Your 25 Favourite Books

[Marcus1]

Previously on Lit Net there was a thread in which users share their top 10 books, so now I thought it would be more interesting to see longer personal lists. You can include non-fiction, poetry, or any book of your liking.


1. The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa
2. The Man Without Qualities - Robert Musil
3. Swann's Way - Marcel Proust
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
5. The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann
6. Labyrinths - Jorge Luis Borges
7. Street of Crocodiles - Bruno Schulz
8. Pedro Paramo - Juan Rulfo
9. Snow Country - Yasunari Kawabata
10. On Heroes and Tombs - Ernesto Sabato
11. Doctor Faustus - Thomas Mann
12. Thousand Cranes - Yasunari Kawabata
13. A Hunger Artist - Franz Kafka
14. To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
15. The Sound of the Mountain - Yasunari Kawabata
16. Joseph and His Brothers - Thomas Mann
17. A Book of Memories - Peter Nadas
18. Kokoro - Natsume Soseki
19. The Waves - Virginia Woolf
20. Beauty and Sadness - Yasunari Kawabata
21. The Passion According to G.H. - Clarice Lispector
22. Brodie's Report - Jorge Luis Borges
23. Galileo - Bertolt Brecht
24. Matter and Memory - Henri Bergson
25. The Invention of Morel - Adolfo Bioy Casares

EDIT: Well, Thomas Mann and Yasunari Kawabata are my two favourite writers. Everything they've written has deeply affected me.

[Mohammad Ahmad]

A good list of book I liked them

[R.F. Schiller]

Cool, I'll go as well. If there are enough lists, maybe I (or someone else) will compile a cumulative list of everyone's entries.

1. Dao De Ching - Lao Zi
2. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
3. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
4. Romance of the Three Kingdoms - Luo Guanzhong
5. Swann's Way - Marcel Proust
6. Speak, Memory - Vladimir Nabokov
7. A Good Man is Hard to Find - Flannery O'Connor
8. Pnin - Vladimir Nabokov
9. Notes from the Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky
10. The Zhuangzi -Zhuang Zi
11. The Death of Ivan Illyich - Leo Tolstoy
12. American Pastoral - Philip Roth
13. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
14. Despair - Vladimir Nabokov
15. The Trial - Franz Kafka
16. The Stranger - Albert Camus
17. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight - Vladimir Nabokov
18. Ada, or Ardor - Vladimir Nabokov
19. The Counterlife - Philip Roth
20. Native Son - Richard Wright
21. Glengarry Glen Ross - David Mamet
22. The Complete Stories of Anton Chekhov - Anton Chekhov
23. The Human Stain - Philip Roth
24. Essays - Ralph Waldo Emerson
25. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

[Pompey Bum]

4. Romance of the Three Kingdoms

Cao Cao says it goes to first or your head's on a spike. :)

[Calidore]

Cool, I'll go as well. If there are enough lists, maybe I (or someone else) will compile a cumulative list of everyone's entries.

:) Can't wait for the "Post your top 25 Top 25 lists" thread.

[Lykren]

1. Ulysses
2. The Tale of Genji
3. Pride and Prejudice
4. Emma
5. Snow Country
5. Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
6. The Dream of the Red Chamber
7. Macbeth
8. Hamlet
9. Anna Karenina
10. Complete Poems of Wallace Stevens
11. Middlemarch
12. To The Lighthouse
13. Complete Poems of W.H. Auden
14. Tess of the D'Urbervilles
15. If Not, Winter
16. War & Peace
17. Jin Ping Mei
18. Autobiography of Red
19. Brideshead Revisited
20. The Tempest
21. The Book of Genesis
22. Complete Poems of T.S. Eliot
23. Complete Poems of William Carlos Williams
24. The Great Gatsby
25. Complete Poems of John Donne

[Lykren]

I realize the ordering of my list is pretty kooky, but the title of this thread is 'favourite books,' not 'books in order of reputation.'

[Pierre Menard]

I'm so glad to see poetry on your list Lykren. It usually always gets under-represented on these lists but you've got some fantastic choices on there.

[Aere Perennius]

I realize the ordering of my list is pretty kooky, but the title of this thread is 'favourite books,' not 'books in order of reputation.'

There isn't a correct answer, as you well know, so don't let others make you feel like there might be.

Anyway, I don't read many translations; and when I do, I judge the translated work as a separate piece from it's original. This means my list is heavily based in English and, from what little I've read and enjoyed, French Literature. I'm only twenty-one—I can't possibly claim to be widely-read and I'm sure my list will reflect that (the prejudice of my mind is a strange influence...). I'm not even sure which of these, if any, I will outgrow as my taste develops. As for ranking them: to list my favorite works of art and then have them compete—I refuse on moral grounds! (And yes, I will be cheating by listing general subjects rather than strictly books.)

Epithalamion by Edmund Spenser
Essais of Michel de Montaigne
Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare
The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall by Francis Bacon
Songs and Sonnets of John Donne
Sermons of John Donne
Lycidas by John Milton
Religio Medici and Other Works by Thomas Browne
Correspondance complète of Madame de Sévigné
Poetical Works, Dramatic Works, and Prose of John Dryden
Andromaque by Jean Racine
Fables of Jean de la Fontaine
Poetical Works and Letters of Alexander Pope
Correspondance complète of Madame du Deffand
Letters of Horace Walpole
Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats
Emma by Jane Austen
Poetical Works and Letters of Emily Dickinson
Novels, Letters, Tales and Other Works by Henry James
Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
La Mare au diable by George Sand
Correspondance complète of Élisabeth Bégon
La Vie mode d'emploi by Georges Perec
L'Équipée malaise by Jean Echenoz

That was fun, thanks! I tried to keep it chronological but by the end the names were coming faster than the dates. I will be the first to admit my tastes are antiquated, but there isn't much in the "wild spirit" of today's literature that I find commendable—at least in English. As you can see, I'm a great lover of epistolary literature; in fact, I could soon be adding Voltaire's many volumes of letters to this list. I'm finding them incomparable as of now.

[Vota]

I have so many great books waiting to be read as I make my way through them one by one. This is the closest thing to a true list that I can come up with from the various books, short stories, plays, and philosophical and historical works that I have read up to this moment. It is heavily populated with science fiction as that is what I predominantly read up until about two years ago.

I had to edit the list upon further reflection as I missed a few. I wouldn't be surprised if a top 25 list of mine within the next few years appeared radically different.

