What are your all-time favorite novels??

I stepped across this as I wanted to read a few opinions on George Eliot.

Would never really do anything like this but I guess the poster above is (scarily) close to my tastes in terms of the Germanic-Franco tradition: so yes to Musil, Proust, Celine and Broch. These would permanently have a place although I prefer Celine's Death on Credit and perhaps would go for The Death of Virgil over Sleepwalkers.

I'd need to have at least a Russian in there: Andrei Platonov or Shamalov (whose short stories add up to something else). Fave American would be Hubert Selby Jr.

Dislike the Gide and could never quite get on with Svevo: probably switch to Conversation in Sicily by Elio Vittorini or Genet's cycle of novels from the 40s (who all count as one thing, to me). Probably like Henry Green more than Joyce these days, as an English writer writing in the same period. All even before the 19th century.

But there are so many non-novel thingies that would be 'all time favourites'. Tales of Boccaccio, Pessoa's fragments as collected in The Book of disquiet, Sciascia's novellas...

Aargh, and the South Americans and Japanese novels! No Mishima no cred!

I hate lists...

shocked that nobody, including me (ha), included Sentimental Education!

i was just reading it and got too bored halfway through :(

Oh and arrgh again Joyce is Irish, meant writer writing in English..

xp. ridiculous awesome shit that harbl dislikes

i wanted to like it, but it's no madame bovary. i guess i should just pick it up again.

list of old sentimental favorites and stuff im feeling at the moment

as for me and my house -- sinclair ross
heartbreaks along the road - roch carrier
the atlas -- william t vollmann
a jest of god -- margaret laurence
a dictionary of maqiao - han shaogong
outlaws of the marsh -- shi naian or whoever the fuck wrote it (i like the sidney shapiro translation)
dragons of autumn twilight - margaret weis and tracy hickman
the fermata -- nicholson baker
rabbit is rich -- john updike
abandoned capital -- jia pingwa (one of the greatest still-yet-untranslated-into-english novels of all time)
notes of a desolate man - zhu tianwen (trans howard goldblatt is the most prolific chinese-engl trans and i have my problems with him but this is an okay translation of a fucking great book)

this is one of my favorite threads. people talking about stuff they love, and cankles.

Is that an exclusive "and"?

i didn't put enough effort into writing that

my favourite novel is the complete works of william shakespeare

jk

Anyway, somehow never saw this thread before so thanks for the revive.

I don't really have favorite novels in quite the way I did when I was younger. Too much water under the bridge by now. But I'm willing to name some that I wouldn't hesitate to reread or recommend.

The Third Policeman - Flann O'Brien
The Master & Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
Hunger - Knut Hamsun
Egil's Saga - Anonymous, but possibly written by the great Snorri Sturluson
Tristam Shandy - Laurence Sterne
Three Men In a Boat, To Say Nothing of the Dog - Jerome K. Jerome
First Love - Ivan Turgenev
Psmith, Journalist - P.G. Wodehouse
Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man - James Joyce
Prater Violet - Christopher Isherwood
At least a few of the twenty Aubrey/Maturin novels of Patrick O'Brian

love this thread but it nags

prob add crying of lot 49 and at swim-two-birds now but man I need to read more

We
Roadside Picnic
The Obscene Bird of Night
Memoirs Found in A Bathtub
Galactic Pot-Healer
Fire On The Mountain
Satyricon
The Scholars

Adam Thorpe - Ulverton
Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen - Freedom
Evelyn Waugh - Brideshead Revisited
Ian McEwan - The Child in Time
John Fowles - The Magus

forgot Cormac McCarthy - The Road

Looking back at my post I wouldn't get Broch anywhere near the top 10. Amazingly all of the rest of my 'what a list would look like, which is not something I could ever do' pretty much stays the same.

Five novels by writers that haven't been mentioned and could be in a list of this sort:

Peter Weiss - The Aesthetics of Resistance (based on the 1st vol., the rest hasn't been translated into English)
Cesare Pavese - The Moon and the Bonfires
Helen Dewitt - The Last Samurai
Rabelais - (but only the Thomas Urquhart translation)
Juan Rulfo - Pedro Paramo

I gave up on The Last Samurai halfway through. Something about the tone irked me

people who love it seem to really love it though

the rings of saturn, w.g. sebald
austerlitz, w.g. sebald
mason & dixon, thomas pynchon
death comes for the archbishop, willa cather
stoner, john williams
moby-dick, herman melville
água viva, clarice lispector
the recognitions, william gaddis
play it as it lays, joan didion
zazen, vanessa veselka

The Recognitions - William Gaddis
JR - William Gaddis
Against the Day - Thomas Pynchon
The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass
American Pastoral - Philip Roth
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
Lolita - Nabokov
Women in Love - DH Lawrence
Underworld - Don Delillo

Love Agua Viva, read a few books by Lispector this year, she's great.

I gave up on The Last Samurai halfway through. Something about the tone irked me

people who love it seem to really love it though

― Number None, Sunday, March 1, 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

She has a voice. Very few people have that.

I am not really good at making these kinds of lists, but I appreciate it when others do. I really like at least three on Aimless's list and have been meaning to read a few others that I own.

