OT: What are your favourite novels?

Lord of The Rings - JRRT
Kidnapped - RLS
Brideshead Revisited - EW
Waverley - SWS
David Copperfield- CD

and many many more.

Keeping it down to a dozen, in approximate chronological order and tweaked somewhat to prevent its domination by any particular author (yes, you, dear Adelaide):

The Antiquary, Sir Walter Scott.
Marius the Epicurean, Walter Pater.
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, George Gissing.
William Jordan, Junior, J.C.Snaith.
Mr. Weston's Good Wine, T.F.Powys.
'Ye Drunken Damozel', Simon Jesty
Crutch, Seton Peacey.
I Can Wait, Adelaide Mary Champneys.
Sparkenbroke, Charles Morgan.
Fool's Melody, A. M. Champneys and Michael Cape-Meadows.
The Dreams, Anna Sebastian.
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, Iain Sinclair.

What am I even doing here? Very good question. I used to buy quite a lot of FS books and may still be vulnerable to the occasional LE.

Alone in Berlin/Every Man Dies Alone by Fallada (if the fictionalised elements are enough to call it a novel)

The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald

Wonder Boys by Chabon

Middlemarch by Eliot

Kenilworth by Scott

Treasure Island by Stevenson

Kafka on the Shore by Murakami

Atlas Shrugged by Rand

Dangerous Liaisons by Laclos

The Mysterious Island by Verne

My ten recent-ish favorites at the moment, subject to change with every rising of the Sun. Classic novels of great literature would be a whole other list.

Watership Down by Richard Adams
If On A Winter's Night A Traveler... by Italo Calvino
The Ark Sakura by Kobo Abe
The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny
Super-Cannes by J. G. Ballard
Report on Probability A by Brian W. Aldiss
Weaveworld by Clive Barker
The Employees by Olga Ravn
In Hazard by Richard Hughes
Claimed by Francis Stevens

Moby-Dick
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
War and Peace
Middlemarch
Snow Country
Lost Children Archive
The Mandarins
Toilers of the Sea
The Leopard
Pedro Paramo

I tried to get these in order, but I don't think it's possible to say the list could be the same next week. Mood pending:

Crime and Punishment
Wuthering Heights
Huckleberry Finn
The Hobbit
War and Peace
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Uncle Silas
Treasure Island
Anna Karenina

1) Jane Eyre
2) Bleak House
3) Anna Karenina
4) Wuthering Heights
5) Jude the Obscure
6) Tess of the D’Urbervilles
7) David Copperfield
8) The Brothers Karamazov
9) Mansfield Park
10) The Mill on the Floss

>10 Bamf102:

War and Peace has in my opinion a greater "sermonizing" element. It's not a book that everyone will enjoy on the same level. Although the character interplay is as strong, people that like a story more than ideas will enjoy Anna Karenina more. It's worth reading either way.

Most memorable dozen:

Middlemarch (Eliot)
Far from the Madding Crowd (Hardy)
Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
Portrait of a Lady (James)
In Search of Lost Time (Proust)
The Razor's Edge (Maugham)
Cancer Ward (Solzhenitsyn)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway)
Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck)
The Outsider (Camus)
The Mersault Investigation (Daoud)
The Emigrants (Sebald)

1. Lord of The Rings & The Hobbit (Tolkien)
2. Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas)
3. Les Miserables (Hugo)
4. Starmaker (Stapledon)
5. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
6. Mysteries of Paris (Sue)
7. La Dame de Monsoreau (Dumas)
8. Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky)
9. Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky)
10. Middlemarch (Eliot)

1. Midnight's Children (Rushdie)
2. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Garcia Marquez)
3. Beloved (Morrison)
4. The God of Small Things (A.Roy)
5. Labyrinths (Borges)
5. Slaughterhouse Five (Vonnegut)
6. The Sympathizer (Nguyen)
7. Watchmen (Moore)
8. In Cold Blood (Capote)
9. The Handmaid's Tale (Atwood)
10. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)

<13 I have to make it a baker's dozen, I can't omit To The Lighthouse (Woolf)

Somebody should make an LT list to compile this info into a coherent format.

