nelson DeMille, and David Morrell (and too many others to mention); my classics phase with George Eliot and John Steinbeck; and my just-ending phase with Anita Shreve and Lee Child and Jodi Picoult.

    Once I find an author I like, I tend to read all his or her books in existence, one after the other, devouring them hungrily. I just finished The Mirror by Marlys Millhiser, a time-travel adventure I first read 30 years ago -- a young woman in modern times looks into an antique mirror and is transported back in time into the body of a woman who turns out to be her grandmother. The setting is in Boulder, Colorado, my favorite city/state.

    You didn't try H.P. Lovecraft?
  • Feb 6, 2013, 12:00 PM
    Wondergirl
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by tickle View Post
    You didn't try H.P. Lovecraft?

    Nope. I've done the Incarnations of Immortality series with Piers Anthony but no Lovecraft. Sell me on him. I'm in a book drought right now. ***ADDED*** Woo, woo. Oates likes him. King too.

    Please recommend a good one to start me out with.
  • Feb 6, 2013, 12:17 PM
    joypulv
    I'm in the US.
    Age about 14: spent the whole summer reading all the works of Mark Twain.
    About 16: stayed awake for 2 1/2 days reading Gone With the Wind.
    Had to read Moby D**K in high school and loved it. "The never ending round of If."
    Had to read Shakespeare and Moliere and enjoyed most of it.
    Poetry: favorite is Yeats.
    During the 60s, when I was in my 20s: Siddhartha, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, anything by an existentialist, from L'etranger to The Second Sex.
    Indian, none of the authors you mentioned, but I loved The Man Who Knew Infinity, the biography of Srinivasa Ramanujan. And I did a book report in high school on Mann's The Transposed Heads.
    Favorite non-biography non-fiction: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (not as difficult to read as the title is).
  • Feb 6, 2013, 01:53 PM
    tickle
    WG, read The Thing on the Doorstep by HP Lovecraft, and be afraid, be very afraid!

    There are a lot of websites dedicated to him on Google
  • Feb 7, 2013, 03:26 AM
    nikkicute
    A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. (first book to make me cry lol)
  • Feb 7, 2013, 05:33 AM
    NeedKarma
    Nikki,
    I read that when I was much younger and it made an impact on me. I really should revisit it.
  • Feb 7, 2013, 07:33 PM
    cdad
    I have never read a book. The only type of book I have read is a technical manual. Im not one for stories.

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