I'm obsessed with literature. Here's my list (with Ulysses being number 1):

Ulysses - James Joyce.
War and Peace -- Tolstoy.
The Magic Mountain -- Thomas Mann
Portrait of the Artist and a Young Man- Joyce
A Farewell to Arms -- Hemingway
Heart of Darkness - Conrad
Tender is the Night -- Fitzgerald
The Sound and the Fury -- Faulkner
Middlemarch - George Eliot
The Brothers Karamazov -- Dostoyevski(longwinded, though)
Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
The Sun Also Rises - Hem
The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald
Lolita - Nabokov
The Road - Cormac MacCarthy
The Castle - Kafka
Nausea - Sartre
Labyrinths - Jorge Luis Borges (collection of short stuff, admittedly)
The Shlong Saga - Henry Miller
Moby Dick - Melville
O Pioneers! - Willa Cather
Emma - Jane Austen
Mansfield Park - Jane Austen
Lord of the Rings - Tolkien
For Whom the Bell Tolls - Hemingway
Lord of the Flies - Golding
Lucky Jim- Kingsley Amis
the Heart is a Lonely Hunter - McCullers
American Dream - Norman Mailer
All Quiet on the Western Front - Remarque
Conan of Cimmeria - Robert E Howard (I can't help it)
THe Hound of the Baskervilles - Doyle

Another point: I focused on novels. The best short stories of Hemingway and Chekhov, in particular, are superior in my judgment to the bottom 15 or so of my list of novels.

As great as these novels are, in my opinion Shakespeare does more memorable stuff in the 50 pages of King Lear or MacBeth than in all of War and Peace. More memorable language, more intensity. He is the Undisputed Champion, as Hemingway said.

Just a top 10 for now:

01. Cormac mcCarthy - The Road
02. William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying
03. J.M. Coetzee - Disgrace
04. Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange
05. Arthur C. Clarke - 2001: A Space Odyssey
06. Cormac McCarthy - No Country for Old Men
07. Stanislaw Lem - Fiasko
08. Toni Morrison - The Bluest Eye
09. Kader Abdolah - Het Huis van de Moskee
10. Nick Cave - The Death of Bunny Munro

Nice to know you guys really appreciate McCarthy, he is my favorite writer. Besides the books I mentioned I also dig his Border-Trilogy and I am currently reading Blood Meridian (a real contender up until now).

Just an eclectic few; I've probably got more favourites I just can't think of them right now. Maybe it's a short attention span or something but I don't often get beyond the first few pages of a novel nowadays unless I trust the author to entertain me.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray [1891]
Evelyn Waugh - Black Mischief [1932]
Evelyn Waugh - A Handful of Dust [1934]
Evelyn Waugh - Scoop [1938]
James Joyce - Finnegans Wake [1939] (I've only read this in patches, but the bits I vaguely understood were always either brilliant or hilarious or both)
Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird [1960]

Some other all-time favorites of mine, that weren't mentioned already:

A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul
100 years of solitude - G.G. Marquez
Love in times of cholera - Marquez
Auto da Fé - Elias Canetti
Desert Le Clézio
Trilogy - Naghieb Mahfouz
The Master and Magrarita - Bulgakov
City of the Blind - José Saramago
The Gospel according to Jesus Christ - Saramago
A Personal Matter - Kenzaburo Oe
Fateless - Imre Kertesz
Girlfriend in a coma - Douglas Coupland
Green hills of Africa - Hemingway (short stories)
Independent people - Haldor Laxness
Emperor of the air - Ethan Canin (short stories)
American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman

SF
The stars, my destination - Alfred Bester
The mote in gods eye - Niven/Pournelle
Earth abides - George R. Steward
Rediscovery of man - Cordwainer Smith (short stories)
Mockingbird - Walter Trevis
Roadside picknick - Strugatsky Brothers
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

Listing my 25 favorite novels is way too hard for me to do, so here's a top 10 instead.

1. Infinite Jest- David Foster Wallace
2. Catch-22- Joseph Heller
3. Gravity's Rainbow- Thomas Pynchon
4. On the Road- Jack Kerouac
5. American Psycho- Bret Easton Ellis
6. Watchmen- Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
7. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas- Hunter S. Thompson
8. To Kill a Mockingbird- Harper Lee
9. The Old Man and the Sea- Ernest Hemingway
10. Looking for Alaska- John Green

I've said it before on this forum and I'll say it again. I wish there was something close to AM for novels. I know it would be a daunting task. There is way more literature out there than films or albums, but even if a site just stuck to post-18th century or English-language or something. That being said, here is a wonderful genre-specific site that tells you awards won and lists made, but it's only for sci-fi/fantasy. http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi. Those two being my favorite genres, I use that site frequently, but I wish there were something similar for other literature.

