What is the best book you have ever read by a male author and a female author?

[chaptazbru]

Mine is The Pursuit of Happiness by Douglas Kennedy

and

The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton.

[mccfluff]

hitchhikers or maybe a terry pratchett, possibly lotr. the dark is rising sequence is a book i still have it hink i got them when i was 10 and i re-read them now and then.

saying that i still have paddington's party book

[rabidog]

Call yourself a quizzer? There is only one book, The A to Z of almost Everything by Trevor Montague

[chaptazbru]

He has got other books out NoMercy - Fear the Worst and Never Look Away - both excellent.

[rabidog]

Call yourself quizzers? There is only one book I'd take on a desert island, the A to Z of almost Everything by Trevor Montague

[chaptazbru]

Gosh this thread has made me realise just how much reading I actually do ! Beats me how I have time to do anything else !!

[NoMercy]

Well it's payday on Friday, so I may go book hunting.

[chaptazbru]

Good luck !

[craft1948]

I've just put 5 onto my Kindle..............

[spikeyboy]

Books already mentioned...Sword of Honour trilogy, Evelyn Waugh. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, Laurie Lee. Pat Barkers Regeneration Trilogy....also Goodbye to all That, Robert Graves...with the previous both better than Birdsong...Coming Up for Air, George Orwell. Anything by Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman and Philip Pullman...and my current favourite Wildwood by Roger Deakin...but not to everyones taste Id guess.

[pdust]

I cant pick a single one as my favourite was a series of books... Necroscope by Brian Lumley..... i honestly cant think of a single book ive read written by a woman :s

[jno]

come on pdust, what about "Here comes Noddy again!"

[chi-chi66]

I collect Linwood Barclay....Harlan Coben....Patricia Cornwell.....Greg Hurwitz
Graham Horley....Faye Kellerman. Starting to get Liza Marklund...Camilla Lackberg...Mankell Henning....
I read alternate authors, so not going along the same route so to say.

[LazyGun]

Not sure that it is possible to nominate a single book as best book ever read, and I am curious as to why you would wish people to order book by the gender of the author.....

The marker for "best book" are ones that I found I was unwilling or unable to put down until I had finished them, and these are a few of the momst memorably ones, for me, at least....

1. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - Robert Tressell
2. The Wasp Factory - Ian Banks
3. The Player of Games - Ian M Banks
4. Gorky Park - Martin Cruz Smith
5. A Handmaids Tale - Margaret Atwood
6. The Night Watch - Terry Prachett
7. Pronto - Elmore Leonard

[DTCwordfan]

I'll pitch in one more, not everybody's cup of tea but he was popular on R4's Book at Bedtime and that is Garrison Keiller's Lake Woebegone Days - if you have been to Minnesota and outside the Twin Cities, it is even funnier as it really does parody life there (and much of the middle States).

[chaptazbru]

chi-chi I love Harlan Coben, Greg Hurwitz (did you like Or She Dies - fab) and of course Lynwood Barclay. I think you'd probably like Douglas Kenedy too.

[sunny-dave]

Just been ferretting around on my book club forum and found my 'top 20' lists ... sorry if it's overload, but here goes :

Fiction

1 Barchester Towers - Anthony Trollope
2 The Nine Tailors - Dorothy L Sayers
3 The Drowned World - J G Ballard
4 Middlemarch - George Eliot
5 The Father Brown Stories - G K Chesterton
6 Sons and Lovers - D H Lawrence
7 Our Man in Havana - Graham Greene
8 Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K Jerome
9 All Quiet on the Orient Express - Magnus Mills
10 A Hat Full of Sky - Terry Pratchett
11 The Hound of the Baskervilles - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
12 An Inspector Calls - J B Priestley
13 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne
14 Tiger Tiger - Alfred Bester
15 Quarantine - Jim Crace
16 A Good Man in Africa - William Boyd
17 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Philip K Dick
18 Diary of a Nobody - George & Weedon Grossmith
19 Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
20 The Difference Engine - William Gibson & Bruce Sterling

Non Fiction :

1 Rural Rides - William Cobbett
2 Journals of the Western Isles - Boswell & Johnson
3 English Journey - J B Priestley
4 Empire of the Sun - J G Ballard
5 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S Thompson
6 The Day the War Ended - Martin Gilbert
7 Cod - Mark Kurlansky
8 Into the Heart of Borneo - Redmond O'Hanlon
9 The Ascent of Everest - John Hunt
10 Arlott on Cricket - John Arlott
11 The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson
12 On the Black Hill - Bruce Chatwin
13 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig
14 The Kon Tiki Expedition - Thor Heyerdahl
15 1066 and all that - W. C Sellar and R. J Yeatman
16 The Double Helix - James Watson
17 Longitude - Dava Sobel
18 Honey From a Weed - Patience Gray
19 The Spirit of Cricket - Christopher Martin-Jenkins
20 Raw Spirit - Iain Banks

[rempop]

the stand by Stephen King peyton place by Grace Metalious

[chi-chi66]

chapta.....have'nt read that one yet....another good one is Beverley Barton.

Will keep a look-out forDouglas Kennedy.

[chaptazbru]

Wow and the books just keep on coming - great !

[HowardKennitby]

I found 'Halting State' by Charles Stross quite an intriguing read. Perhaps prophetic as well.