Interesting..
I will put this in several epochs, and in those epochs there is no particular order to the choices
1. During High School

a. Lady Chatterley's Lover - Lawrence
b. Portnoy's Complaint - Roth
c. Fanny Hill - Cleland
d. Valley of the Dolls - Susann
e. Biggles Takes It Rough - W.E. Johns
f. Lord of The Rings - Tolkien
g. Lord of the Flies - Golding
h. The Tree of Man - White
i. Cry the beloved country - Paton

2. At university

a. On the road - Kerouac
b. Trout fishing in America - Brautigan
c. Catch 22 - Heller
d. Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Pirsig
e. Slaughterhouse 5 - Vonnegut
f. Tarantula - Dylan
g. Tess of the d'Urberville's - Hardy
h. The Glass Bead Game - Hesse
i. The Magic Mountain - Mann

well that was 40 years ago...perhaps more epochs to follow!

Most of my reading life has been spent on non-fiction but favourite novels that come readily to mind include...

Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky
East of Eden, Steinbeck
Catch-22, Heller
Atlas Shrugged, Rand
Witches Abroad, Pratchett (tough call but have to include at least one from either Witches or City Watch series)
Joy in the Morning, Wodehouse (a Jeeves just has to be here, obviously)
Neuromancer, Gibson
Best Served Cold, Abercrombie

Moby Dick
Crime and Punishment
The Sound and The Fury

Twelve perennial favourites:

The Satyricon (Petronius)
The Golden Ass (Apuleius)
Don Quixote (Cervantes)
Frankenstein (Shelley)
The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne)
Moby-Dick (Melville)
20,000 Leagues Under the Seas (Verne)
The War of the Worlds (Wells)
Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
Growth of the Soil (Hamsun)
At the Mountains of Madness (Lovecraft)
The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien)

>22 Bamf102: Moby-Dick does not deserve the reputation it has as being a difficult read. For one thing, the chapters are generally short (many only a couple pages), and the overall length is actually not that long, especially by the standards of modern publishing. There is some complexity in allusions and symbolism, but I don't think one needs to get all of that to enjoy the book. The plot is exceedingly simple, and the quantity of characters is a pittance compared to any of the Russian greats.

Just listing a few that immediately come to mind:

Jane Eyre (Bronte)
Wuthering Heights (Bronte)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Hardy)
Return of the Native (Hardy)
Mill on the Floss (Eliot)
Middlemarch (Eliot)
Great Expectations (Dickens)
Our Mutual Friend (Dickens)
Madame Bovary (Flaubert)
Age of Innocence (Wharton)
Dracula (Stoker)
Frankenstein (Shelley)
Howard's End (Forester)
Hobbit/LOTR (Tolkien)
Little Women (Alcott)
The Country Child (Uttley)
Northanger Abbey (Austen)

Favourite novel is A Month in the Country by JL Carr.
Followed by Middlemarch - George Eliot
After that, in no particular order come:
Emma - Jane Austen
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
The Aubrey-Maturin series - Patrick O'Brian (effectively one long novel!)
Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry
To The Bright Edge of the World - Eowyn Ivey
Not one specific novel, but pretty much any Maigret volume, preferably set in Paris.
Have to have at least one from childhood: Winter Holiday or Secret Water - Arthur Ransome.
But, aside from the Carr and Middlemarch, both musts, and possibly O'Brian, could probably choose another dozen, even if some authors would remain the same.

Just a few:

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Time Machine
Lush Life
Bonfire of the Vanities
Catch-22
On the Road
The Lathe of Heaven
Jurassic Park
The Great Train Robbery
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Hunter (Richard Stark)
The Count of Monte Cristo
L. A. Confidential
American Tabloid
The Jungle Book
Treasure Island
Wise Blood
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Hound of the Baskervilles
The Moving Target
LaBrava
Out of Sight
Rebecca
The Maltese Falcon
Lonesome Dove
Underworld (DeLillo)
Red Dragon

>21 SyllicSpell: So completely random question. Do you have the FS for both The Scarlet Letter and Frankenstein?

I ask because I found a good deal on Frankenstein but without a slipcase and looked for a title that had a slipcase approximately the same size that I could pick up cheap to steal the case and Scarlet Letter is supposed to be also plain black, same size. I already ordered Scarlet Letter so worst case scenario I get to reread it (first time since junior high school). But if you have both, does Frankenstein fit in Scarlet Letter's case and look more or less correct?

