My Top 5 Favorite Books of All Time: A Tribute to Dolly Parton

In Honor of Dolly Parton: My Top 5 Favorite Books of All Time

There are celebrities we admire because they entertain us, and then there are those rare people who somehow leave the world a genuinely better than they found it.

Dolly Parton was one of those people.

Like millions of others, I have always loved Dolly for her music, humor, unmistakable personality, and ability to be completely herself. But one of the things I admire most about her has nothing to do with rhinestones, country music, or Dollywood.

Dolly Paron believed in books.

She believed that reading could change a child's life. She believed books could give children opportunities their circumstances might otherwise deny them. Most importantly, she actually did something about it.

After Doly's passing, I kept thinking about her incredible commitment to literacy and the millions of people whose lives have been touched by the books she helped put into children's hands. It made me think about the books that have mattered most in my own life.

Not necessarily the books critics would call the greatest novels ever written. Not necessarily the most sophisticated books I've ever read.

I'm talking about my books.

The books i wish I could experience again for the first time.

The books I recommend over and over.

The books whose characters or settings stayed somewhere in my head long after I turned the final page.

So, in honor of Dolly Parton and her lifelong belief in the power of reading, I'm celebrating the thing she worked so hard to give to others: the joy of finding a book you absolutely love.

Here are my five favorite books-or, in one case, series-of all time.

5-Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney

Few things will get my attention faster than a dysfunctional family trapped together in an isolated location where people begin dying.

Add a creepy old house, a storm, family secrets, and the inability to escape?

I'm sold.

That is exactly the kind of atmosphere Alice Feeney creates in Daisy Darker.

The Darker family gathers at Seaglass, their grandmother's isolated home, for what should be a birthday celebration. The house sits on a tiny tidal island, meaning th family is competely cut off from te outside world when the tide comes in.

Then someone dies.

And suddenly, everyone inside Seaglass has a reason to be afraid.

What I love about Daisy Darker is its atmosphere. The setting isn't simply where the story takes place-it feels like another character.

There is something inherently unsettling about knowing that even if you desperately wanted to leave, you couldn't.

The novel combines two things I absolutely love: a locked-room style mystery and a deeply dysfunctional family.

Everyone has secrets. Everyone has resentments. Everyone has history.

And Feeney slowly peels those layers away while the situation inside the house becomes increasingly disturbing.

Then there is the twist.

I read a lot of thrillers. Once you've read enough of them, you start looking for the trick. You become suspicious of everything. You start mentally cataloging clues because you're determined that the author is not going to fool you.

Alice Feeney folled me.

And I loved her for it.

Daisy Darker is dark, atmospheric, strange, clever, and exactly the kind of book that reminds me why I love mysteries so much.

4-Home Is Where The Bodies Are by Jeneva Rose

Jeneva Rose is one of my favorite thriller authors, and Home is Where the Bodies Are is easily one of my favorite books of hers.

The premise alone grabbed me.

Three estranged siblings return to their childhood home following their mother's death. While going through her belongings, they discover an old VHS tape.

And what they see on it changes everything.

Suddenly, they have to confront the possibility that the people who raised them may have been hiding something horrifying.

There is something especially disturbing about mysteries involving family secrets because your family is supposed to represent familiarity. They're the people whose histories you think you know.

But what if you don't?

What if your childhood memories are incomplete?

What if the adults you trusted were hiding things from you?

An what if uncovering the truth changes the way you understand your entire family?

That's what makes this book so effective.

They mystery is compelling. but, but underneath it is a story about siblings, grief, resentment, memory, and the strange experience of returning to your childhood home as an adult.

And then Jeneva Rose does what Jeneva Rose does best.

She pulls the rug out from underneath you.I remember reaching the twist and having one of those wonderful WAIT WHAT?! reading moments.

Those are the moments I chase as a thriller reader.

I don't just want a book to surprise me. I want it to make me mentally rewind everything I've already read because suddenly earlier scenes mean something completely different.

Home Is Where the Bodies Are gave me exactly that experience.

3-An Unwanted Guest by Shari Lapena

If someone asked me to design the perfect setting for a mystery novel, I might accidentally describe An Unwanted Guest.

An old hotel.

Upstate New York.

A brutal winter storm.

Snow and ice making travel impossible.

No power.

No easy communication with the outside world.

A group of strangers.

And then people start dying.

Everything about that setup appeals to me.

Shari Lapena takes the classic isolated-mystery formula and creates something wonderfully claustrophobic with it. The guests arrive at Mitchell's Inn expecting a peaceful winter getaway, only to find themselves trapped when the weather becomes increasingly dangerous.

Then one guest dies.

Then another.

Eventually, everyone has to confront the terrifying possibility that whoever is responsible is still inside the hotel with them.

This is one of those books where the setting is half the fun.

I could practically feel the cold while reading it.

The snowstorm removes all of the character's normal escape routes and modern conveniences. They cannot simply get in their cars and leave. Help isn't around the corner. They are stuck with one another.

That creates exactly the kind of tension I love.

And because there are multiple characters with their own secrets, relationships, and possible motives, suspicion constantly shifts.

One chapter makes you certain you've figured it out.

Then something happens.

Never mind.

Maybe it's someone else.

That experience is why An Unwanted Guest remains my favorite Shari Lapena novel.