1. The Iliad
2. The Odyssey
3. Dune
4. The Stars My Destination
5. Hamlet
6. War and Peace
7. The Night's Dawn Trilogy
8. Altered Carbon
9. Montaigne- essays
10. Robert G. Ingersoll- greatest lectures
11. The Sorrows of Young Werther
12. Human, All Too Human
13. The First Law Trilogy
14. Ender's Game
15. The Wheel of Time series
16. The Jungle
17. Path Notes of An American Ninja Master
18. Starship Troopers
19. The Forever War
20. Old Man's War
21. Armor
22. Shadow Strategies of An American Ninja Master
23. Camping and Woodcraft by Horace Kephart
24. Moby Dick
25. The Dark Knight Returns

The ninja books were written by an American who had achieved the Kundalini. There is a ton of great information about psychology, sociology, eastern metaphysical stuff, symbolism, combat etc. They were the equivalent of his martial arts grimoires. Really fascinating reads.

[kev67]

Childhood favourites
============
Watership Down, Richard Adams
The Hobbit, J R R Tolkein

Fiction
====
I Claudius, Robert Graves
The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling
Dead Man's Walk, Larry McMurtry
Mr American, George MacDonald Fraser
The Mote in God's Eye, Larry Niven and Gerry Pournell
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Nice Work, David Lodge
About a Boy, Nick Hornby
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula LeGuin
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
The Inimitable Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse

Autobiography
=========
All Creatures Great and Small, James Herriot
Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall, Spike Milligan

Religious commentary
==============
Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, Paula Fredriksem
Lamb of God, Ralph F Wilson

Non-fiction
=======
The Emperor's New Mind, Roger Penrose
The Revenge of Gaia, James Lovelock
Whole Earth Discipline, Stuart Brand,
The Quest, Daniel Yergin
Treasure Islands, Nicholas Shaxon
Flat Earth News, Nick Davies
Blair's Wars, John R. Kampfner

[stlukesguild]

Well... in making such a list the first thing I would need to do is get Shakespeare out of the way as he is such an obvious first choice. So assuming I already have The Collected Works of William Shakespeare the next 25 would include:

1. Dante Alighieri- Comedia
2. anon.- The Bible (King James Translation)
3. anon.- The Arabian Night's (1001 Nights)
4. Homer- The Odyssey
5. Cervantes- Don Quixote
6. William Blake- Collected Poetical Works
7. Milton- Paradise Lost
8. Charles Baudelaire- Les Fleurs du mal
9. Firdowsi- The Shahnameh (The Book of Kings)
10. J.L. Borges- Collected Fictions and Non-Fictions
11. Flaubert- Madame Bovary
12. Lawrence Sterne- Tristram Shandy
13. Montaigne Essays
14. Melville- Moby Dick
15. Dickens- A Tale of Two Cities
16. Rilke- Collected Poems
17. Keats- Collected Poems
18. Edmund Spenser- Epithalimion
19. Robert Herrick- Hesperides
20. Walter Pater- The Renaissance
21. Kafka- Collected Short Stories
22. Nabokov- Lolita
23. Italo Calvino- Invisible Cities (or The Baron in the Trees/Complete Cosmicomics)
24. Hawthorne- Collected Short Stories
25. Whitman's Leaves of Grass

Honestly, I can't imagine being without any of the books on this list... and I could easily come up with a second 25 that are just as essential to me:

26. Lewis Carroll- Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking-glass
27. Emerson- Collected Essays
28. Theophile Gautier- Collected Tales & Poems
29. Leopardi- Canti
30. Eugenio Montale- Cuttlefish Bones
31. T.S. Eliot- Collected Poems
32. Thomas Traherne- Collected Poems
33. W.B. Yeats- Collected Poetry
34. Tennyson- Collected Poetry
35. Gibbon- The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
36. Friederich Holderlin- Collected Poetry
37. Goethe- Collected Poetry
38. Hermann Hesse- The Glass Bead Game
39. Hugo- Les Miserables
40. Tolstoy- War & Peace
41. Dostoevsky- The Brothers Karamazov
42. Rousseau- Confessions
43. Emily Dickenson- Collected Poems
44. Fernando Pessoa- Selected/Collected Poems/The Book of Disquiet
45. Thomas Mann- Doctor Faustus
46. Sophocles- The Three Theban Plays
47. Aeschylus- The Orestiea
48. Euripides- Medea
49. Henrik Ibsen- An Enemy of the People
50. Boris Pasternak- My Sister-Life

[Marcus1]

For poetry I do like Keats, Yeats, Neruda, Rilke, Celan, Pessoa, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mandelstam, Garcia Lorca, Paz and Farrokhzad.

[stlukesguild]

And how did I forget Proust? :ack2:

[Lykren]

I'm so glad to see poetry on your list Lykren. It usually always gets under-represented on these lists but you've got some fantastic choices on there.

I'm not widely read in poetry (nor in literature in general for that matter), so one thing I'm really looking forward to, once I finish my list of novels to read, is really exploring poetry widely and deeply. As you can see the poetry I have read so far has made a strong impact on me, so I'm glad that there's more where that came from!

[Pierre Menard]

I hate ranking these things, but a rough go would be:



1. J.L. Borges - Ficciones (all of his short stories, poems and non-fiction really).
2. W.B. Yeats - Collected Poems
3. Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass
4. Shakespeare - Julius Caesar
5. Herman Melville - Moby Dick
6. Rainer Maria Rilke - Collected Poems
7. T.S. Elliott - Collected Poems
8. Fernando Pessoa - Book of Disquiet
9. Cervantes - Don Quixote
10. Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot
11. Joseph Conrad - Lord Jim
12. Sophocles - Oedipus Trilogy
13. Wallace Stevens - Collected Poems
14. Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse
15. Cormac McCarthy- Suttree
16. Ryunosuke Akutagawa - Collected Stories
17. Yasunari Kawataba - Snow Country
18. Homer - The Iliad
19. Montaigne - Essays
20. Honore De Balzac - Eugenie Grandet
21. Isaac Bashevis Singer - Collected Stories
22. Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire
23. William Faulkner - Sound and the Fury
24. Seamus Heaney - Collected Poems
25. Ovid - Metamorphoses

[Pompey Bum]

Well if we must. I'll stand by my ten-book list:

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Journey to the West (attributed to Wu Cheng-en)
Romance of the Three Kingdoms (attributed to Luo Guanzhong)
Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne

To those I will add (as before in no order of preference):

Apuleius' Metamorphoses (The Golden As s)
Xenophon's Anabasis
The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus
History of the Conquest of Mexico by William Prescott
The Holy Bible (King James Version--but also the Septuagint and the Vulgate)
Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding
Any number of Dickens novels--don't make me choose.


And if poetry is included:

Henry IV Part One by William Shakespeare
Henry IV Part Two by William Shakespeare
A Midsummer's Night Dream by William Shakespeare
Don Juan by Lord Byron
The Iliad by Homer
The Odyssey by Homer
Ovid's Metamorphoses
Catullus' Lesbia Cycle

[stlukesguild]

The Holy Bible (King James Version--but also the Septuagint and the Vulgate

You've read the Greek and Latin translations of the Hebrew?

