What are your all-time favorite novels??

a real flash of brilliance and then a real booze induced fall-off...the one after this made me kinda sad

ten faves form the past twenty+ years

Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red
Tom McCarthy, Remainder
Donald Antrim, The Hundred Brothers
Vladimir Makanin, The Baize Covered Table With Decanter
W.G. Sebald, The Rings Of Saturn
Grace Krilanovich, The Orange Eat Creeps
Jose Saramago, Blindness
Jim Crace, Being Dead
Roberto Bolaño, Distant Star
Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co.

Oh man! I'll just go with ones that I think have not been mentioned (but I'm not going to search on the titles to make sure, because I want to mention them anyway:
I was forced to read 1984 in Ninth Grade, but immediately and all through there was a lot more vs. Cold War Adult World than Communism Does Not Pay---also in high school, Nabokov's The Defense, about dorky chess prodigy, v. relatable to to non-chess prodigy me, who also dug The Crying of Lot 49, with paranoid pleasures x the fab Mrs. Maas, which spoke to the 60s for sure, ditto though set a little earlier, V., incl. things I hoped to get up to, yo-yo-ing etc., plus more scary funky Mid-Century wreckage and piecework palaces in the twilight.
in 70s-early 80s: Bramner's The Gay Place, Stone's Hall of Mirrors and Dog Soldiers (esp. struck by way women have to make their ways through these male preoccupations and stumblefests).
More recently:
The Way We Live Now
The Idiot
2666 (was mentioned)
Swann's Way
My Brilliant Friend
Two more in the Gilead sequence:
Home and Lila

And The Professor's House!

great weird book w/ that left turn into the desert

Cather rules.

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