>27 Willoyd:

Good call on Lonesome Dove. Love this as well. Uva uvam vivendo varia fit.

In no specific order

The Lottery
City Of Thieves
Power Of The Dog
Lord Of The Flies
Dune
The Gambler

>24 Lady19thC: Great list! Howard’s End is another I should have had on mine!

>26 Bamf102: all of Hardy are wonderful. In addition, I would add to your must read list : Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude the Obscure and Return of the Native.

>30 rsmac: Sorry, I can't help you with this. I have Frankenstein but not The Scarlet Letter.

>13 cronshaw: Aha! Now a most 'memorable' selection can be quite different from the OPs 'favourite'!

In that case, my list at #2 would be different.

>28 Bamf102: I just finished Middlemarch. Mustich (1000 books to read before you die) describes it as the wisest novel written in the English language and Virginia Woolf indicated it was one of the few English novels written for grown up people.

I had hoped to read it in a fine Folio Society edition or other fine edition. However, I opted for the attractive HC Penguin Classics edition of 1994 with 400 notes by Rosemary Ashton, which I believe are necessary for a full enjoyment of the novel, in understanding obscure events in 1830’s provincial England not to mention Eliot’s numerous references to the classics and medicine. The newer Penguin edition does not include these notes nor does any by Folio Society or other fine editions such as by Easton Press.

There are literally hundreds of memorable quotes in this novel (see Goodread quotes). But let me give you just one….the last paragraph of this book.

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

>37 HugoDumas: Ooh, let me add another from Book 2, chapter 20!

"That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity."

George Eliot is second to no-one.

P.S. I had also hoped to enjoy Middlemarch in Folio or another fine edition, but like you was put off by the lack of decent notes. I read (twice, I loved it so much) the Oxford World Classics edition which is annotated superbly.

>38 cronshaw: One could do a FS post just on Middlemarch it is that good. This is a novel written for intelligentsia and cannot fully be appreciated in just one reading; so I regret reading it so late in my life. It is full of profound observations about life, deep think philosophy, penetrating into the psyche if not the soul of the main characters. It is unusually descriptive of the characters in this novel with a beauty unmatched with perhaps the exception of Balzac, Zola and Maupassant. In short, once you read the “story” you will want to reread it just to savor the artistic beauty of this novel.

>39 HugoDumas:
It is unusually descriptive of the characters in this novel with a beauty unmatched with perhaps the exception of Balzac, Zola and Maupassant.
It never ceases to frustrate me how little regarded these authors are by Folio. Zola is a particular favourite of mine, and the new translations from OWC would be ideal for FS treatment.

>40 Willoyd: the FS edition of Balzac’s Lost Illusions is stunning. I also notice three Zola novels have been published and are available on eBay.

Middlemarch - Elliot
The Sound and the Fury- Faulkner
Balcony in the Forest - Gracq (NYRB)
A Farewell to Arms - Hemingway
The Remains of the Day- Ishiguro
Dubliners - Joyce
The Border Trilogy - McCarthy
Moby Dick - Melville
East of Eden - Steinbeck
War and Peace - Tolstoy

and…

I’m almost finished with Book 1 of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard. It just might make its way into my favorites list. I’m enjoying it so far!

Surprised to see Atlas Shrugged make some lists! I find most people in FSD pretty anti-Rand. I personally have found her work interesting.

Flatland - Edwin Abbott
Tau Zero - Poul Anderson
The Foundation Trilogy - Isaac Asimov
The End of Eternity - Isaac Asimov
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
The Woman In White - Wilkie Collins
The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders - Daniel Defoe
A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
The Adventures of Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle
The Sign of Four - Arthur Conan Doyle
Georges - Alexandre Dumas, pere
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas, pere
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas, pere
Twenty Years After - Alexandre Dumas, pere
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Silas Marner - George Eliot
Moonfleet - John Meade Falkner
As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Lieutenant Hornblower - C.S. Forester
I, Claudius - Robert Graves
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Prisoner of Zenda - Anthony Hope
The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
Ringworld - Larry Niven
H.M.S. Surprise - Patrick O'Brian
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
Captain Blood - Rafael Sabatini
Ivanhoe - Walter Scott
The Talisman - Walter Scott
Catriona - Robert Louis Stevenson
Kidnapped - Robert Louis Stevenson
Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Fathers and Sons - Ivan Turgenev
Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Mark Twain
The Time Machine - H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds - H.G. Wells
The Code of the Woosters - P.G. Wodehouse
Beau Geste - P.C. Wren

