Huffington Post Readers' Picks (PHOTOS, POLL)

We know that the Huffington Post reader is really smart, and since you're on the Books page, we know that you like to read, so it made sense that when we gave you our Huffington Post Editors' Picks, we should turn it around and ask you to recommend your own favorites. We got some great submissions -- so many, in fact, that we're rolling them out in two parts. So here it is, the first HuffPost Readers' Book Picks. Vote on your favorites, and we're still taking submissions, so send yours in using the Participate button below!

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Winter's Tale, Mark Helprin

inmyhumbleopinion: My favorite book of all time, and the most beautifully written. This is a love story to New York, embracing its chaotic immigrant past and its glorious hopeful future. It's about integrity and dreams, romance and glory. It's funny, gritty, magical, and compelling. I've yet to read anything that comes remotely close to this masterpiece by Mark Helprin.

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Comments

[thrdr]

It has occured to me that the above slideshow thingy mentions Mark Helprin's "Winter's Tale," which is a brilliant and beautiful novel but is also very densely-packed; it can be daunting for all of its wonders. It might be better for a first-time Helprin reader to start with "A Soldier of the Great War" (my personal favorite if nothing else) or "Memoir from Ant-Proof Box," which are slightly less phantasmagorical. Helprin's first novel, "Refiner's Fire," and his short-story collections, are also very good.

[contradiction]

I can and have and will, read everything Chuck Palahniuk. Every time I read something by him I am amazed at the mind that man has. He is so creative and twisted.

One of my other super faves is Middlesex ~ It is a bit long but I enjoyed the history it offered prior to getting to the gist of the story. I suppose it was needed to emphasize just how perfect the alignment must be to make such a rare creature. Loved it though, from start to finish.

[hoisttheflag]

Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie. Simply a great work.

[poobah]

Just read a delightful book of short stories. "The Calaboose Epistles" by R T Smith reads like the poetry he is more noted for. This collection shows that he is no stranger to prose, and is more than capable in his depiction of the inner workings of Southern people.

[24hourrifle]

russel banks-"clo­udsplitter­"

poe ballantine:"god clobbers us all"

upton singlair-"the jungle"...­an absolute classic

im reading david mitchell's "cloud atlas" this weekend,terrific.

also..."an arsonists guide to writers homes in new england"..­.(i may have gotten that title wrong a bit)

[Mrjonz]

My favorite book is Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita.­" It’s three stories in one; one is about the devil and his retinue come to Moscow and wreck havoc; the second is about Jesus and Pilate; and the third is about couple of the title, a writer and his lover. Unifying themes are the power of love and forgivness. The book is full of humor, madness, beauty and passion, and contains one of the best depictions of Jesus in fiction, in my opinion. I first read it in the Michael Glenny translation, but there is a newer one by Burgin & O'Connor with annotation by Bugakov scholar Ellena Proffer that reads quite well too.

But then there’s also Alfred Bester’s “The Stars my Destination,” possibly the best sci-fi novel ever written.

[PNOGUY]

Waugh, Wodehouse, Dickens, Trollope, Anthony Powell...a­ll those dead white guys.

[JimNesbit]

Has everyone forgotten about Camus, Sartre and Hesse?

[iamjones]

No Exit is brilliant.

[Hybrid]

A Winter's Tale? It's fun escapist trash, but not literature. My favorite American works are An American Tragedy, by Dreiser, the late novels of Henry James and The Changing Light at Sandover by Merrill. Faulkner's pretty good. The funniest novel I've ever read has to be Dead Souls by Gogol. I'm not so crazy about Tolstoy - I don't agree with his ideas about how history works, which is the point of War and Peace. The Illiad is pretty great, my favorite (and I think most psychologically accurate) religious text out there. I love Gombrowicz's Cosmos and Pessoa's Book of Disquiet and Rilke's Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge.

[iamjones]

i loved Pessoa's Book of Disquiet, too

[jeremyemilio]

"Faulkner's pretty good."

Pretty good!?! Oh my... have you read _Go Down Moses_ (or just "The Bear")? My pick for the best, most interesting, and most important piece of American literature of the first half of the 20th century (well, for me it's a tie with Gatsby, but Fitzgerald doesn't seem he'd be quite your taste).

Anyhoo... not that I'm any real authority, but I think you've got a very interesting literary palate. May I suggest one of our Canadian authors, David Adams Richards. Try _Road to the Stilt House_ for an early example or _Mercy Among the Children_ for his full, mature, confident writerly voice.

