What are your all-time favorite novels??

oh! the miracle of the rose

i don't read women much. i really enjoyed most of the "Portable" Dorothy Parker though.

i have kind of the same problem, i mostly read books by dudes. i need to work on that. i remember really liking "a tree grows in brooklyn" when i was like 14 or 15 though. that might be an all-time favorite.

The Waves
The Man Who Loved Children
The Ghost Writer
The Folded Leaf
Lincoln

back and nope - I got nothing on the female tip - sad

I do however have a #10!

1. Pale Fire - Nabokov
2. Jude the Obscure - Hardy
3. White Noise - DeLillo
4. Heart of Darkness - Conrad
5. Our Lady of the Flowers - Genet
6. The Trial - Kafka
7. Gravity's Rainbow - Pynchon
8. Mayor of Casterbridge - Hardy
9. The Maltese Falcon - Hammett
10. As I Lay Dying - Faulkner

Now that my list is finalized I'm probably going to get a tattoo of all these stacked on top of one another somewhere on my person.

Wise Blood
The Optimist's Daughter
Persuasion

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is great. I do like some stuff by women writers but just not enough for it to make the top 10.

What's wrong with you people?! What about George Eliot? If Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda were the only two novels in existence, literature would still thrive.

ha "women writers"

oh yeah i don't think it's top 5. i have a hard time ranking things though.

Me too! I've actually been thinking about this for days.

george eliot is a girl?!?!?!?

lol jk

as I lay dying and wise blood are both awesome.

harry crews "car"

Alfred I know this is a challop but my entire senior seminar was on George Elliot and I was not the biggest of fans. I would like to re-read now though because I expect that my opinion of her may well have changed.

Lucky Jim
Atonement
Austerlitz

Alfred I know this is a challop but my entire senior seminar was on George Elliot and I was not the biggest of fans. I would like to re-read now though because I expect that my opinion of her may well have changed.

Cool! I'd love to read it. I reread Middlemarch a few years ago and was sooooo impressed by the...architecture of the thing: these discordant elements in perfect harmony, along with its considerable visceral pluses (her delight in character, the depiction of small town England, etc).

My bookshelf is several thousand miles away but off the top of my head I am sure Daniel Deronda would make the list. Also, Great Expectations; maybe Murphy.

I've always wanted to read Far From the Madding Crowd because the title is so great; have only read Jude the Obscure, which I wasn't too high on.

i think blood meridian might have to be on there, despite the slog that is its first hundred pages.

i will try to report back with a full ten after a few beers.

the ones that occur to me off the top of my head (and after scanning the thread):

the brothers karamazov -- dostoyevsky
the plague -- camus
song of solomon -- morrison
wuthering heights -- bronte
brideshead revisited -- waugh
heart of darkness -- conrad
pride and prejudice -- austen
the dead father -- barthelme
if on a winter's night a traveler -- calvino
waiting for the barbarians -- coetzee
100 years of solitude -- ggm

(mostly conventional stuff, i know. karamazov and the plague stand above the rest for me, as books that i think really directly influenced my moral view of the world.)

xpost: oh yeah, blood meridian too, for sure. i don't remember any slog. i was pretty taken in by about page 20.

if on a winter's night a traveler -- calvino

Is def up there for me.

i need to re-read Blood Meridian, but my copy got destroyed when I lent it to a friend and he took it to the beach :(

i really don't go for much literature pre-20th century, and i don't quite know why that is.

Not sure I would say these are my five favorites ever, but this is what popped in my head:

Invisible Cities - Calvino
Gravity's Rainbow - Pynchon
As I Lay Dying - Faulkner
In The Castle Of My Skin - George Lamming
The Lost Scrapbook - Evan Dara

Steinbeck - Sweet Thursday
Joyce - Ulysses
Kluge - Biggest Elvis
Vidal - Lincoln
Stephenson - Snowcrash

Oh god I forgot about how great Invisible Cities is. #11

Yay, Jaq! I always recommend Lincoln and Burr to people who think of Gore Vidal just as a wit and essayist.

oh hell, lolita should definitely be on mine too. pale fire would go on the runner-up list.

invisible cities is probably third fave calvino, with winter's night after that. second is the wildly underrated "Marcovaldo."

Speaking of Vidal, his Calvino essay is marvelous.

I probably should have put Absalom, Absalom! on my original list too. Man, this is tough.

