What are your all-time favorite novels??

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.

Yes! Harriet the Spy might be my favorite novel -- the one that showed me what fiction can do.

i prefer V. to Gravity's Rainbow
also read Burr ages ago, didn't think much of it at the time

why would anyone rep for moby dick its just some dudes on a boat

Good troll.

it's an earnest question, sip dis dick

ilb is jealous right now.

And I am sipping yr dick with a bendy straw.

(that sound when there's just ice and almost no drink left)

you could read this, harbl. short stories, though.

i prefer V. to Gravity's Rainbow

The scene in V. where he envisions machine gunning people from behind the salad bar may be my favorite Pynchon moment.

I hated Moby Dick. In fact, I had a professor who basically told us it was ok to skip all the technical whaling parts because even he thought they were boring.

i actually really dug moby-dick. took a while, but i got into it enough that i thought all the whaling stuff was cool. it doesn't make my top tier just because it didn't grab me or shake me or otherwise compel me the way my real favorites did. but i understand its classic-ness.

i loved the technical whaling parts!

I just couldn't do it. I have this unfortunate thing where if a book doesn't really grab me within a couple days of reading then I'm likely to abandon it. I can't force myself to read something that I'm just not enjoying. That happened to me with M Dick.

I didn't finish The Confidence Man, but it was weird feeling all of these undercurrents of Melville's symbolism coming to life, instead of just being something you write a hackneyed term paper about. It's sort of like seeing a ghost.

winter's tale, mark helprin -- here's one that is on my all-time list because of how much i loved it as a teenager, but when i reread it some years later all of its overblown romantic flaws were much more evident. still, some great stuff in it. (my appreciation for it has been further dimmed by helprin's increasingly vocal right-wing curmudgeonliness over the years.)

and in the i guess you'd say non-literary realm, the original four books in gene wolfe's book of the new sun series, and the original three earthsea books are probably at the top. (ok, along with LOTR and watership down, if we're counting their impact on a 12-year-old.)

That happened to me with M Dick

it was one that i started twice. the first time i stalled out around page 60. i came back about 6 months later and for whatever reason it clicked.