I decided to do a Top 10 list of fiction books, and realized that it was difficult to compile that list, since it would spill over to more than 10. In fact, even a Top 50 would be difficult.

Instead, here is a random list of books, that have been critically acclaimed amongst the best in the the fiction category.

The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

Santiago, a boy living in Andalusia, leads a common life of travel through his trade of shepherding. One day he has a dream in which a child tells him to go to the Egyptian pyramids, a destination that will apparently lead to treasure. He consults a gypsy to interpret his dream, who simply tells him to go to the Pyramids to find the loot and asks for a tenth of his future treasure instead of a fee for her service. He becomes discouraged by this advice, yet she assures him that the wisest men would agree with the simplicity of this special case.
The story is unique, because its not much of a story, but a wonderful metaphor on life, aspirations, following your dream, conviction and living your dream.

 

All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren
More than just a classic political novel, Warren’s tale of power and corruption in the Depression-era South is a sustained meditation on the unforeseen consequences of every human act, the vexing connectedness of all people and the possibility—it’s not much of one—of goodness in a sinful world. Willie Stark, Warren’s lightly disguised version of Huey Long, the onetime Louisiana strongman/governor, begins as a genuine tribune of the people and ends as a murderous populist demagogue. Jack Burden is his press agent, who carries out the boss’s orders, first without objection, then in the face of his own increasingly troubled conscience. And the politics? For Warren, that’s simply the arena most likely to prove that man is a fallen creature. Which it does.

Red Rabbit, Tom Clancy
Jack Ryan, CIA, helps with transporting a Russian defector and his family to the United States with the help of the British SIS. He confirms the KGB plan to kill Pope John Paul II (who, at the time the novel takes place, had just been elected). As in many stories in the Jack Ryan universe (often described as the Ryanverse), the story incorporates several historical events, including the 1978 assassination of Georgi Markov and the World War II era Operation Mincemeat. While Clancy doesn’t rewrite the public version of events surrounding the nearly-successful assassination of the Pope, he does involve Ryan and his team in a typically clandestine manner.

Airframe, Michael Crichton
The novel opens aboard Hong Kong based Transpacific Airlines flight 545, inbound to Denver. An incident occurs about a half hour off the California coastline and the pilot requests an emergency landing at Los Angeles stating that the plane encountered “severe turbulence” in midflight. The pilot gives air traffic control conflicting information regarding the type and severity of injuries, but does inform them that crew members were hurt and “three passengers are dead”.
The incident seems inexplicable. The N-22 is a plane with an excellent safety record, and the pilot is highly trained, ruling out the possibility of human error. Passengers and flight crew give concurring accounts of the circumstances of the disaster, and the most likely explanation turns out to be a technical problem that was fixed years ago.
The accident takes place at a bad time for Norton Aircraft. Norton is on the verge of concluding an eight-billion-dollar sale of N-22 aircraft to the Chinese government. Should the N-22’s safety record be questioned, the Chinese government might cancel the sale. With only a week left until the deal is signed, Casey Singleton, a Vice President for Norton Aircraft in charge of the Quality Assurance Incident Review Team, must find out what happened on the plane while dealing with disgruntled Union workers.

The Celestine Prophecy, James Redfield
The book discusses various psychological and spiritual ideas that are rooted in many ancient Eastern Traditions, such as the claim that vegetarianism can help an individual to establish a connection with the Divine. The main character of the novel undertakes a journey to find and understand a series of nine spiritual insights on an ancient manuscript in Peru. The book is a first-person narrative of spiritual awakening. The narrator is in a transitional period of his life, and begins to notice instances of synchronicity, which is the realization that coincidences may have deep meaning.

In the novel, the Maya civilization left ruins in Peru where the manuscript was found, whereupon the Incas took up residence in the abandoned Maya cities after the Maya had reached an “energy vibration level” which made them cross a barrier into a completely spiritual reality.

The Bourne Ultimatum, Robert Ludlum
The novel follows David Webb, alias Jason Bourne, as he works to find his old enemy, Carlos the Jackal, who is trying to kill him. As the Jackal enters old age and his infamy fades, he decides that he will do two things before he dies: kill Webb/Bourne, and destroy the KGB facility of Novgorod, where the Jackal was trained and later turned away.

Overload, Arthur Hailey
Overload is a novel by Arthur Hailey, concerning the electricity production industry in California and the activities of the employees and others involved with Golden State Power and Light, a fictional California public service company. The novel is described from the point of view of vice-president of Golden State Power and Light,Mr. Nimrod Goldman, often mentioned as Nim.
The plots follow many of the issues of the day, including race relations, corporate politics, business ethics, terrorism and journalism.

Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
The “Rama” of the title is an alien starship, initially mistaken for an asteroid and named after the Hindu God Rama. Asteroid 31/439 is detected by astronomers in the year 2131 while still outside the orbit of Jupiter. The object’s speed and the angle of its trajectory clearly indicate that this is not an object on a long orbit around our sun; it comes from interstellar space. Astronomers’ interest is piqued when they realize that this asteroid not only has an extremely rapid 4 minute rotation period but it is quite large in size for an asteroid. An unmanned space probe is launched from the Mars moon Phobos, and photographs taken during its rapid flyby reveal an absolutely cylindrical object 16 kilometers wide and 50 kilometers long, made of a highly reflective material. In other words, this is humankind’s first encounter with an alien space ship.

The Odessa File, Frederick Forsyth
Peter Miller, a German freelance crime reporter, follows an ambulance to the apartment of Salomon Tauber, a Jewish Holocaust-survivor who has committed suicide. Miller is given the dead man’s diary by a friend in the police. He reads Tauber’s life story and learns that Tauber was in Riga concentration camp commanded by Eduard Roschmann, “The Butcher of Riga”. He also learns that Tauber witnessed Roschmann shooting a German Army captain. Miller resolves to search for Roschmann.
He pursues the story and visits the State Attorney General’s office and other offices where he learns that no-one is prepared to search for or prosecute former Nazis. But his investigations take him to the famed war-criminal investigator Simon Wiesenthal, who tells him about the society “ODESSA”.

The Kite runner, Khaled Husseini
The story set in Afghan, and later in the US, is a moving story of friendship, love and loyalty. The context of the story is set in a more peaceful Afghanistan and transitions to a Russian control, and Taliban regime. There is a certain quality in the story telling that genuinely touches your heart, and immerses the reader in the story.
However, there is also a shocking twist in the story that reveals itself towards the end.
All in all, a well crafted novel with strong characters and a story that lingers.