[Pierre Menard]

I really wanted to put The King James Bible in there, but I haven't finished a lot of the major books of it yet, and I was finding it hard to choose an individual one…if I was asked in a year, it'd certainly be on there. It's a powerful, magisterial work.

[mortalterror]

1. The Bible (King James)- especially the book of Job, sorrow at it's most beautiful.

2.The Iliad and the Odyssey(Fitzgerlad and Fagles)- I'm always amazed at this guy. His work is so powerful after all these years. It's so light, and free, lyrical but powerful and aggressive, poetic and adventurous, all great poetic accomplishments unite in these works.

3.Plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides- Shakespeare of the ancient world, the greatest most concise writer of plot, and the greatest writer of psychology.

4. Plays of Aristophanes- Particularly with Lysistrata, the funniest writer of all time.

5.Plato's Republic- The greatest thinker of all time. I love how his work builds on itself as it goes along, like a pyramid or a skyscraper, one level on top of another.

6.Virgil's Aeneid- The beginning is a lesson on how to begin a book, and Book 2 with the Fall of Troy is the greatest description of warfare, battle, and the fall of a city in literature. Tolstoy couldn't touch it.

7.Ovid's poems- The Metamorphoses is just the tip of the iceberg that is his work. He is the poet of variety, a scholar the likes of Petrarch or T.S. Eliot, a lover of mythology, a lover of women and sensuality, richly allusive to literature he loved. He is cosmopolitan, worldly, sophisticated, aristocratic, and moral. His major work is like the Bible: out of many stories a unity.

8.The Plays of Seneca- A passion, an energy, and a fire to his poetry and theater not seen again until the 19th century decadents.

9.Satyricon by Petronius- A first century Don Quixote, or a mock Odyssey in prose. Either way, this epic comic novel about a hero nicknamed "the crotch" who has offended the god Priapus and must voyage across the Roman empire facing monsters, pirates, philosophers, and perverts in search of his lost mojo is hilarious stuff.

10.Pharsalia by Lucan- An anti-epic poem of a world gone mad in an apocalyptic civil war. What The Book of Revelations would be like if Caesar were the anti-Christ.

11.Bhagavadgita (Edwin Arnold)- Good as The Book of Job and similar in that they both probe the nature of God and man's relation to the divine.

12.Poems of Tu Fu, Li Bai, and Bai Juyi- the first is a master of form, the second is romantic and original, the third is simple and concise.

13.Beowulf (Seamus Heaney)- Initially, I didn't think much of of this Old English poem, but under Heaney's skillful translation I see now all the praise which is heaped upon it is merited. It makes you wish more of the Finnesburg Fragment and other Anglo-Saxon poetry were preserved.

14.The Shahnameh by Ferdowsi (Arthur and Edmond Warner)- an Iranian poet the equal of Shakespeare or Homer wrote a three thousand page poem about the mythical history of Iran from it's earliest days to his own. His hero Rostam is one of the baddest mother****ers in all of literature. Think Gilgamesh, Achilles, Erra, Marduk, Samson, Hercules, or Roland. The feats in this book would put Beowulf to shame.

15.The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (FitzGerald)- one of the greatest sequences of short poems ever. Wine, song, and the transience of human life.

18.The Gita Govinda by Jayadeva- A poem about two lovers better than the Song of Solomon. A story about yearning for mystical union and the ideal mate. Almost as good as the Bhagavadgita.

17.The Poems of Rumi- If Ferdowsi is the Homer of the Middle East, Rumi is it's Dante. You will find no greater celebration of the mystery and wonder of God than here.

18.The Divine Comedy by Dante- Especially the Inferno. It has all of the structure of Plato's Republic, all the mythology of Ovid, all the religious devotion of the Bible, a never ending stream of characters and invention. The greatest book ever.

19. Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso- The best poem about Knights, the middle-ages, chivalry, and the Crusades. Epic writing better than Milton's, because it's not so stuffy. All of the energy of the earlier romances but with more polish and style.

20..The Essays of Montaigne- philosophy that doesn't hurt your head. Like talking to the world's most interesting man.

21.Shakespeare's Plays- He's the writer I look to and think "There's no better way to word this. These are the best words in the best possible combination."

22.Fuente Ovejuna by Lope De Vega- this guy's plays have all the pacing, character, and dramatic situations of Shakespeare, but without some of the poetic beauty.

23.Eight Dramas of Calderon (FitzGerald)- Another nearly Shakespearean dramatist. His poetry sparkles especially in Life is a Dream. His handling of plot is phenomenal but his characters are a little flat.

24.Plays of Jean Racine (Cairncross)- A dramatist near the level of Shakespeare, though more in tune with my personal aesthetics. Mostly a copier of Euripides, for which he's a match, but there's a structure, an order, no wasted motions or words to his writing that marks him for the premier writer of the Enlightenment. There's something surreal about the precision and control with which he writes about chaotic, irrational, wild, torturous love.

25.The Farce of Sodom and poems of John Wilmot- the best English poet of his time. Buried by posterity due to his sexual, scatological, satyrical wit. An Enlgish Marqies de Sade. The second funniest play of all time. Pity it isn't actable.

26.Maxims by La Rochefoucauld- Never has man spoken with such depth in such brevity.

27.Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon- The greatest non-fiction prose with a story the likes of the the Shahnameh.

28.The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge- Romantic, brooding, and supernatural. My favorite poem.

29.Poems of Leopardi- Why do I love him so much? Is it his pessimism, his cynicism, his sardonic anger at being "turned out into the world half made up" like Richard III? He is a poet with a dark side like Baudelaire, who nevertheless finds beauty in life's tragedy.

30.Walden by Thoreau- A formative book in my high school years. It made me appreciate strolling, and nature, with a strong undercurrent of American pragmatism.

31.Danton's Death by Buchner- Witty, sarcastic, punning, dripping with dark humor and fatalism.

32.A Hero of Our Time by Lermontov- what Eugene Onegin would be if it were gloomy, romantic, and prose.

33.Pere Goriot by Balzac- the best example of plot structure for novels.

34.Flowers of Evil and Paris Spleen by Baudelaire- The single greatest poet of the nineteenth century. Forget Goethe, Wordsworth, Shelley, Browning, Rimbaud, Whitman, and Tennyson. This is the high point of the age.

35.Alices Adventure in Wonderland and Through the Lookinglass by Lewis Carroll- the most inventive, original, imaginative novel for kids and adults ever.

36.Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas- More action packed and interesting than any other creation in literature. This is a page turner. It has that wonderful gift of pacing and variety which makes reading effortless and fun.

37.Moby Dick by Melville- It's one part Shakespeare, one part the Bible, and one part whaling encyclopedia, kind of weird but highly edifying.