It gives me everything I want from a mystery: atmosphere, isolation, secrets, suspicious characters, murder, and the constant feeling that something is very, very wrong.

2-The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling

This is technically cheating because I'm giving seven books one spot.

I don't care.

There was absolutely no way I could make a list of my favorite books without including Harry Potter.

There are books you enjoy, and then there are books that become associated with an entire period of your life.

For me, Harry Potter belongs in that second category.

The magic of the series isn't simply Hogwarts, spells, Quidditch, or magical creatures-although obviously those things are part of what makes the world so fun.

It's the feeling of entering that world.

Opening one of these books feels like stepping through a door.

Suddenly, there is Hogwarts.

The Great Hall.

Diagon Alley.

Hogsmeade.

The Forbidden Forest.

Platform Nine and Three-Quarters.

You don't simply read about these places. After enough time with the series, they begin to feel strangely familiar.

But what has always made Harry Potter special to me is the heart underneath the magic.

At its core, the series is about friendship, loyalty, grief, prejudice, courage, sacrifice, family, and the choices people make when they are confronted with evil.

Harry's greatest strength isn't magic.

It's his ability to love people despite everything that has happened to him.

Hermione shows us the power of intelligence and conviction.

Ron demonstrates how bravery can exist alongside insecurity and fear.

And some of the most fascinating characters-Snape, Sirius, Lupin, Dumbledore, Draco-exist in complicated moral territory that becomes increasingly interesting as the series grows darker.

That's another reason I love these books.

They grew with their readers.

What begins with an 11-year-old discovering he' a wizard gradually becomes a much darker story about authoritarianism, death, resistance, propaganda, prejudice, and the responsibility to stand against injustice.

Yet somehow the magic never disappears.

There will always be something comforting about returning to Hogwarts.

And I suspect there always will be.

1-The Women by Kristin Hannah

And fially, there is The Women.

My favorite book.

There are books that entertain you.

There are books that you admire.

And occasionally, there is a book that absolutely wrecks you.

The Women did that for me.

Kristin Hannah tells the story of Frances "Frankie" McGrath, a young woman who joins the Army Nurse Corps during the Vietnam War after her brother goes overseas.

Frankie begins her journey sheltered and inexperienced. Nothing in her privileged upbringing could possibly prepare her for what she encounters in Vietnam.

The war changes her.

But one of the most powerful aspects of The Women is that Hannah doesn't end Frankie's story when she leaves Vietnam.

Because coming home doesn't mean the war is over.

Frankie returns to an America deeply divided over Vietnam, where veterans are ofte treated with hostility and where women's contributions to the war are frequently ignored altogether.

Again and again, Frankie encounters the same dismissive message:

There were no women in Vietnam.

Except there were.

They served.

They suffered.

They saved lives.

They came home carrying memories and trauma that other people often refused to acknowledge.

That is what stayed with me most about this novel.

Frankie's story is fictional, but the women she represents were very real.

I knew about Vietnam before reading The Women. I knew about the protests. I knew about the soldiers. I knew about the political controversy surrounding the war.

But this book made me think much more deeply about the women who served there, particularly the nurses whose stories have historically received far less attention.

And Kristin Hannah makes that hstory painfully human.

Frankie isn't presented as some flawless heroic figure.

She struggles.

She makes mistakes.

She loves people.

She falls apart.

She survivies.

And sometimes she barely survives.

Her friendships-especially the relationships she forms with other women who understand what she has experienced-are some of the most powerful parts of the entire novel.

There are scenes in The Women that stayed with me long after I finished reading.

That's ultimately why it takes the number-one spot.

A great book doesn't necessarily end when you close it.

Sometimes it follows you.

The Books We Carry With Us

Looking at this list, I realized something.

These books seemingly have almost nothng in common.

The Women is historical fiction.

Harry Potter is fantasy.

An Unwanted Guest is a locked-room mystery.

Home is Where the Bodies Are is a domestic thriller.

Daisy Darker is a gothic family mystery.

But every one of them transported me somewhere.

Vietnam.

Hogwarts.

A snowbound hotel.

A family home filled with secrets.

A strange house stranded on a tidal island.

For a little while, I wasn't sitting somehwere reading words printed on paper.

I was somewhere else.

And maybe that's on of the greatest gifts books give us.

Dolly Parton understood that.

She understood that putting a book into a child's hands wasn't simply giving them an object. It was giving them a doorway.

A book can take a child living in a tiny town somewhere into another country, another century, another universe.

It can introduce them to people they would never oterwise meet.

It can teach empathy.

It can provide comfort.

It can make someone feel less alone.

And sometimes it can plant the tiniest seed of an idea:

Maybe my world can be bigger than the one I see around me.

That may be one of the most beautiful parts of Dolly Parton's legacy.

The world will remember Dolly for "Jolene", "9 to 5", "I Will Always Love You", Dollywood, the rhinestones, the wigs, the jokes, and that unmistakable voice.

But millions of children will also know her in another way.

The Book Lady.

And there may be no better tribute to the Book Lady than to keep doing exactly what she spent decades encouraging people to do.

Pick up a book.

Fall into another world.

And keep reading!

Thank you for the music, Dolly.

And thank you for the books.

Rest in peace.

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Midnight Margians from Savannah, GA

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