What are your all-time favorite novels??

yeah finally got around to reading it a couple of years ago myself and have picked up a couple since.
I think it had turned up in something like 3 or 4 decades ago, is it mentioned in the Outsider by Colin Wilson or Biba Kopf's Hardcore essay from the NME in 1984? possibly both.
So it had been something i had wanted to read for ages.

The Man Who Loved Children - Christina Stead
Coming Through Slaughter - Michael Ondaatje
Salem's Lot - Stephen King
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Another Country - James Baldwin
Disgrace - J.M. Coetzee
Austerlitz - W.G. Sebald
A View of the Harbour - Elizabeth Taylor
Invitation to the Waltz - Rosamund Lehmann
A Month in the Country - J.L. Carr

I can already see gaps. Impossible.

Just because I've recently entered all my reading from 2008 on (and what I can remember before that) into goodreads:

Middlemarch - George Eliot
Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
Tehanu - Ursula Le Guin
Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
The Unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro
Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens
Outline - Rachel Cusk
Wittgenstein's Mistress - David Markson
The American - Henry James

It's kinda sad that I can't imagine rereading enough to have an all-time faves list. Fave authors, sure.

Jane Eyre
Our Mutual Friend
The Catcher in the Rye
Crime and Punishment
The Brother's Karamazov
Ulysses
Infinite Jest
The Grapes of Wrath
Nineteen Eighty-Four
The Lord of the Rings

Mason & Dixon - Thomas Pynchon
2666 - Roberto Bolaño
Absolom, Absolom - William Faulkner
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Neuromancer - William Gibson (lol)

I could probably sub As I Lay Dying for Absolom Absolom nearly any day; likewise The Savage Detectives for 2666 on certain days. Infinite Jest and The Brothers Karamazov would have been on the list at one point, but I have last my connection to those novels over the years.

last = lost

Always on my mind:

The Dream of the Red Chamber (or A Dream of Red Mansions or The Story of the Stone)
Ulysses
I Claudius/Claudius the God
Invisible Man
Middlemarch
A Tale of a Tub
Gulliver's Travels
Nadja

The Man Who Loved Children - Christina Stead
A View of the Harbour - Elizabeth Taylor

Come sit beside me.

Always on my mind:

good standard

xps to NV I was thinking of reading Story of the Stone! Should I?

your writing has kind of a Swift-y vibe, NV

Can I recommend a great little novel? Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar is a perfect one...it rewards an immediate second read and is v short so that’s doable.

gyac - I'd say yes, definitely. nb it's looong and I read the modern Penguin translation, the older public domain translations I've seen add layers of florid English to the difficulty. It's a really moving family epic of loss and transience with extra Buddhism and magic sprinkled into the mix, and it's a really absorbing world.

horseshoe aw shucks thank you I admit I shamelessly steal Swift's rhetorical moves all the time, he still makes me laugh and he invented that kind of dry sometimes meanness that I fall well short of but can't help aping

Also I'm bookmarking Ghachar Ghochar

Also I love the horrified recognition in Swift's long books or "novels" when he realises he's ultimately satirising himself

In Search of Lost Time
The Brothers Karamazov
Middlemarch
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings
Jeeves novels
Pride & Prejudice
The Book of the New Sun
Le Grand Meaulnes
Washington Square
Moby-Dick

I said Ulysses earlier itt, but feel like I was fooling myself in retrospect. I need to give it a lot more time at least.

Hooray!

Yes I always think of myself of disliking 18th century lit, but I forget Swift; he is great!

off the top of my head

catch-22
lord of the rings
cat's cradle
coming through slaughter
master & margarita
ragtime
siddhartha

A Dance to the Music of Time - Powell
Austerlitz - Sebald
Hangover Square - Hamilton
The Trial - Kafka
Moby-Dick - Melville
Middlemarch - Eliot
Hav - Morris
The Hound of the Baskervilles - Conan-Doyle
Five Red Herrings - Sayers
Jude the Obscure - Hardy
The Good Soldier Švejk - Hašek

Books I keep coming back to:

Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Wharton, The House of Mirth
Chandler, The Long Goodbye
John Dos Passos, U.S.A. trilogy
Delany, Dhalgren
Gibson, Blue Ant trilogy (Pattern Recognition/Spook Country/Zero History)
Hammett, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse

I love a lot of 18th century prose: Henry Fielding, Lawrence Sterne, Gibbon. Jane Austen feels closer to 18th than 19th for me, English in that era feels looser and more fluid and just more fun tbh

an easy squeezy threesy:

Kolyma Tales by Shalamov

Moby Dick

Cat's Cradle

i am trying to think but i forget a lot of books that i read. i was going to read war and peace this summer because i liked anna karenina.

― harbl, Tuesday, June 23, 2009 9:16 PM (eleven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

two guesses :(

Austen is what happens when the 18th century FIGURES ITSELF OUT imo. I get why people like Fielding and Sterne, but they’re not for me.

Give me a Victorian doorstop any day. I need to read Our Mutual Friend.

I love Our Mutual Friend but hate the ending, which is what kept it off my list.

Oscar and Lucinda
Midnight’s Children
Glamorama
Vanity Fair
Kindred

and my forever favourite

Lolita

i do love a good Dickens too but i think of him as having his 18th century roots showing, especially early on, especially Fielding

19th century stuff that could've should've made my list would include

Bleak House
Wuthering Heights
Mary Barton maybe?
À rebours

love Glamorama and yeah Lolita of course

surprised The Trial seems the universal Kafka pick, I've always rated The Castle higher (however unfinished)

anyway this is impossible...Moby Dick and The Quixote are my two "favorite" books but almost seems like they shouldn't count, they're looming up there like a couple of stone tablets

ten (almost) pre-war:

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
J.K. Huysmans, À rebours
F.R. Wolf, Hadrian VII
Franz Kafka, The Castle
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Henry Green, Party Going
Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds
Willa Cather, My Antonia
Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke
Albert Camus, The Stranger

xps to NV we need to talk Glamorama sometime, maybe tomorrow?

NV <3 Against Nature is sublime, I don't know how many times I've read that book or just picked it up and read thirty pp in the middle

xp yeah!

not xp also yeah! i think about monochrome feasts a lot

erm that's Rolfe (Baron Corvo), above

ten post-war

Max Frisch, I'm Not Stiller
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
Nabokov, Lolita
Frederick Exley, A Fan's Notes
Thomas Bernhard, The Lime Works
Robert Coover, Universal Baseball Association...
Harry Mathews, Sinking of the Odradek Stadium
Marguerite Dumas, The Lover
Peter Handke, Goalie's Anxiety at The Penalty Kick
Don Delillo, The Names

A Fan's Notes is a good pick, tho i've only read it once partly because it touches too close to home and i'm thinking i might've lost my copy

Masters of Atlantis - Charles Portis
Warlock - Oakley Hall
Cogan's Trade - George V. Higgins
Jesus' Son; Train Dreams - Denis Johnson
Fat City - Leonard Gardner
Housekeeping; Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
The Third Policeman - Flann O'Brien
As I Lay Dying - Faulkner
Moby-Dick - Melville
The Long Goodbye - Chandler

yeah xp that can be dicey if you aren't in a good place

Exley evokes that state of mind and the bar-life state of mind so well

oh i found it phew

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)