38.Madame Bovary- Quite possibly the world's greatest novel. All the story of Anna Karenina in a little over two hundred pages.

39.Oblomov by Goncharov- The titular character is a sort of budhist saint of inactivity, or at least he would be if he weren't a lazy Russian aristocrat who can't get his life together. Like Don Quixote, he's a one of a kind comedic archetype, and he doesn't even get out of bed for the first fifty pages.

40.Les Miserables- Better than War and Peace, better than A Tale of Two Cities. Early nineteenth century France told by it's greatest author. With a prose style influenced by Dante and a novel structure borrowed from Dickens and Balzac this epic length novel is a total hit.

41.Guy De Maupassant's short stories- the master short story writer whom Hemingway learned so much from.

42.The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne- one of the great novellas. Concise and powerful. The story of guilt, corruption, society, and secrets.

43.Mark Twain's novels- Nobody makes me laugh like this guy. He knew every trick in the book and wrote a few new ones.

44.Heart of Darkness by Conrad- Darker than dark subject matter and a prose darker still. This is a book about insanity, corruption, and how men can be changed by a single incident forever.

45.The Call of the Wild by London- Nobody's ever written about the American Old West like Jack London. What's so peculiar about this story in particular is that it's narrated by a dog. This makes it more visceral, and the physical descriptions of the sublime landscape and harsh conditions come direct to the reader unmuddied by pre-concieved social structures.

46.Poems of T.S. Eliot- I'm a sucker for scholar poets and howls of despair.

47.Steppenwolf by Hesse- Description of a man torn between two worlds, two warring identities, never at peace with himself, told in a Russian nesting doll sequence of plots and narrators, and then capping off with a psychedelic dream scenario.

48.Of Human Bondage by Maugham- The absolute realism of this novel and the accuracy of the details it describes strikes a chord in me. I've had a number of experiences myself and can relate with much of the novel up to the false and contrived happy ending.

49.Akutagawa's short stories- This guy could give Hemingway a run for his money where short stories are concerned.

50.Cavafy Poems- This guy is every bit as good as Rilke, Eliot, or Neruda. His poems go back to a time of Greek antiquity, but not the golden age. His poems are about the troubled transitional times, when things were unsettled and uncertain. There is a modern anxiety running through them all, with a classical perfection.

51.Mrs. Dalloway by Woolf- Forget Joyce, Woolf was the best writer of stream of conscious prose.

52.The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald- The great American novel? Maybe. It's trim. It's slick. It's poignant. It has good characters, action, a little symbolism, and a moral. The prose style is pretty good too.

53. The Complete works of Hemingway- My single favorite writer period. He's got that Shakespeare kind of a talent where you didn't know words could combine that way and have the effect they do. He shatters me when I read him.

54.Journey to the End of the Night- darkly comic French novel. Some parts are as good as Catch 22.

55.1984 by Orwell- 1984 is the most visionary of his works but he's had a number of other hits especially his non-fiction which are worth reading. This is one of the only science fiction novels that deserves to be called art.

56.Novellas of Steinbeck- The Pearl and Of Mice and Men are tragedy perfected. Nobody makes you this sad.

57.Lolita by Nabokov- you should be grossed out by the subject matter but the prose is so gorgeous and there are so many tricks and thematic layers to the book that you simply don't care in the end.

58.The Dwarf by Lagerkvist- It's a portrait of misanthropy, avarice, pride, a strange tale with a unique voice.

59.Catcher in the Rye by Salinger- The American Notes From Underground, the secret life of a misfit teenager. I don't think anyone has so accurately detailed the psychology of a single character this way before. For many years my favorite novel.

60.On the Road by Kerouac- Page turner pacing, romantic, adventurous. It makes you want to be the kind of larger than life persons it describes, living life on the edge. Great prose style.

61.Waiting For Godot by Beckett- the most original playwright since Ibsen. Ground breaking and philosophical. Full of dramatic pauses and minimalism. He's re-inventing language.

62.Catch-22 by Heller- Maybe the funniest novel ever. Could use a better ending though.

63.Slaughterhouse-Five by Vonnegut- a better pacifist novel than All Quiet on the Western Front

64.Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Thompson- Funny, deranged, darkly humorous, bizarre.

65.Fight Club by Palahniuk- a masculine manifesto

[Pierre Menard]

5.Plato's Republic- The greatest thinker of all time. I love how his work builds on itself as it goes along, like a pyramid or a skyscraper, one level on top of another.




Hey Mortal, what translation of Plato/The Republic would you recommend? Especially in regards to bringing out the literary quality?

[Poetaster]

This tells me I don't know Ancient Greek and I really should.

1. Aeschylus - The Oresteia (Fagles)
2. Dante - Commedia (Mark Musa I like, currently learning Italian)
3. Homer - The Illiad (Fitzgerald)
4. Homer - The Odyssey (Fagles)
5. Complete Plays of Shakespeare
6. Unknown - Beowulf (original Old English)
7. Virgil - The Aeneid (original latin)
8. Virgil - The Eclogues (original Latin)
9. Robert Frost - Complete Poems, Prose and Plays
11. George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four
12. John Milton - Paradise Lost
13. Solzhenitzsyn - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Ralph Parker)
14. Thomas Pynchon - Mason and Dixon
15. Thomas Pynchon - V.
16. Patrick Hamilton - Hangover Square
17. Thomas Mann - Death in Venice
18. John Keats - Collected Poems (Wordsworth publication)
19. Ovid - Metamorphosis
20. Fredrich Nietzsche - The Birth of Tragedy
21. Aristotle - Politics/Plato - The Republic
22. Akutagawa Ryunosuke - Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories (Penguin publication)
23. W.B. Yeats - Selected Poetry (Oxford publication)
24. King James Bible
25. J.R.R. Tolkien - The Hobbit

[Pompey Bum]

The Holy Bible (King James Version--but also the Septuagint and the Vulgate

You've read the Greek and Latin translations of the Hebrew?

Yes and translated much of both into written English, although that was many lifetimes ago (I'm an old man and went to school when students were actually expected to learn something--harrumph harrumph harrumph). But the truth is that Biblical authors and translators tend to be a lot easier than real classical authors (who I used to read, too) because the idea was to reach as many people as possible--hence the use of koine Greek and vulgar Latin. But anyway, yes. And I wasn't boasting, by the way. KJV, the Septuagint, and the Vulgate are three sumptuous (and to me, beloved) translations of the Bible.

[Pompey Bum]

I really wanted to put The King James Bible in there, but I haven't finished a lot of the major books of it yet, and I was finding it hard to choose an individual one…if I was asked in a year, it'd certainly be on there. It's a powerful, magisterial work.