Based on number of rereadings,

The Ambassadors - Henry James
Nostromo - Joseph Conrad
The Man Without Qualities - Robert Musil
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
Ulysses - James Joyce
Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner
Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World - Haruki Murakami

and a whole lot of genre novels: Hammett, Chandler, Cain, le Carré, Furst, Dick, Ballard, King, etc.

here they are today:

Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights
Henry James – The Portrait of a Lady
Alan Hollinghurst – The Line of Beauty
Henry Green – Concluding
Dawn Powell – A Time to Be Born
Kingsley Amis – Lucky Jim
Virginia Woolf – To the Lighthouse
William Maxwell – The Folded Leaf
Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary
Joseph Roth – The Radetzky March
J.M. Coetzee – Disgrace
Andre Breton – Nadja
Muriel Spark – The Driver’s Seat
D.H. Lawrence – Women in Love
Evelyn Waugh – The Loved Ones
Thomas Hardy – Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Christopher Isherwood – A Single Man
F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby
George Eliot – Middlemarch
Philip Roth – Sabbath’s Theater
Alejo Carpentier – The Kingdom of the World
Peter Handke – Short Letter, Long Farewell
Gore Vidal – Lincoln
James Joyce – Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Anthony Trollope – The Way We Live Now

Inspired by this thread, I wrote about my favorite novel.

Love Agua Viva, read a few books by Lispector this year, she's great.

it was hard to pick one so i picked the first i read

member of the wedding - carson mccullers
therese raquin - zola
foundation trilogy - asimov
the europeans - henry james
a summer bird-cage - margaret drabble
claudine at school - colette
madame bovary - flaubert
remains of the day - kazuo ishiguro
gatsby - fitzgerald
pale fire - nabokov
sputnik sweetheart - murakami
no longer human - osamu dazai
miss lonelyhearts/day of the locust - west
bonjour tristesse - francoise sagan
the wind in the willows - kenneth grahame

xpost Thanks, Alfred! I see that my library also has Nobody's Family Is Going To Change---how's that one?

I haven't read it.

This was going to be a top 10, but I couldn't cut any more. At the moment:

The Brothers Karamazov
The Savage Detectives
The Plague
Pride and Prejudice
Infinite Jest
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Mason & Dixon
Chronic City
A Wild Sheep Chase
Cat's Eye
Jitterbug Perfume
Brighton Rock

Love Agua Viva, read a few books by Lispector this year, she's great.

it was hard to pick one so i picked the first i read

― insufficiently familiar with xgau's work to comment intelligently (BradNelson), Sunday, 1 March 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I actually think she has never written any better than this - also its hard to reconcile as a novel.

Off the top of my head...

Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Alasdair Gray - Lanark
Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay
David Foster Wallace - The Pale King
Wilkie Collins - The Woman in White
Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five
Margaret Atwood - Oryx & Crake
Alasdair Gray - 1982 Janine
R.L. Stevenson - Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

er.... That's only nine... uh... I must have read more than 9 novels...

I want to say that Ulysses is my favourite, but I've only read it once and I don't feel that I know it well. "Favourite" seems to me to suggest that you've made the book your own, which I definitely can't say for Ulysses. But it looms in my mind as the most interesting novel I've read.

don't think i've ever answered this before

1. Robertson Davies - Deptford Trilogy
2. Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls
3. Isaac Asimov - Foundation Trilogy
4. Philip Roth - American Pastoral
5. Thomas Pynchon - V.

i kinda miss reading novels. it has been a while.

I didn't know where to place these favorites from the 19th century, so here will do.

wonder if my list would be really basic lol

dhalgren
the rings of saturn
the magic mountain
the dispossessed
moby-dick
o pioneers!
água viva
stoner
madame bovary
the last samurai

reread The Magic Mountain last April.

oh i posted a list five years ago! but i have read several of my favorite books of all time since then thank goodness

Moby Dick and The Last Samurai would be on my list, and I really liked The Dispossessed (and Zazen! I missed that she published another novel last year!). I have the feeling I wouldn’t be into Stoner but I should probably give it a shot sometime.

I'm done with the idea of favorite novels, unless the concept is stretched so thin as to encompass many hundreds of novels I have derived a large measure of enjoyment from. Making a shorter list is just an exercise in forgetfulness and self-deception.

Kim - Kipling
The Plague - Camus
The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula Le Guin
The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov
The Last Chronicle of Barset - Anthony Trollope
Three Novels - Karel Capek
The Last Samurai - Helen DeWitt
A Scanner Darkly - Philip K. Dick
Wives and Daughters - Elizabeth Gaskell
Riddley Walker - Russell Hoban
Villette - Charlotte Bronte
The Lantern Bearers - Rosemary Sutcliff

Addendum for favorite mystery novels:

Gaudy Night - Dorothy Sayers
The Fire Engine That Disappeared - Sjowall and Wahloo
Brat Farrar - Josephine Tey

i read moby dick a few years ago and as soon as i got into it was like 'oh obviously this is one of the greatest things ever made'

yeah i’m more or less with aimless, except for moby-dick

Villette, and then others

Been a long time since I read Moby Dick. But have been making my way through the Moby Dick Energy podcast which is fun.

Really not sure I could do a top 5 of books or cds that was accurate beyond the moment.
I also don't seem to have been reading fiction much recently or at least not in that form. Seem to have been reading non whenever I have actually got around to reading anything.

i read Hunger a few years ago and was horrified/compelled by it. great book