Other thread could be favorite quotes from novels but again . . . tough!

i wanna read a book now

harbl war and peace is a traet!

harbl, read the white people by arthur machen.

harbl read this, harbl read that, harbl do my book report for me.

As I Lay Dying
Infinite Jest
JR
Absalom, Absalom
Drop City

this is tough. . .

I would say Moby Dick, too, but I just reread it, and parts of it were as amazing as I remembered, but I dunno. . .

Vidal is such a master of dialogue, also perfect pitch for cattiness.

If I were going for 10: Lolita, definitely, and also Moby Dick. Possibly Bleak House too. Possibly Auster's New York Trilogy but maybe not.

ok "the white people" sounds right up my alley

i wanna read JR. even though i know on other threads i've poured the haterade on gaddis. xp to que

haha actually the white people sounds like something i would not like at all but i am willing to try. i thought white people meant like...white people.

ahhaha.

i am going to go drink now.

Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy. (Trilogies = maximizing the "desert island" list, though Powell's Dance to the Music of Time would really spike it.) Oh wait! Graves' I, Claudius and Claudius the God

I spent most of summer '07 reading Dance to the Music of Time -- entertaining, but a disappointment, esp. the volumes dealing with the war.

Proust is lovely so far but I just started the third book

1. B.S. Johnson - The Unfortunates
2. James Joyce - Finnegans Wake
3. B.S. Johnson - House Mother Normal
4. Jean-Paul Sartre - Nausea
5. Georges Perec - A Void
6. B.S. Johnson - Albert Angelo
7. B.S. Johnson - See the Old Lady Decently
8. B.S. Johnson - Christie Malry's Own Double Entry
9. B.S. Johnson - Trawl
10. James Joyce - Ulysses

I really like B.S. Johnson!

JR is an amazing book. Gaddis is emotionally exhausting but totally worth it.

...
waiting for the barbarians -- coetzee
...

This would be one of mine too, tipsy mothra.

Others on the list would probably be The Recognitions (which I love marginally more than JR), Owls Do Cry, The Man With the Golden Arm, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge...

Oh shit, I forgot Travelling People. Swap that with Trawl, maybe.

xpost

Harriet the Spy - Fitzhugh
The Lake - Kawabata
From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler - Konigsberg

Maybes:

Wiseblood - O'Connor
My Romance - Lish
Zuleika Dobson - Beerbohm

I have to think about more.

Maybe I don't become attached to things.

that is my favorite Cather, and yes, she is great. she was sort of terrible? but her writing is beautiful.

Hard to resist A Lost Lady too.

*Brammer's* The Gay Place)(three stories, interlocking around a gas giant, unseen, always felt, who has been auto-compared to LBJ but I go w those who say he seems more like Earl Long, the hardest workin' playin' man in tightrope political show biz)

Member of the Wedding and The Moviegoer too.

xps yes Cather for me is one who has several that could make a list...same for me w/ Bernhard and Nabokov, on a given day any one of four or five novels from either might be a favorite

Native Son, Their Eyes Were Watching God both blew me away, in diff directions.

at a certain point mine would have been

richard powers, the gold bug variations
bruce duffy, the world as i found it
mark helprin, a soldier of the great war

but the latter i read before i knew helprin was a fascist : /

For sure faves:

To The Lighthouse
Moby-Dick
Frankenstein
Crime & Punishment
Ragtime
Black Swan Green

Stuff I would have repped for once upon a time but not sure now/would have to revisit:

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Cat's Cradle

Five favourites that haven't been mentioned:

Samuel Beckett, Molloy
Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (or Queer, or Cities of the Red Night)
Thomas McGuane, The Bushwhacked Piano
Hubert Selby, The Room

I think The Room is the only Selby novel I've never read. I love The Demon.

The Demon starts off great, at a lower pitch of intensity than most of his work, but when the Pope comes into it it goes overboard for me. Selby doesn't have the wider range, but his focus is very sharp. There's more to him than just Last Exit to Brooklyn.

I see I already listed mine way upthread. Since then I've only added one for sure, and that's Against the Day.

But, to put another spin on it, here are the 10 books I've probably reread the most:

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Cat’s Eye
Lord of the Rings
Breaking and Entering (Williams)
Northanger Abbey
Nine Tailors (Sayers)
A Wild Sheep Chase
The Comedians (Greene)
Rubicon Beach
The Last Gentleman