My money's on 1 Samuel. The story of Saul is as profound and beautiful a tragedy as Shakespeare ever wrote. But Morty (:) ) is correct that Job is deeply moving, too.

[Pompey Bum]

Li Bai

Dang boy, I knew there was something I liked about you.

[stlukesguild]

Pierre Menard
I hate ranking these things, but a rough go would be:

1. J.L. Borges - Ficciones (all of his short stories, poems and non-fiction really)...

Gee! With that online moniker, I never saw that one coming.

Not that I haven't surrendered a good couple of feet of shelf space to the great Argentine.

[stlukesguild]

mortalterror-

2.The Iliad and the Odyssey
3.Plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides
4. Plays of Aristophanes
5.Plato's Republic
6.Virgil's Aeneid
7.Ovid's poems
8.The Plays of Seneca
9.Satyricon by Petronius
10.Pharsalia by Lucan

mortal... you're such a classicist. Not that Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides didn't make my list. If I extended the list to my top 100 Virgil, Ovid, and Plato would certainly be included... in spite of the fact that I disagree with a hell of a lot of Plato's ideas. He's still a brilliant thinker who conveyed his thoughts in an equally brilliant manner.

12.Poems of Tu Fu, Li Bai, and Bai Juyi

I'd add Tu Fu, Li Bai (Li Po), and Wang Wei... Now we just must await the arrival of JBI to inform us as to just how completely ignorant we are with regard to Chinese literature.

13.Beowulf

Another work that would certainly make my top 100

15.The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Yes. Lovely work.

18.The Gita Govinda by Jayadeva- A poem about two lovers better than the Song of Solomon. A story about yearning for mystical union and the ideal mate. Almost as good as the Bhagavadgita.

I'll need to read this one. Translation?

17.The Poems of Rumi

I avoided Rumi because there are some many miserable hippy-new age crap translations of his work.

19. Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso

Yes.

22.Fuente Ovejuna by Lope De Vega- this guy's plays have all the pacing, character, and dramatic situations of Shakespeare, but without some of the poetic beauty.

23.Eight Dramas of Calderon (FitzGerald)- Another nearly Shakespearean dramatist. His poetry sparkles especially in Life is a Dream. His handling of plot is phenomenal but his characters are a little flat.

Yes. I need to read these guys again.

24.Plays of Jean Racine (Cairncross)- A dramatist near the level of Shakespeare...

He still hasn't resonated with me to the extent he has with you... perhaps it is his minimalist classicism.

28.The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge

Cristabel and Kubla Kahn as well. That these three poems are enough to earn him a place in the cannon says volumes. Nerval and Novalis survive on an equally slim yet brilliant oeuvre.

29.Poems of Leopardi

Been reading him a lot recently.

36.Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

Yes... for pure entertainment, this can't be beat.

43.Mark Twain's novels

Damn! How'd I forget Twain?

44.Heart of Darkness by Conrad

And Conrad?!

46.Poems of T.S. Eliot- I'm a sucker for scholar poets...

Then we might get you to come around to Geoffrey Hill yet. :D

47.Steppenwolf by Hesse

Another favorite. I simply prefer The Glass Bead Game... but then I went through a Hesse obsession in my late teens... reading almost everything he wrote

50.Cavafy Poems- This guy is every bit as good as Rilke, Eliot, or Neruda.

I read a bit of his work a good many years back. I must give him another look.

51.Mrs. Dalloway by Woolf- Forget Joyce...

Forget Joyce? Now surely that is blasphemy. You'll never make it in academia.

52.The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald

Another to make the Top 100 List

The Complete works of Hemingway

Ditto

58.The Dwarf by Lagerkvist

Somebody else has actually read The Dwarf?! :eek::skep: Brilliantly nasty little guy.

59.Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

Ummm... no. Too much teen angst.

[stlukesguild]

I'm surprised Chaucer hasn't made anyone's list. Of course it must be read in the original Middle English, or as Ezra Pound suggested, if you aren't willing to put forth the effort, you should never be allowed to read a good book again. :prrr:

The Canterbury Tales should have made my list. I think reading the original gave me a greater love for the splendor of words than Lewis Carroll or James Joyce.

[mortalterror]

Hey Mortal, what translation of Plato/The Republic would you recommend? Especially in regards to bringing out the literary quality?

I actually never pick favorite translations for non-fiction writers like Plato and Aristotle. I usually just go with the penguins. Bit lazy of myself, now that you mention it. I probably should have shopped around like I do with poetry translations.


My money's on 1 Samuel. The story of Saul is as profound and beautiful a tragedy as Shakespeare ever wrote. But Morty (:) ) is correct that Job is deeply moving, too.

When I recommend Bible books and passages to illustrate the book's literary merit, I usually go with Job, Psalms, The Song of Songs, Book of Revelations, and 1st Corinthians for the poetry and rhetoric more than the books like Genesis, Exodus, or Judges with the great plots. But lately, my attention has been drawn to the psychedelic visionary mystical passages like Jacob's visions of angels climbing a ladder to heaven or Ezekiel's vision of the fiery winged beings and wheels within wheels, etc.


[COLOR="#B22222"]18.The Gita Govinda by Jayadeva- A poem about two lovers better than the Song of Solomon. A story about yearning for mystical union and the ideal mate. Almost as good as the Bhagavadgita.

I'll need to read this one. Translation?
Edwin Arnold. I read it on archive.org in pdf form since it's in the public domain, but if you want a hard copy Amazon sells them under the title "Indian Poetry: Containing 'The Indian Song of Songs', from the Sanskrit of the Gîta Govinda of Jayadeva; Two Books from 'The Iliad of India' ... of the Hitopadesa and Other Oriental Poems." I've seen a few other translations, but I fell in love with Edwin Arnold's. I believe I went with him for a Bhagavadgita too, which Dover sells in one of their slim and handy "thrift" editions.


[COLOR="#B22222"]17.The Poems of Rumi

I avoided Rumi because there are some many miserable hippy-new age crap translations of his work.
I noticed that too. But there probably wouldn't be that many translations of a medieval mystic of the middle east if he really wasn't that good, and you wouldn't deprive yourself of Dante just because hippies loved him would you? I'd go with Coleman Barks' translations which you can find at any Barnes and Noble.


46.Poems of T.S. Eliot- I'm a sucker for scholar poets...

Then we might get you to come around to Geoffrey Hill yet. :D
Anything is possible. I changed my opinion of Conrad after all. The first time I tried to read Heart of Darkness I absolutely hated it. A couple of years went by and it was like a completely different book.


47.Steppenwolf by Hesse

Another favorite. I simply prefer The Glass Bead Game... but then I went through a Hesse obsession in my late teens... reading almost everything he wrote
That's when I got into Hesse as well. After Steppenwolf, I read Beneath the Wheel, and then part of Damian. Always meant to go back and read more, especially Siddhartha, but knowing how way leads on to way...


