Mine are:
here are mine…
Ah, literature! Good thread…
My top10:
Damn, making these lists is difficult. I’ve never actually ranked my favourite novels before, so this was an interesting exercise. I’d prefer to think of this as a representative sampling rather than a straight 1-10, and I’ve kept it to one title per author. Moreover, they’re in chronological order (although Hearts of Darkness, concidentally the oldest, is also my favourite).
I can’t understand how I foregot the Si-Fi classics…
“Foundation” by Issac Asimov
"The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams
"Rogue Ship" by A. V. Van Vogt
Some very good lists here 
1984 is one of my favourites too.
I like Ray Bradbury very much. Fahrenheit 451 and the Martian Chronicales are fairly good books. I like his clever short stories too.
My favourite novel by Franz Kafka is Das Schloss - THE CASTLE.
Another great author is Leo Perutz with his Novel The Master of the Day of Judgement.
The Stranger and The Plague by Albert Camus.
H.P. Lovecrafts The Mountain of Madness and The Shadow over Innsmouth.
Kill Shot by Elmore Leonard
Baudolino by Umberto Eco (and I liked of course The Name of the Rose= Great Book and great Movie!).
The Damnation Game and Coldheart Canyon by Clive Barker
Atlantis, The Stand and Misery by Stephen King.
If I can have short story collections, I would include “Over to You” by Roald Dahl (befroe he wrote children’s novels), which is a collection of short storys about World War 2. In my opinion, it is quite possibly the greatest book I have ever read.
Here’s my top thirty favourite novels of all time…
In no particular order:
(Titels in bold are special favourites)
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
Charles Dickens: Bleak House
Lev Tolstoj: War and peace
Nicolaj Gogol: Dead Souls
Fjodor Dostojevski: Crime and Punishment
George Eliot: The mill on the Floss
Kawabata Yasunari: Snowland
Mishima Yukio: Mourning for the Fatherland
Theodor Fontane: Irrungen, Wirrungen
Thomas Mann: Der Zauberberg
Henryk Sienkiewicz: Quo Vadis
Philip Roth: Portnoy’s Complaint
Patricia Highsmith: Deep Water
Katherine Mansfield: Collected short stories
Italo Svevo: La coscienza di Zeno
Stephen King: The Body
Raymond Chandler: The Long Goodbye
RossMacDonald: The Big Chill
Michel Houellebecq: les particules Elémentaires
Vladimir Nabokov: Pninn
James Joyce: Dubliners
Dylan Thomas: Prospect of the sea & other stories
Hjalmar Söderberg: Doctor Glass
John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath
Tauo Tsu Chin: The dream in the Red Chamber
Kate Chopin: Short Stories
Carson McCullers: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Marcel Proust: A la recherche du temps perdu
Anton Tsjechov: The three Sisters
Richard Adams: Watership Down
Lewis Carrol: Alice in Wonderland & Alice through the Looking Glass
Gerard Reve: De Avonden (The Evenings)
Willem Elsschot: Kaas (Cheese)
Bordewijk: Bint
Maarten 't Hart: De Jacobsladder
[quote=“scherpschutter, post:9, topic:1901”]In no particular order:
(Titels in bold are special favourites)
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
Charles Dickens: Bleak House
Lev Tolstoj: War and peace
Nicolaj Gogol: Dead Souls
Fjodor Dostojevski: Crime and Punishment
George Eliot: The mill on the Floss
Kawabata Yasunari: Snowland
Mishima Yukio: Mourning for the Fatherland
Theodor Fontane: Irrungen, Wirrungen
Thomas Mann: Der Zauberberg
Henryk Sienkiewicz: Quo Vadis
Philip Roth: Portnoy’s Complaint
Patricia Highsmith: Deep Water
Katherine Mansfield: Collected short stories
Italo Svevo: La coscienza di Zeno
Stephen King: The Body
Raymond Chandler: The Long Goodbye
RossMacDonald: The Big Chill
Michel Houellebecq: les particules Elémentaires
Vladimir Nabokov: Pninn
James Joyce: Dubliners
Dylan Thomas: Prospect of the sea & other stories
Hjalmar Söderberg: Doctor Glass
John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath
Tauo Tsu Chin: The dream in the Red Chamber
Kate Chopin: Short Stories
Carson McCullers: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Marcel Proust: A la recherche du temps perdu
Anton Tsjechov: The three Sisters
Richard Adams: Watership Down
Lewis Carrol: Alice in Wonderland & Alice through the Looking Glass
Gerard Reve: De Avonden (The Evenings)
Willem Elsschot: Kaas (Cheese)
Bordewijk: Bint
Maarten 't Hart: De Jacobsladder[/quote]
Some great (if heavy) books there!
With the exception of Proust (thousands of pages, no narratave in the classic sense) and that classic Chinese novel, none of these novels can be called really ‘heavy’. Crime and punishment is complex from a philisophical point of view, but it can be read as a thriller too, and most peoplewho have read it, call it very suspenseful.
Tolstoj, Dickens, Eliot, Sienkiewicz: those novels are long, but not difficult to read.
[quote=“scherpschutter, post:9, topic:1901”]In no particular order:
(Titels in bold are special favourites)
Philip Roth: Portnoy’s Complaint[/quote]
I haven’t read any Roth for some years but I did read a lot of his stuff some years ago. Portnoy’s Complaint was actually one I never really enjoyed. My favourite of his was The Great American Novel. Very funny and would appeal to all our baseball fans.
[quote=“scherpschutter, post:11, topic:1901”]With the exception of Proust (thousands of pages, no narratave in the classic sense) and that classic Chinese novel, none of these novels can be called really ‘heavy’. Crime and punishment is complex from a philisophical point of view, but it can be read as a thriller too, and most peoplewho have read it, call it very suspenseful.
Tolstoj, Dickens, Eliot, Sienkiewicz: those novels are long, but not difficult to read.[/quote]
When I said “heavy”, I ment books that deal with large, important themes.
not a top ten but whatever
The Dark Tower series is awesome
and anything by Cormac McCarthy is golden
especially Blood Meridian
Who’s that written by?
Stephen King
Is he in his horror mode or not?
The Dark Tower series is like part western, part fantasy, part horror…the way I like to sum it up is by saying its basically as if The Man With No Name from the Dollars Trilogy was in a Lord of the Rings-type world and setting…although its a bit more complicated than that…you should check it out
That sounds very interesting… especially the Man With No-Name bit!