For OMGWTF endings, I'll put in a word for Jack McDevitt's A Talent for War, a book I've practically shoved into the hands of strangers. McDevitt is an enjoyable hard sf writer, but I fear that every one of his books since I've finished, sighed and thought, "It was no A Talent for War."

Even though I wrote my Ph.D seminar paper justifying the last part of Huckleberry Finn, I really wish the whole business with Jim at the farm didn't exist, and we went directly to the wonderful last paragraph.

To Kill a Mockingbird has a great ending.

A great ending of a book is Life of Pi. I was in awe for days. One of my favourite books, generally.

Heh. I was totally going to name it as an ending that pissed me off.

The Poisonwood Bible by Anne Kingsolver

I think this book falls apart halfway through. The narrative ended about halfway in, I guess when they leave Africa. After that it's all crap.

Life of Pi

is like it's opposite. The book is engaging philosophically in the first half then when the second half starts with a syntactically/stylistically totally different sentence ("The ship sank.") it begins again in earnest for real and is great through the end.

I think Invisible Man has momentum and inevitability all the way through. Ditto with Handmaid's Tale but of course if you don't read the historical note for HMT you never figure the end out. Possession too has a great end. As does The Picture of Dorian Gray. I'm trying to think of the books I'm teaching this year... Many of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's books end beautifully, satisfyingly.

I agree with consuela that you have to have a good plot plotted out PRIOR to writing the end to really have a good ending.

The best last paragraph of a book? Origin of Species. The prose itself is so Victorian, at least syntactically. And the I love how he throws all the laws he spends hundreds of pages explaining. But the final image of the bank and the planet evolving is just so lovely.

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

A satisfying end to a difficult book.

Heh. I was totally going to name it as an ending that pissed me off.

Ha. Yes, I know other readers who were very annoyed by it. For me, it was perfect.

I also love the last paragraph of Origin of Species.

Gaudy Night has a great ending.

I loved the ending of Kavalier and Clay. I thought it was perfect.

Hm. Owen Meany was the third book by Irving that I read, and ensured there would never be a fourth.

But I thought of a book I love despite the ending: White Fang, which turns into a little fairy tale at the end and doesn't match the rest of the book.

I suppose both examples illustrate the kinds of stories I prefer.

I love the ending of White Fang.

edit: I love how the man tells his dad that White Fang will have to express his friendship for the other dog by being chief mourner after they have a fight to settle who is who in the pecking order. And White Fang's confusion when his master gives him permission to go after the bullies.

I might be the only one, but I liked the end of Mockingjay, especially as an end to the trilogy. It was grim, given what happens to Prim, but I thought that was part of the point. It's war, and it's often pointless, and it's violent and deadly and ugly. But where Katniss and Peeta end up seemed hopeful to me, and fairly realistic, for this series.