50.Cavafy Poems- This guy is every bit as good as Rilke, Eliot, or Neruda.

I read a bit of his work a good many years back. I must give him another look.
He's got that whole modernist Byzantium thing down that Yeats was mining toward the end of his life.


[58.The Dwarf by Lagerkvist

Somebody else has actually read The Dwarf?! :eek::skep: Brilliantly nasty little guy.
Brilliant writer Lagerkvist. Definitely deserved his Nobel Prize. My favorite college professor put me onto this book. The comparison to Gunter Grass and The Tin Drum is there to be made, but I found this so much more readable. Peter Dinklage absolutely must make this movie once Game of Thrones is over. Tyrion Lannister is practically the same character, in the same time period, and no one else could do it justice. I read half of Lagerkvist's Barabbas and it was fairly readable too.


[59.Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

Ummm... no. Too much teen angst.

Have you ever heard the objection to Romeo and Juliet that the characters are only 14 so how can we take their relationship seriously? The age doesn't seem to matter in that case. People write Holden Caulfield off as juvenile for the same thoughts, personality, and behavior that they praise Dostoyevky's underground man for. This strikes me as a real life example of Borges' Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. It's the same character doing the same thing, written by two different authors. One is a teenager and juvenile, the other is middle aged and profound.

[NikolaiI]

25 books, in no real particular order of importance;

Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [Erik Blackall]
The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [Burton Pike]
Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse
Steppenwolf, by Herman Hesse
Drinking the Mountain Stream, by Jetsun Milarepa
Entering the Stream, edited by Samuel Bercholz, Sherab Chödzin Kohn, Bernardo Bertolucci
K-PAX, by Gene Brewer
A Primer to Group Pscyhotherapy, by Dr. Ray Naar
The Further Reaches of Human Nature, by Abraham Maslow
My Great Predecessors, by Garry Kasparov, all volumes
In My Own Way, by Alan Watts
Be Here Now, by Ram Dass
Anna Karenenia, by Leo Tolstoy
The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoevsky
Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
The Joyous Cosmology, by Alan Watts
The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
Black Elk Speaks, by Black Elk
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, by Dr. Richard Feynman
Wizard and Glass, by Stephen King
Hearts in Atlantis, by Stephen King
The Song of Ice and Fire (first 3 books only), by George R.R. Martin
The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Gap Cycle series, by Stephen R.R. Donaldson
The Dark Elf Trilogy, by R.A. Salvatore

And then a short list of authors of whom I don't have specific favorite, but are high on my list, or just couldn't fit.

R.W. Emerson,
Sri Aurobindo,
Swami Vivekananda,
Ramana Maharshi,
Percy Bysshe Shelley,
Rumi,
William Blake,
A.E. Housman,
A.C. Swinburne,
William James,
Thich Nhat Hanh,
Tara Brach,
Dogen Zenji,
Bassui,
Bankei,
Leonardo da Vinci,
C.G. Jung,
Joseph Campbell,
Carl Sagan,
Neil DeGrasse Tyson,
H.D. Thoreau,
Henri Nouwen (The Way of the Heart),
Dr. Anton Chekhov,
Isaac Asimov.
Xenophon,
Nietzsche.

There are plenty more but these are a few that came to mind.

[Paulclem]

I'm going to go with the next 25 or so that I read. With so little time for re-reading, I think, given the likelihood of a couple of disappointers, that they will give me my next literature pleasure fix. We'll dally for a while whilst I try to formulate my ideas about the book, and then it will be on! - onward!

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

Before LitNet Forums
1 -16 are pretty well locked in not only for content, but for sentimental and olfactory reasons too. The order roughly follows the sequence in which they were read.

1. Three Stories from Winnie-the-Pooh – A.A. Milne, illustrated by Ernest H. Sheppard
(the three stories are as follows: In Which Pooh Goes Visiting, In Which Piglet Meets a Heffalump, In which Eeyore Has a Birthday) Scholastic Book Services, C-1969

2. Where the Red Fern Grows – Wilson Rawls

3. Toilers of the Sea-Victor Hugo

4. Call of the Wild-Jack London

5. Tale of Two Cities-Charles Dickens

6. The Deserted Village and Other Poems-Oliver Goldsmith; Riverside Literature Series, C- 1894. “Other poems” includes The Traveler. My grandfather’s pencil marks are still visible, scattered throughout the book.

7. Famous Fighters of the Second World War-William Greene, C-1957. The glossy paper has a nice aroma.

8. A Field Guide to Western Birds-Roger Tory Peterson, C-1941

9. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and The Vision of Sir Launfal-Samuel Taylor Coleridge and James Russell Lowell; a Lake English Classic, C-1898.

10. The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer; translated by Nevill Coghill, a Penguin Classic. C-1952. There you go, Chaucer made it to the list, although not in Middle English, still a timeless favorite none the less.

11. Palladio’s Architecture and its Influence- Text by Henry Hope Reed, photographs by Joseph C. Farber. As one would expect, the book includes wonderful B&W images of Villa Capra la Rotunda and Villa Barbaro, two of the greatest villas in Palladio’s repertoire. It must be mentioned that Paolo Veronese, a great Renaissance painter, is responsible for the trompe l’oeil frescos throughout villa Barabaro.

12. Julius Caesar-William Shakespeare; Eclectic English Classics, C-1898

13. Pipes O’ Pan at Zekesbury – The Poems and Prose Sketches of James Whitcomb Riley C-1913. My favorite is Down Around the River

14. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich -William L. Shirer, C- 1960

15. The Wayward Bus – John Steinbeck.
This is the book I happened to be “reading”, actually it served primarily as a stage prop, as I weaseled my into a pool party where I met the future old lady (wife). C-1947 (the book- not the wife)

16. The Lady of the Lake – Sir Walter Scott, C-1911

After LitNet Forums and in most cases, influenced by the Forums. This is today’s snapshot, my exposure to literature is but a drop in the bucket and as such 17-25 could easily change moving forward.

17. Heart of Darkness-Joseph Conrad

18. The Odyssey - Homer

19. The Idiot-Fyodor Dostoevsky[/i]

20. The Moon and Sixpence- Somerset Maugham

21. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame-Victor Hugo

22. The Inferno-Dante Alighieri

23. Rossums Universal Robots - Karel Čapek. A science fiction play that introduced the word “robot”, actually coined by the author’s brother and painter, Josef Čapek.

24. Cancer Ward-Alexander Solzhenitsyn. One of Solzhenitsyn’s a person can actually complete in a lifetime! One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is another good choice.

25. The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. I just finished it, so it still lingers fresh on the mind.

[Emil Miller]

Before LitNet Forums
1 -16 are pretty well locked in not only for content, but for sentimental and olfactory reasons too. The order roughly follows the sequence in which they were read.