[Social Construct]

They're all my favorite. What a wonderful gift for its progeny humankind has wrought: Books!

[professor]

Greatest book of the latter half of the 20th century?

Gilligan's Wake by Tom Carson

[Jenell Scherbel]

Orhan Pamuk. This Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist and essayist has a lot to say that's hopeful and positive about East and West as cultures that may collide happily rather than destructively. His essays are like having a plain-spoken friend in the room.

[jeanrenoir]

Why don't Americans read the truly great books anymore? Why do they waste so much precious time in their brief lives? They should remember Thoreau's comment that he read the best books first, because otherwise he might not have time. Pride and Prejudice is pretty good, but rather superficial compared to War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. And why no votes for Homer, Dante, Montaigne, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Kafka, or Proust--all writers who can't be compared with any of the writers nominated so far, including Austen. Midnight's Children is a fine book, but hardly in the class with the greatest work of literature ever written by a woman--by far; MUCH better than Austen, George Eliot, or Woolf, fine as they all are: The Tale of Genji? American culture seems to get shallower and more lost in contemporaneity by the year. The nominated books reflect that. Every book nominated so far, except Pride and Prejudice, will be forgotten in a hundred years, most in fifty.

[jeremyemilio]

Hmmm... I was just about to nominate Gravity's Rainbow, but was afraid to look like a book snob. No worries now. You seem to have that one cornered!

In seriousness, though, I can't help agreeing with you for the most part. Where are Moby Dick and Ulyssess? Where are Frankenstein and Middlemarch? And forget Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare; where's Chaucer? The description of Wonder Boys says it all. Kavalier and Clay is ten times the novel Wonder Boys is.

I have to disagree with you on Pride and Prejudice, though. I'll defend Austen's right to be near the top of any list, and Pride and Prejudice is quite rightly often perceived as being her masterpiece (although, given my druthers, I'll take Charlotte Bronte's masterpiece Wuthering Heights any day).

Some more obscure gems:

Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion
Byatt's Possession
Munroe's Who Do You Think You Are?
Lewis's The Monk
Boswell's Life of Johnson
Johnson's Dictionary
Carlyle's Sartor Resartus
Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France
Faulkner's Go Down Moses
Carroll's Alice's Adventure in Wonderland

[jeremyemilio]

Ummm... I meant Emily Bronte, of course.

I happen to have a crush on Jane Eyre, so...

[HacunaMatata101]

jeanrenoir, I think the question becomes, WHO gets to decide what the best books of all time are: The New York Review? the BBC? the authors of "1000 books to read before you die"?, the Pulitzer and Nobel committees? The "authorities" would be different in each country and culture.

Even the crappiest drugstore chick-lit any of us can imagine can be a classic to someone if it enlightened that reader's mind about their fellow man.

This HuffPo page is merely people sharing favorite books, I'd not freak out just yet, it's an ongoing process. If your faves aren't on the page, maybe it's up to you to put them there.

[mergina]

IMMACULATE FETISH, only please, stop sending the Starbucks mugs...sen­d gift certificates instead teehee.

[twohearts]

I'll always have a big sweet spot in my heart for Dickens - especially Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend. Everyone should also read Tale of Two Cities, just for the mystery & history of it.

Of course I adore Flaubert and Jane Austen, Wharton and S.V. Millay - as a poet. I think I like novels (or stories) the most when they present a clear sociological & history-en­vironmenta­l character.

2H

[naschkatze]

Our Mutual Friend is my favorite Dickens. I have a set of Dickens, but I am always reading my favorites over and over: Our Mutual Friend, Bleak House, Great Expectations and sometimes Ollie and Davey. What others are your favorites? If I were choosing between Martin Chuzzlewit, Barnaby Rudge, Dombey and Son, and Nicholas Nickleby, which would you recommend?

[freshnotbitter]

He was very popular in his time. Notice how the books go on and on like a soap opera or a reality show. That is because they were. He wrote highly anticipated serials. He is taught in the best schools. I would not teach him in mine but that is just a matter of taste.

[3fingerbrown]

I'd definitely go with Nickleby, but I'm biased--it happens to be one of my all-time favorite stories. I don't know if it's humanly possible to read the last few paragraphs without crying. The other three on your list are, to me, minor Dickens--that is to say, well worth reading, but not in the same league as his best.