Favorites covered by FS,

Master & Margarita
Steppenwolf
Magic Mountain
Brave new World
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Riddley Walker
Small Gods

non-FS,
The Last Temptation of Christ
Christ Recrucified
Zorba the Greek

EDIT: Hm, my list is quite off-kilter with the rest of the posts; only Magic Mountain picked once. I'm all for trying Middlemarch now.

In no particular order:
Lolita (although hard to pick my favourite Nabokov)
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page
Lord of the Rings
The Stranger
The Brothers Karamazov
Howards End
The Hobbit
Count of Monte Cristo
Toilers of the Sea
Night Watch (needed to include a Pratchett)

No order:

Disgrace
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Jane Eyre
Cloudstreet
The Doubleman (Koch)
The Blind Assassin
Parrot and Olivier in America
A Farewell to Arms
Brideshead Revisited
Pride and Prejudice
High Fidelity
Atonement
Dune
Great Expectations
Lincoln in the Bardo
To the Lighthouse

All white, majority men...working on it...

1. Lord of The Rings & The Hobbit (Tolkien)
2. Color Purple by Alice Walker.
3.Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.
4.Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.
5. David Copperfield
6.The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald
7.To Kill a Mockingbird
8.Jane Eyre

>3 terebinth: wow, that's a different list. I haven't even heard of one of them! (A reflection on my incredible ignorance, btw)

In no particular order

East of Eden - Steinbeck
Heart of Darkness - Conrad
Gormenghast - Peake
The Magic Mountain - Mann
Narcissus and Goldmund - Hesse
Book of the New Sun - Wolfe
The Magus - Fowles
Wuthering Heights - Brontë
Gravity’s Rainbow - Pynchon
War and Peace - Tolstoy

+1 for Narziss and Goldmund
Beloved
Song of Solomon
The Color Purple
White Teeth
The Vintner’s Luck
The Child in Time
The Bone People
The Name of the Wind/The Wise Man’s Fear (did you know The Doors of Stone is finally coming out soon!)
Jane Eyre
The Count of Monte Cristo (penguin translation)
Toilers of the Sea (LEC)

Edited to add:
Gilead (of course), and
The Discovery of Slowness

From over thirty five years ago:
The Lord of the Rings
Bleak House
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller
Under the Greenwood Tree
A Room with a View
Kim

All dead white males

To add to those, more recently:
Beyond Black (2005) - Hilary Mantel
A Long Long Way (2005) - Sebastian Barry
A Little Life (2015) - Hanya Yanagihara
Solar Bones (2016) - Mike McCormack
Home Fire (2017) - Kamila Shamsie
Winter (2017) - Ali Smith
The Sentence (2022) - Louise Erdrich

But a lot of what I now read and rate highly aren’t novels, such as Joan Didion, Annie Ernaux, travel, essays and history.

>42 HugoDumas:
Yes, I have Lost Illusions and the 3 Zola volumes. 3 Zola in 75 years and 1 in the past 30+. I do wonder what he's done to offend them. There have been marginally more Balzac, but again just 1 in the past 30+ years.

A lot of you have more refined tastes, it seems. There may be books out there that are better for me but these are books I love:

• The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien


• The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler


• Moby Dick by Herman Melville


• The Code of the Woosters or Uncle Fred in the Springtime by P. G. Wodehouse (can't decide)


• Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder


• Anathem by Neal Stephenson


• Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome


• Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson


• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis


• Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie


• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë


• Kim by Rudyard Kipling


• The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons


• Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

I try to only read things by dead white males (they're some of my favorite people) but I just can’t help myself with some of these authoresses. And occasionally I must also read books by the living.

