What do you consider to be the top ~10 best books ever written?

[dardan]

I'm mostly asking because I am still new to literature and don't know where I can best start other than asking you. Considering that those who match taste in film probably match taste in books as well it should be interesting for many to see what their closest TCI's recommend. Feel free to list as many books and/or collections as you want.

[Daigoro]

reading is for nerds

Seriously though I don't know. But you could always start with the Four Great Classical Chinese Novels (Water Margin, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West and Dream of the Red Chamber) I guess. And I hear War and Peace is pretty good, give that a shot too.

[MmzHrrdb]

The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. Technically a children's book, which is probably why it doesn't get more attention, but it's still the funniest, cleverest and most entertaining book I've ever read. A gem in every paragraph. I reread it annually.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is also brilliant.

[CosmicMonkey]

I don't feel like I've read enough literature (especially classical literature) to be able to answer that question, but this might be a good place to start browsing: http://thegreatestbooks.org/

I've noticed that a lot of the highest ranked novels aren't exactly accessible to average adult Anglophone. Joyce, Proust, Faulkner, Woolf etc. all pretty much require an English Degree to understand and I feel in general that the literary community has a much more instilled sense of snobbery than the communities of film or music or other media do.

My Own Personal Favourites include:
Ubik by Philip K. Dick, easily most mind-bending psychedelic trip I've experienced in any medium.
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, a sprawling multi-generational epic.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, beautiful and horrifying at the same time.

[edkrak]

I'm a total noob when it comes to literature, but if it's of any help:

Top ten novels:
1. Gombrowicz Witold - Pornografia
2. Gombrowicz Witold - Ferdydurke
3. Andrade, Mario de - Macunaima
4. Hesse Herman - Steppenwolf
5. Dick Philip K. - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
6. Lem Stanisław - Kongres futurologiczny
7. Gombrowicz Witold - Trans-Atlantyk
8. Topor Roland - Le Locataire chimérique
9. Herbert Frank - Dune
10. Lem Stanisław - Solaris

Top ten novellas/shorts:
1. Gogol Mikołaj - Viy
2. Maupassant, Guy de - Le Père Amable
3. Gombrowicz Witold - Przygody
4. Klima Ladislav - Skutečná událost sběhnuvší se v Postmortalii
5. Gombrowicz Witold - Dziewictwo
6. Gogol Mikołaj - Shinel
7. Gombrowicz Witold - Biesiada u hrabiny Kotłubaj
8. Tolstoy, Aleksey Konstantinovich - Oupyr
9. Euripides - Medea
10. James, Montague Rhodes - Whistle and I'll Come to You

[karamazov.]

-Extremely- Western-centric, be warned:

Non-fiction.
-"Das Kapital," "The Marx-Engels Reader" -- Marx, Engels.
-"Right-Wing Women," "Intercourse" -- Andrea Dworkin.
-"History of the Peloponnesian War" -- Thucydides.
-"The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution" -- C.L.R. James.
-"Dialectic of Enlightenment" -- Adorno.
-"Gödel, Escher, Bach" -- Hofstadter.
-"Van Gogh. Il suicidato della società" -- Artaud.
-"Muqaddimah" -- Ibn Khaldun.
-"SCUM Manifesto" -- Solanas.
-"Tao Teh Ching" -- Laotzu.
-"The Souls of Black Folk" -- W.E.B. du Bois.

Poetry.
-"The Odyssey," "The Iliad" -- Homer.
-"Une saison en enfer," "Les Illuminations" -- Rimbaud.
-"Jubilate Agno" -- Smart.
-"Comedìa" -- Dante.
-"The Bedbug and Selected Poetry" -- Mayakovsky.
-"Cantos" -- Pound
-"Leaves of Grass" -- Whitman.
-"Complete Poetry and Prose" -- Blake.
-"Zone" -- Apollinaire.
-"Collected Works" -- Juan de la Cruz.

Novels, novellas, and unclassifiable weirdo shit.
-"The Brothers Karamazov," "Demons," "The Idiot," -- Dostoevsky.
-"Moby Dick," "Pierre," "Bartleby, the Scrivener" -- Melville.
-"The Soft Machine," "Naked Lunch" -- W.S. Burroughs.
-"VALIS" -- Philip K. Dick.
-"Notre Dame des Fleurs" -- Genet.
-"Gravity's Rainbow" -- Pynchon.
-"Atrocity Exhibition," "The Drowned World" -- J.G. Ballard.
-"Franny and Zooey" -- Salinger.
-"Finnegans Wake" -- Joyce.
-"Sea of Fertility" Cycle -- Mishima.
-"Der Prozeß" -- Kafka.
-"Go Tell it on the Mountain" -- Baldwin.
-"No Longer Human" -- Dazai.
-"Demian," "Siddhartha" -- Hesse.
-"La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel" -- Rabelais.

Short fiction.
-"My Sister's Hand in Mine" -- Jane Bowles.
-"Complete Short Stories" -- J.G. Ballard.
-"The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories" -- Kafka.
-"Going to Meet the Man" -- Baldwin.
-"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" -- Joyce Carol Oates.
-"Tales of Caunterbury" -- Chaucer.
-"Nine Stories" -- Salinger.
-"Dubliners" -- Joyce.


p.s. we have a criticker group on goodreads.

[Detox]

I don't know much about literature either, but there are some novels I really love.

Cormac McCarthy - The Road
Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian
Bret Easton Ellis - American Psycho
Mario Vargas Llosa - The War of the End of the World
Gabriel García Márquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch
Irvine Welch - Trainspotting
Jonathan Littell - The Kindly Ones

[karamazov.]

Pretty neat to see some love for pkd.

[theficionado]

My list of favorite novels (one per author) probably looks something like this:

Blood Meridian Cormac McCarthy
Catch-22 Joseph Heller
If on a winter's night a traveler... Italo Calvino
The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera
One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez
The Counterlife Philip Roth
Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
Revolutionary Road Richard Yates
Going Native Stephen Wright
A Confederacy of Dunces John Kennedy Toole
White Noise Don DeLillo

[karamazov.]

My list of favorite novels (one per author) probably looks something like this:

Blood Meridian Cormac McCarthy
Catch-22 Joseph Heller
If on a winter's night a traveler... Italo Calvino
The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera
One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez
The Counterlife Philip Roth
Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
Revolutionary Road Richard Yates
Going Native Stephen Wright
A Confederacy of Dunces John Kennedy Toole
White Noise Don DeLillo

Figures you'd like DeLillo and Calvino. Good choices. Are you familiar with much Ballard?