What are your favourite books of all time?
Despite my love for good writing it's a sad truth that I have read a pitifully small amount in my life to date. Having said that I have made sure to touch on a few of the classics and have amassed a short list of beloved books over the years. Here's my list, what's yours?
100 Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez
-This book blew my mind and left be stunned for days. I fear going back to reread lest it should let my memory of it down.
Under the Volcano
Malcolm Lowry
-Lowry's devastating account of the decent of a man into alcoholic oblivion. Such stunning writing! My father urged me to read this and now it's one of my favs.
Moby Dick
Herman Melville
-What can I say that hasn't been said about this already? That chapter, "The whiteness of the whale" !!
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
-I find some of the rest of Steinbeck to be too sentimental but how can you not fall in love with this masterpiece?
The Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
-My grade 12 English teacher actually gave this to me and another student as a project because he could see I was reading beyond my grade level. I need to get back to it as I don't remember a lot of it. But I remember enough to secure it's place here.
Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides
-I've yet to read anyone that manages to write with such care and love for their own characters. Such a romantic and heart breaking read!
Faces in the Water
Janet Frame
-A university English prof got me hooked on Janet Frame. A more unique stylistic writer you will not find. Such creativity with words and phrases I have yet to see equaled (though like I said I've read pitifully little). This book recounts the authors years of mistaken institutionalization in the New Zealand of the 60s.
As you can see I have a love for great style. Story and even characters and plot are less important to me than a style that blows me away.
Can anyone recommend any authors for me based on the above?
= new reply since forum marked as read
I was thinking about her while reading your list, and when I got to your sentence about style, it made even more sense to suggest her writing. There's something about the way she writes that really makes the reader feel the story/setting/characters, imo.
while I appreciate good writing and all, and I've read some Classics, still, some of my all-time favorite books are not what anyone would exactly call "highbrow"...
Green Darkness by Anya Seton
Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor
Hawaii, Centennial, and Chesapeake, all by James Michener
The Education of Little Tree by Forrest Carter (a pseudonym)
There are probably others, but these are the ones I've read over and over and over throughout the years.
My mother had Green Darkness and Forever Amber and most of James Michener's books.
She loved big historical novels.
small handful of Michener's books I haven't read.
My favorites are the larger historical novels...lots of characters, natural history, etc.
Like with "Hawaii", when he starts out telling the story of how the Hawaiian islands were formed.
And again, in "Centennial", how the land out west was formed, and the creatures that inhabited it, starting with the dinosaurs.
I never get tired of the stories, even though I've read them dozens of times.
A really magnificent achievement that will scare the fertilizer out of you not with gore but with its deep look into pure evil and madness. Randall Flagg . . . 
Up there with Steinbeck, Hemingway, Stephen King (yes, I consider him one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Come on, he's written HOW many books? All of them equally readable. Especially the non-fiction stuff.)
It's where my handle comes from:
Jason Taverner, singer and TV show host - genetically engineered to the highest level - but a self obsessed narcicist. This is after the US is under fascist martial law, and everyone has hologram IDs. If you are caught without an ID, you go to jail. Universities have been banned, and there was a government sterilization program earlier that almost wiped out all African Americans in the US.
Its beautiful in its complexity, characters, and predicting the reality TV and celebrity culture of the day.
It's also is Kafkaesque in how the story begins with Jason Taverner waking up one morning to find that he doesn't exist anymore. As in, no ID, no show - and in a police state that's not a good thing.
The book is beautiful in how the story centers around Jason Taverner first, then the Policeman's story. You barely notice this when it happens.
Phillip K Dick wrote some great books, but by far this is my favorite.
I love those books and I'm not normally a fantasy fan--I got into them because I love mysteries and they're like a mashup of Sam Spade and Harry Potter. 
