Here is some of my favorite stuff:
Note: these are all ranked based on how much I personally enjoyed them. For example, Night Watch is objectively the second best Discworld book on its own but if you've read the earlier books then Night Watch is the best because of how it builds on previously established characters and expands the lore in an interesting new way.
| Rank | Title | Poster | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Dark Knight | In the Dark Knight Trilogy. Really good writing and performance. I especially like the villains, the Joker and Two-Face |
Only including one book per author. Also these are based on how much I enjoyed reading them, not their overall quality of the book. Beloved by Toni Morrison is one of the best books I've ever read, but it wasn't something I would read for enjoyment. Additionally, some books are made better with context from outside the book. For example, my favorite Discworld book in a vaccum would be Jingo! but I liked Night Watch the best because it was something of a love letter to the city of Ankh Morpork and added backstory to many of my favorite characters in the series. Also, a lot of these I read a long time ago and I'm somewhat going off of how I felt when I read them. So the Secret Series is probably way higher than it deserves to be because 8 year old me really loved it. Conversely my opinions can change if I remember a book enough to retroactively enjoy the story more or less, so even though my favorite Harry Potter book used to be 4 I've developed a love for villainous backstory and a hatred for thin contrivances that only exist so the story can happen, so my favorite is now 6 even though I haven't reread those books. Entire series is overrated though
| Rank | Title | Cover | Author | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Night Watch | Terry Pratchett | Part of the Discworld series. Possibly the only time travel story that I can't complain about. The cause was a magical accident that was under nonrepeatable circumstances, and we spent the previous book introducing a group that deals with things like this so it doesn't seem as contrived when they show up. Additionally, any contrivances are heavily lampshaded since it's a comedy, and justified by the Discworld running on narrative causality. Anyway, we finally get to see some backstory for the city of Ankh-Morpork, and we see a bunch of familiar characters as their significantly younger selves. It's also a great exploration of the character of Sam Vimes. I don't love how the Watch books kind of sideline the rest of the Watch to tell a Vimes story, and this was the most egrigious example, but it was such a good Vimes story that I can't even be mad. | |
| 2 | The Restaurant at the End of the Universe | Douglas Adams | Second Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book. Similar to Discworld in prioritizing comedy over plot, but to a much larger degree. I especially enjoy how the narrator will go on tangeants about random aspects of the universe. It's also an interesting continuiation of the Ultimate Question, with the reveal that (spoilers) humans aren't native to Earth and therefore Arthur's brain doesn't contain the question. That storyline was also the only time in the first two books that the characters spend some time on a more serious story, and we get to explore Arthur's character in ways that we didn't have time to in the first book. That's why I think it's better than the first one, because even though it's still mostly about the comedy it introduces some actual nuance and starts taking some of the ideas seriously. | |
| 3 | The Return of the King | J.R.R. Tolkien | Third Lord of the Rings book. A great conclusion to a great series. You've read it, you don't need my to explain why it's so good. I especially liked the Scouring of the Shire and I'm still mad the movie cut it out, but that's a really big can of worms that I can't fit into this table. I'm a sucker for climactic endings that incorporate alot of stuff from earlier parts of the story, and LotR does that absolutely. However, I do acknowledge that I read these books in elementary school my recollection is affected by the movies. Someday I will reread the series and reevaluate, but for now it stays extremely high. | |
| 4 | A Memory of Light | Robert Jordan / Brandon Sanderson | Fourteenth Wheel of Time book. Whenever I talk about WoT I say "It's one of the best series ever, I don't recommend it" because it's just so long that it's not worth it. The books have a ton of setup and payoff, which is both a pro and a con because the setup is often boring but the payoff is always good. The last book, as one might expect is all payoff. And it's awesome. Seeing some villains that have been around for over ten books finally get defeated is a treat, especially since it's coupled with the heroes finally being their best selves. But the reason I loved this book over some of the others is that it has some really great emotional moments. The final battle between Rand and the Dark One is really, really good and there's alot of moments of desparation where someone is about to die but they get saved by another character, and the reason that those moments are so good in this book specifically is that the person doesn't always get saved and a few major characters die, so you don't actually know what's going to happen. I predicted the very end almost perfectly, but I was dead wrong on like every character death, which is pretty rare especially for WoT, which is purposefully kind of predictable. | |