Quite an eclectic selection Gilliatt. I have read but three of them: Call of the Wild; The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and The Moon and Sixpence.
I don't recall much about Jack London's book except that it was a 'red in tooth and claw' novel about dogs.
W.Shirer's 'Third Reich' is, of course, a standard reference among others: most notably Prof. Alan Bullock's, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. Shirer's Berlin Diary is also very informative as, being an American foreign correspondent, he was still working in Germany when the British had declared war and was able to report at first hand what the British could not.
Maugham's book is pretty much essential reading for those who want to understand the artistic temperament; nothing short of a brilliant fictionalisation of Paul Gauguin's life and times. Great stuff.
.

[Ecurb]

It seems to me that one's "favorite" books may differ from the "best" books. My "favorite" lovers list certainly includes my first girlfriend (even if later lovers were actually better people, which, in my case, they weren't). My older brother wore a Crackerjack ring on a string around his neck for years, emulating Frodo. How many novels we read as adults have as much impact?

IN addition, for those of us who reread books constantly, books we've been reading and rereading for decades have given us more pleasure than a book we read recently for the first time. With this in mind, here's my list (I'm sticking to novels):

Books from my childhood (in no particular order):

1) The Narnias -- as a kid, I was convinced that I might actually get to Narnia through some magical door at any time.
2) Lord of the Rings
3) The Jungle Books
4) The Treasure Seekers (E. Nesbit) -- Almost forgotten now, but C.S. Lewis did mention it at the start of "Magician's Nephew", "In those days Mr. Sherlock Holmes was still living on Baker Street and the Bastables were looking for treasure on Lewisham Road." I like novelists who give props to other novelists like that.
5) Treasure Island -- I had nightmares about Blind Pew after my mother read it to me. How did Stevenson know that a blind pirate would be scarier than a pirate who could see? Shouldn't the opposite be the case?
6) The Count of Monte Cristo.
7) Morte D'Arthur
8) Orlando Furiosso
9) The Iliad
10) The Odyssey -- I'm cheating a little here, because my favorites as a child were actually children's retellings of the stories rather than translations, although I've read the translations since. For a while "The Story of Roland" by James Baldwin was my favorite book. I also liked "The Tale of Troy" by Roger Lancelyn Green.
11) Call of the Wild

Grown up novels:

12-17: Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion. Jane Austen is the only adult author about whom I can claim some minor expertise, and has given me endless pleasure. I did leave Lady Susan off of this list.
18) War and Peace -- It's hard to leave out beautiful Anna, but as great as it is, it's a little too depressing to read over and over again, and therefore doesn't make my "favorites".
19) The Last Chronicle of Barset -- I love the sappy stuff, it it's well done, and nobody does it better than Trollope.
20) Pale Fire -- Along with Ulysses, it was my dad's favorite novel, which allows it to edge Lolita.
21) Sometimes a Great Notion (Kesey) -- The best novel about my home, Oregon.
22) Angle of Repose (Stegner)-- I worked in a mine in Leadville, Colorado as a young man. Much of this novel about mining is set in Leadville.
23) Fathers and Sons
24) Middlemarch
25) Lucky Jim -- Almost as funny as Austen. I did leave off some of the funniest novelists: Heller, Twain, Roth. I'm not sure why. I was just winging it.

[Pierre Menard]

Pierre Menard
I hate ranking these things, but a rough go would be:

1. J.L. Borges - Ficciones (all of his short stories, poems and non-fiction really)...

Gee! With that online moniker, I never saw that one coming.

Not that I haven't surrendered a good couple of feet of shelf space to the great Argentine.


Haha, a bit obvious wasn't it? I think Borges will always be number 1 for me, not just because he was a great writer in three different genres, but also because he fundamentally changed how I see literature, and opened me up to many different artists, and really broadened my perspective. I'll be forever thankful for that.

[Pompey Bum]

It seems to me that one's "favorite" books may differ from the "best" books. My "favorite" lovers list certainly includes my first girlfriend (even if later lovers were actually better people, which, in my case, they weren't).

Heh heh. Thought you were going somewhere else with that at first. :)

[Clopin]

In no order.

1. The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S Lewis
2. The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa
3. Collected Poems - T.S Eliot
4. The Divine Comedy - Dante
5. Metamorphoses - Ovid
6. The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoyevsky
7. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy O'Toole
8. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
9. The Once and Future King - T.H White
10. Collected Tales - Gogol
11. The King James Bible
12. The Collected Plays - William Shakespeare
13. Faust Part 1 - Goethe
14. Plays and Stories - Chekhov
15. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
16. Collected Poems - Emily Dickinson
17. War and Peace - Tolstoy
18. Crime and Punishment - Dostoyevsky
19. Dead Souls - Gogol
20. Short Stories - Kafka
21. Complete Poetry and Prose - William Blake
22. To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
23. 100 Years of Solitude - Marquez
24. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
25. Italian Folktales - Italo Calvino

[romeoindespair]

25 house of the dead Fyodor Doestevsky
24 Fountainhead Ayn Rand
23 Count of monte cristo Alexandre Dumas
22 1984 George Orwell
21 Tom Sawyer Mark Twain
20 100 years of solitude Gabriel Marquez
19 Nausea Jean Paul Sarte
18 Glamorama Bret Easton Ellis
17 Less than zero Bret Easton Ellis
16 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
15 Rules of attraction Bret Easton Ellis
14 Symposium Plato
13 Leaves of grass Walt Whitman
12 Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoyevsky
11 Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
10 120 days of sodom Marquis de Sade
9 Aesops fables Unknown
8 Portrait of an artist James Joyce
7 Crime and punishment Fyodor Dostoyevsky
6 Walden Henry David Thoreau
5 Mans fate Andre Malraux
4 Beyond good and evil Friedrich Nietzsche
3 Finnegan's wake James Joyce
2 Swanns Way Marcel Proust
1 The Stranger Albert Camus

[Lykren]

And first prize for most bizarre list goes to romeoindespair :D

[wordeater]

1. Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
2. Lev Tolstoy - War and Peace
3. Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities
4. Agatha Christie - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
5. Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights
6. Thomas Hardy - Tess of te d'Urbervilles
7. Roald Dahl - Kiss Kiss
8. Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment
9. Charles Dickens - Great Expectations
10. Graham Greene - The Quiet American
11. Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
12. Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth
13. Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
14. Henry James - The Portrait of a Lady
15. Arthur Conan Doyle - The Hound of the Baskervilles
16. Thomas Mann - Death in Venice
17. Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
18. Stendhal - The Red and the Black
19. John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath
20. James Joyce - Ulysses
21. David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas
22. George Orwell - 1984
23. Victor Hugo - Les Misérables
24. Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis
25. Isabel Allende - The House of the Spirits

[romeoindespair]

And first prize for most bizarre list goes to romeoindespair :D

Whats bizzare about it?