Moby Dick ( It is a good thing Ol' Herman is on numerous lists ) : having the leather edition by FS is a bliss. It gives Melville's book the aura of a profane Bible.
Magic Mountain; lousy blue edition by FS
Salammbo by Floby
Brothers Karamazov
Bleak House;
Far Tortuga; Peter Matthiessen
The War of the End of the World; OK edition by FS
The Odyssey by you know who
Ulysses by JJ
We by Zamyatin
Rites of Passage ( + the two sequels ) by Golding
Dead Souls by Gogol
In the Name of the Rose : Very nice edition by FS
Faulkner As I Lay dying: average edition by FS
Marguerite Duras : The English lover ( L'Amante Anglaise ),
and that wonderful Spanish Lady Emilia Pardo Bazan

certainly not Ayn Rand

My current list:
1. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
2. Mill on the Floss - George Eliot (I have not read any other George Eliot novels yet so I have something to look forward to as I loved this book)
3. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
4. The Third Policeman - Flann O’Brien
5. Persuasion - Jane Austen (I love all Jane Austen’s novels but this is my favourite)
6. Ulysses - James Joyce
7. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
8. Dune - James Herbert
9. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
10. A Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula Le Guin
11. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
12. At Swim-Two-Birds - Flann O’ Brien

>44 RRCBS: Funnily enough, the random snide comment arrived in >58 Macumbeira: unbidden.

1. Dune - this is kind of a recurring read. Whether a bad day or depressed or just can't focus, this one helps me to get out of whatever funk I am in.
2. Christmas carol - gets me in the Xmas spirit
3. Cannery row / sweet Thursday - first time I've ever had tears of laughter reading a book. Great characters as well
4. Ocean at the end of the lane - nostalgia for childhood
5. Something wicked this way comes - nostalgia for childhood and simpler times

>37 HugoDumas: Purchased "the attractive HC Penguin Classics edition of 1994 with 400 notes by Rosemary Ashton, which I believe are necessary for a full enjoyment of the novel, in understanding obscure events in 1830’s provincial England not to mention Eliot’s numerous references to the classics and medicine".
Thanks for the tip

I’m not particularly widely read, but:

The Hobbit and Lord of The Rings
The Great Gatsby
Brideshead Revisited
The Count of Monte Cristo
I, Claudius & Claudius The God
The Cicero Trilogy by Robert Harris
Aubrey-Maturin series
Song of Ice and Fire Series

Limiting myself to one per author.

Moby Dick
The Sun Also Rises
Midnight's Children
Dune
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gilead
Foucault's Pendulum
Victory
Suttree
Hombre
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance
The Road Home
An Unkindness of Ghosts

Hmm, this is my list:

1. Heliconia Spring - Brian Aldiss. Such an amazing story, the time it covers, the people, the settings, etc.
2. Love in a Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Bittersweet and beautiful.
3. Dune - Frank Herbert. Such a great imagination and a good story, although he loses his way (in my opinion) in the later books.
4. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis. Wonderful memories of reading this as a child. It reminds me of escapism, Christmas and a childlike awe.
5. Shogun - James Clavell. I have a bit of a fascination for history, Japan, a clash of cultures and of course a protagonist who overcomes the challenges put against him. Which is basically this book.
6. A Christmas Carol - Dickens. I always watch (or read, depends on my mood and how much free time I have) it in the run up to Christmas. It really gets me into the seasonal mindset. I love Christmas.
7. Rule of Evidence - Jack Campbell (John G. Hemry). I could of chosen any of his series of books, the Stark War series are very good as well. I opted for his Jag in Space. Basically an old fashioned morality story, about someone doing right, combined with a space and navy setting and a legal story. Very nice. John G. Hemry tells some wonderful morality stories, in a military / space setting (purely as a plot vehicle)
8. Night Watch - Terry Pratchett. Commander Vimes. Time Travel. Again, a book about someone trying to do the right thing, when it is perhaps easier not to. Coupled with great humour.
9. Cadfael: A Morbid Taste of Bones - Ellis Peters. History and Mystery, with escapism and some learning. I chose the first book, simply because it is the start of a great journey.