10 I recommend:

Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke
Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
The Matarese Circle - Robert Ludlum (better than anything in his Bourne series)
The Giver - Lois Lowry
The Hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle
Philip K. Dick's short stories
Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow
Invisible Monsters - Chuck Palahniuk
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (but the UNABRIDGED version, which in this case means better translation and entire chapters restored)
Sphere - Michael Crichton

top 20th-century novels, chronologically, one per author, top ten starred

1. Nostromo / Joesph Conrad / England / 1904
2. The Petty Demon / Fyodor Sologub / Russia / 1904
3. The Good Soldier / Ford Madox Ford / England / 1915
4. The Rainbow / D.H. Lawrence / England / 1915
5. The Golem / Gustav Meyrink / Austria / 1915
*6. Petersburg / Andrei Bely / Russia / 1916
7. Winesburg, Ohio / Sherwood Anderson / U.S. / 1919
8. The Good Soldier Svejk / Jaroslav Hasek / Czechoslovakia / 1923
9. Cane / Jean Toomer / U.S. / 1923
*10. The Magic Mountain / Thomas Mann / Germany / 1924
11. The Trial / Franz Kafka / Austria / 1925
12. To the Lighthouse / Virginia Woolf / England / 1925
13. In Search of Lost Time / Marcel Proust / France / 1915-1927
14. A Farewell to Arms / Ernest Hemingway / U.S. / 1929
*15. The Sleepwalkers / Hermann Broch / Austria / 1932
*16. Journey to the End of the Night / Louis-Ferdinand Celine / France / 1932
17. Light in August / William Faulkner / U.S. / 1932
18. Tropic of Cancer / Henry Miller / U.S. / 1934
19. U.S.A. / John Dos Passos / U.S. / 1930-36
20. The Big Sleep / Raymond Chandler / U.S. / 1939
21. The Grapes of Wrath / John Steinbeck / U.S. / 1939
22. The Power and the Glory / Graham Greene / England / 1940
23. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter / Carson McCullers / U.S. / 1940
*24. The Man Without Qualities / Robert Musil / Austria / 1930-42
25. All the King's Men / Robert Penn Warren / U.S. / 1946
*26. Under the Volcano / Malcolm Lowry / England / 1947
27. The Sheltering Sky / Paul Bowles / U.S. / 1949
28. The Catcher in the Rye / J.D. Salinger / U.S. / 1951
29. The Ginger Man / J.P. Donleavy / U.S. / 1955
30. The Alexandria Quartet / Lawrence Durrell / England / 1957-60
31. Hopscotch / Julio Cortazar / Argentina / 1963
32. Cosmos / Witold Gombrowicz / Poland / 1965
33. The Painted Bird / Jerzy Kosinski / U.S. / 1965
34. The Master and Margarita / Mikhail Bulgakov / U.S.S.R. / 1966-67
35. One Hundred Years of Solitude / Gabriel Garcia Marquez / Colombia / 1967
36. House Made of Dawn / N. Scott Momaday / U.S. / 1968
37. The First Circle / Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn / U.S.S.R. / 1968
*38. The Sea of Fertility / Yukio Mishima / Japan / 1968-71
39. Invisible Cities / Italo Calvino / Italy / 1972
40. Crash / J.G. Ballard / England / 1973
*41. Dhalgren / Samuel R. Delany / U.S. / 1975
*42. Terra Nostra / Carlos Fuentes / Mexico / 1975
43. Women / Charles Bukowski / U.S. / 1978
44. Neuromancer / William Gibson / Canada / 1984
45. The Unbearable Lightness of Being / Milan Kundera / Czechoslovakia / 1984
*46. Blood Meridian / Cormac McCarthy / U.S. / 1985
47. London Fields / Martin Amis / England / 1989
48. Generation X / Douglas Coupland / Canada / 1991
49. The Rings of Saturn / W.G. Sebald / Germany / 1995
50. Underworld / Don DeLillo / U.S. / 1997

After reading many more novels, I figured I'd post my revised list.

1. Infinite Jest- David Foster Wallace
2. Catch-22- Joseph Heller
3. Ulysses- James Joyce
4. Underworld- Don DeLillo
5. The Catcher in the Rye- J.D. Salinger
6. 1984- George Orwell
7. Gravity's Rainbow- Thomas Pynchon
8. The Pale King- David Foster Wallace
9. The Great Gatsby- F. Scott Fitzgerald
10. The Sun Also Rises- Ernest Hemingway

So half of those are standard high school reading material, and the other half are sprawling postmodern epics. Seems about right.

Yeah, I think I'm about due for a revised list too.

I just finished Anna Karenina and picked up a haul of six novels from B&N and Amazon:

Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint
Roberto Bolano - Nazi Literature In The Americas
Don Delillo - Libra
David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest
Marilynne Robinson - Gilead
Steve Erickson - Amnesiascope

I was thinking of starting with Gilead and then Nazi Literature, but I'm open to other suggestions.

Anyway, my favorite books ever:

Philip Roth - The Human Stain, American Pastoral
Don Delillo = White Noise, Underground
Roberto Bolano - 2666, The Savage Detectives
George Orwell - 1984, Animal Farm
Jonathon Franzen - The Corrections
John Fowles - The French Lieutenant's Woman
Fyodor Dostoyesky - Crime and Punishment
Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five

And, there are a bunch of 'canon' classics I read in high school which I didn't really get at the time because I was reading them under diress, because I was looking only for plot points, and because I had a lot of heavy biases, and I have no idea how I'd rate them reading them now in 'Enjoy' mode instead of 'Analyze' mode, so I'll leave them out.

Honorable mention for best comedy book ever:
Jon Stewart - America The Book

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