[Lykren]

Whats bizzare about it?

Bret Easton Ellis next to Plato, and Anna Karenina next to 100 Days of Sodom seems pretty unusual to me!

[Marcus1]

Haha, a bit obvious wasn't it? I think Borges will always be number 1 for me, not just because he was a great writer in three different genres, but also because he fundamentally changed how I see literature, and opened me up to many different artists, and really broadened my perspective. I'll be forever thankful for that.

Yes Borges is definitely one of the most unique and influential writers of the 20th century. Argentina has produced many literary geniuses, and he's one of them. Sabato's chapter in On Heroes and Tombs entitled "Report on the Blind" is so Borgesian. I'm planning to read his non-fiction essays.

http://litreactor.com/sites/default/files/images/column/complete_fictions_borges.jpg

[Helga]

no particular order here:

1.Flowers of Evil- Baudelaire..............Just because it's one of the best books of poetry I own
2.Beowulf...................................Becaus e I love Grendel
3.The Collector- John Fowles.......................A misunderstood love story
4.Jonathan Livingstone Seagull- Richard Bach..........freedom
5.Slaughterhouse 5- Vonnegut..............just beautiful writing
6.Blóðhófnir- Gerður Kristný............a long poem about a story from the old Edda
7.On the pain of others- Susan Sontag.............I laugh when people fall
8.Orlando- Virginia Woolf................ just my favourite Woolf, cross dressing, gender swapping brilliance
9.Rebecca-Daphne Du Maurier................a ghostly love story
10.Macbeth- William Shakespeare................I just love the Lady
11. A Midsummer Night's Dream- William Shakespeare........ because I saw Helena in me as a teenager
12. Blake's Poetry and Design- William Blake...............because of the sick rose
13. The English Auden- W.H. Auden...................he is just wonderful, and he loved the ice
14. Northanger Abbey- Jane Austen.................my favourite Austen, Tilney is better than Darcy and Catherine is funny
15. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.............The best autobiography in alphabetical order
16.The Woman Warrior Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts- Maxine Hong Kingston...... another great autobiography but with a myth
17.W or the Memory of Childhood- Georges Perec...........I guess I like autobiographies
18.Confessions of an English Opium Eater- Thomas De Quincy..... the writing style used in this autobiography needs to be read outloud
19. The Lives of Charlemagne- Einahrd and Notker the Stammerer.....Charlemagne was one of a kind
20.The Hobbit- Tolkien................I just picked a Tolkien at random, everything is good
21. Skugga-Baldur- Sjón.........brilliant ice
22. A Farewell to Arms- Ernest Hemingway...........had to pick one by him and this is the first one I read
23.Grendel- John Gardner............Because I love Grendel, he is an aristocrat
24.The Virgin Suicides- Jeffrey Eugenides...........suicide is interesting
25.Turninn- Steinar Bragi.........history of the world and its evil in just about 100 pages

[Dark Muse]

1. The Magus by John Fowles
2. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
3. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
4. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
5. The Stranger by Albert Camus
6. Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
7. The Inferno by Dante
8. The Odyssey by Homer
9. The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence
10. Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
11. The Three Musketeers by Alexander Dumas
12. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
13. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
14. Othello by William Shakespeare
15. The Legend of Nightfall by Mickey Zucker Reichert
16. Villa Incognito by Tom Robbins
17. Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas
18. Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
19. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
20. Druids by Morgan Llywelyn
21. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
22. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
23. The Sibyl by Par Lagerkvist
24. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
25. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemmingway

[Iain Sparrow]

1. To Kill a Mockingbird
2. The Origin of Species
3. Heart of Darkness
4. Nineteen Eighty-Four
5. A Midsummer Night's Dream
6. The Name of the Rose
7. Breakfast at Tiffany's
8. 2001: A Space Odyssey
9. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
10. The Man Who Would Be King
11. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
12. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
13. The Daughter of Time
14. The Blind Watchmaker
15. Abarat; Days of Magic, Nights of War
16. Treasure Island
17. Dune
18. The Diamond Age
19. Neuromancer
20. Lord of the Rings
21. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
22. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
23. War of the Worlds
24. The Chronicles of Narnia
25. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
*26. Dracula

[Marbles]

Since this is about 25 most favourite books, I'm of the view that the more our lists vary the better, as it reflects the diversity of tastes, interests, origins and the effects those books have on one's make up. So favourite books may not be the 'best' or 'great' books seen regularly in so many lists. Sometimes a rather little known book from a far off hand leaves more with you than the compulsory readings of the canon.

That said, this list represents lacunae in my readings. I am sure it'd look somewhat different by the next decade.

I have taken the liberty to mention 25 authors instead of books, so the total number of books exceeds 25. Hope I did not break the rules!

On top of my head, completely random listings.

Franz Kafka - The Metamorphoses, The Trial, The Castle
Jorge Luis Borges - Complete fictions and other writings
Khalil Gibran - Broken Wings (from Arabic)
Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote
Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra
Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace, Anna Karenina
George Orwell - 1984, Animal Farm, Homage to Catalonia
T.S. Elliot - Four Quartets ad other poems
Gustav Flaubert - Madame Bovary
Khushwant Singh - Train to Pakistan
Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
Faiz Ahmad Faiz - Complete poems
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
Mirza Ghalib - Divan-e-Ghalib (poems), Collected Letters (from Urdu)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, other novels
John Steinbeck - Grapes of Wrath, The Pearl, East of Eden
Omar Khayyam - Rubaiyat
Jalaluddin Rumi - Mathnawi Manawi, Divan Shams-e-Tabriz
Pablo Neruda - Complete poems (although I'm still reading him)
Non-fiction:
Frantz Fanon - The Wretched of the Earth
Edward Said - Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism
Simone de Beauvoir - The Second Sex
Michel Foucault - The History of Sexuality, The Order of Things, others
Victor Kiernan - The Lords of Humankind

[easy75]

The Bible

Then there is everything else:

Independence Day - Richard Ford
The Heart of The Matter - Graham Greene
The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien
To Kill A mockingbird - Harper Lee
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Man Child In The Promised Land - Claude Brown
Black Dahlia - James Ellroy
Billy Bathgate - E.L. Doctorow
December 6th - Martin Cruz Smith
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk - Ben Fountain
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz
Can Man Live Without God? - Ravi Zacharias
The Piano Tuner - Daniel Mason
All The Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy
Light in August - Faulkner
Cinnamon Kiss - Walter Mosely
All The Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
This is How You Lose Her - Junot Diaz
The Lay of The Land - Richard Ford
Burning Angel - James Lee Burke
The Dog of The South - Charles Portis
Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
Huck Finn - Twain