| 5 | Children of Time | Adrian Tchaikovsky | First Children of Time book, and now that I've typed that I don't know if it was necessary. This book is AWESOME. Light spoilers but the story starts with the collapse of a godlike future human society, and follows two plotlines. The first is a species of an intelligent species of spiders, the result of an experiment which went horribly wrong during the aformentioned collapse of the future society. Unchecked, they start to build a society which since it's based on spiders is completely alien to how we would do things. Their technology progression, society, even their method of communication is different and you can tell the author put a ton of work into this to make it as plausible as he could. The other plotline is about a ship of humans who escaped a doomed Earth, trying to find a terraformed world from the previous era to settle on. I won't tell you what happens next but I think you can imagine which world they find. Anyway this is an absolute masterclass in science fiction world building. I could gush about it for much longer but let me just say it's awesome. | |
| 6 | The Dark Forest | Cixin Liu | Second Remembrance of Earth's Past book, AKA sequel to The Three-Body Problem. I absolutely loved this book. It's by far the most character-driven out of the series, which I appreciated because I'm a sucker for characters. But also, out of the three, it feels the most like a story. The first one is "scientist wanders around until he figures/finds out crazy scifi concept" and the third one is "a whole bunch of crazy scifi stuff while a scientist repeatedly fails to save humanity". This one, however, has a conflict that is consistent and known from the beginning. Humanity needs to solve the problem introduced in book 1, and there's a faction that wants the bad thing to happen. I can't go into details but the fate of the world is in the hands of a random dude named Luoji, but nobody including him knows why he's so special. There's a part with a love story and it's not great but this part of the book is also interspliced with other characters trying their own methods of tackling the problem, so it never made me want to stop reading. The progression of the story and Luoji's character arc are great, and so is his eventual solution which introduces a crazy scifi concept that is legit the best scifi idea I've ever read. | |
| 7 | Catch-22 | Joseph Heller | Deserves special mention because it's the only book on this list that's not fantasy or scifi. Catch-22 is a satirical comedy about World War 2, in which the main character Yossarian is trying to go home but he and his friends consistently fall victim to the red tape of the American military and the whims of his ambitious but incompetent superiors. It's really funny but also sometimes super horrifying, often flipping between those two on a dime. And even though it's shocking I think the tonal whiplash is intentional because it gives you a window into how it feels to be at war. | |
| 8 | Undecided Game of Thrones book | George R.R. Martin | nth A Song of Ice and Fire book. Not saying which one because I haven't read A Dance with Dragons yet and based on the character split that one's probably gonna be my favorite, but since I go months without updating this I figured I should put a placeholder because the series definitely deserves to be here. The worldbuilding and writing style are great, I don't love the magic system but I appreciate that it matches the tone. There's also less (but not zero) waiting around for things to happen as in other books, which I really appreciate since that was my biggest gripe with the Wheel of Time, a series that I find very interesting to compare and contrast with this one but I can't because nobody wants to read WoT. | |
| 9 | The Battle of the Labyrinth | Rick Riordan | Fourth Percy Jackson and the Olympians book. | |
| 10 | Jade City | Fonda Lee | First Green Bone Saga book. | |
| 11 | The Ersatz Elevator | Lemony Snicket | Sixth A Series of Unfortunate Events book. | |
| 12 | Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince | J.K. Rowling | Sixth Harry Potter book. | |
| 13 | Dune | Frank Herbert | First Dune book. | |
| 14 | This Isn't What It Looks Like | Pseydonymous Bosch | Fourth Secret Series book. I'm gonna be honest here, I don't really remember which book I liked the best so I chose the one that I actually remember the plot to. | |
| 15 | Dracula | Bram Stoker | ||
| 16 | Frankenstein | Mary Shelley | ||
| 17 | The Count of Monte Cristo | |||
| 18 | The Mote in God's Eye | Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven | I think there's a sequel but it's such a contained story one wouldn't be necessary. | |
| 19 | Catching Fire | Suzanne Colins | Second Hunger Games book. | |
| 20 | The | Third series book.. |
Oh my god, the list of books I've enjoyed numbers in the triple digits but when you limit to one per author it gets a lot shorter. I want to put some honorable mentions here for works that are good but not great:
Lovecraft. I like some of the monsters and concepts, and his horror style is pretty good, but his obsession with framing devices infuriates me and makes the stories so much worse. Also, while he's far from the only author who's a bad person irl, his racism sometimes bleeds into his work so much that it's distracting.
The Ranger's Apprentice. I read these in like third grade and I vividly remember specific passages I enjoyed, but since I couldn't for the life of me recount the plot of a single one of those books I can't in good faith put one on here.
Other fantasy series I haven't read. At this point I've read the heavy hitters, but if you've read a book that seems like it should be up there and it's not I probably just haven't gotten to it.
The Catcher in the Rye. I can't say I really liked this book but I do think it deserves a lot of credit for framing the mindset of a confused teenager in a way that I haven't seen any other author do. But it deserves mention because whenever this book comes up people treat it like it's some horrible evil manifesto about an angry young man and I think that reading fundamentally misunderstands what the book is saying.
Little House in the Big Woods. Ha just kidding I hated this book so much. In hindsight it probably wasn't that bad but I owe it to second grade me to bash on it.