Moby Dick
Other Voices Other Rooms
To Kill A Mockingbird
Old Man and the Sea
Great Expectations
Hunchback of Notre Dame
Grapes of Wrath
A Prayer for Owen Meany
1984
Farenheight 451
Blood Meridian
Suttree
The Border Trilogy
Child of God
Salems Lot
As I Lay Dying
Huckleberry Finn
Treasure Island
The Yearling--This would be a good one for Folio to do.
I will stop now....its so hard to pick, they change as life goes by

(In no particular order)
Madame Bovary (Flaubert)
Lord Jim (Conrad)
Great Expectations (Dickens)
Atonement (McEwan)
The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky)
Underworld (DeLillo)
Cloudsplitter (Banks)
Orlando (Woolf)
Howards End (Forster)
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (le Carré)
Disgrace (Coetzee)
The Road (McCarthy)

Some favorites:
Dickens - Bleak House
Tolstoy - Resurection
Dostoyevsky - Devils
Celine - Journey to the End of the Night
Dreiser - American Tragedy
Hawthorne - Marble Faun
Balzac - Lost Illusions
Lampedusa - Il Gattopardo
Melville - Moby Dick
Trollope - Dukes Children
Stendhal - Red/Black
Surtees - Ask Mama
Smollet - Peregrine Pickle
SWScott - Kenilworth
King - Pet Sematary
Waugh - Black Mischief
Bowles - Spiders House
Eliot - Middlemarch
Howells - Rise of Silas Lapham
Edgeworth - Ormond
Mann - Magic Mountain
Gaskell - North/South
Goncharov - Oblomov
James - Golden Bowl
Salter - Sport and a Pastime
Turgenev - Torrents of Spring
Hardy - Far from the madding crowd
Conrad - Nostromo
Kipling - Kim
Austen - Emma
Lermontov - Hero of our Time

>68 DanielOC:

I am glad you had the time to precisely narrow it down.

>69 dlphcoracl: >68 DanielOC:

I'd actually like to see the list, if you don't mind. Also, you should read more from the Russians.

>70 CobbsGhost: We should all read more.

Ah, asking for favorite novels/books/whatever is so much better than asking for "best"!

The White Guard by Bulgakov - my personal #1 novel since mid-twenties
Master and Margarita by Bulgakov - my #1 from mid-teens to mid-twenties
The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien - my #1 from 10 to mid-teens

Some of my other favorites novels, from adolescence up to now, in no particular order:

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Nanny from Moscow by Ivan Shmelev
The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek
Burmese Days by George Orwell
To Have And Have Not by Ernest Hemingway
Danilov, the Violist by Vladimir Orlov
The Vanquisher of Rats by Boris Kantor

Some of my favorites novels from childhood/early adolescence that come to mind right now:

Treasure Island by RLS
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The King Must Die/The Bull from the Sea by Mary Renault
Quentin Durward by Walter Scott
The Black Arrow by RLS
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

100 Years Of Solitude (García Márquez)
The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov)
The Tin Drum (Grass)
The Good Soldier Svejk And His Fortunes In The World War ( Hašek)
Wuthering Heights (Bronte)
The War Of The Worlds / The Time Machine (Wells)
A Confederacy Of Dunces (Toole)
Portnoy's Complaint (Roth)
Falconer (Cheever)
Lord Of The Rings (Tolkien)
Tarka The Otter (Williamson)
The King Of Elfland's Daughter (Dunsany)
Brave New World (Huxley)
.......and many more. What purpose is achieved in squeezing a lifetime of reading into a meagre list of 10 titles, or 100, or 1000?

>22 Bamf102:
I read Moby Dick a few months ago, and was much assisted by a website called Power Moby-Dick: The Online Annotation ( http://www.powermobydick.com/ ). It provided annotations chapter by chapter for unfamiliar terms: nautical, biblical, historical, geographical, linguistical, etc. It added much to my appreciation of the text.

Lost Horizon by James Hilton
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
The Dumas Club by Arturo pèrez reverte
Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
1984 by George Orwell
The Quiet American by Graham Greene
The Man who was Thursday by GK Chesterton

also some short story collections:
Collected Ghost Stories by M R James
Klondike Tales by Jack London
Phantom rickshaw and other eerie tales by Rudyard Kipling
Adventures of sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle