Your All-time 5 Favorite Literary Works

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Mine:

Stendhal, Red and Black
Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund
Thomas Mann, Tonio Kroger
Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Dostoevsky, Idiot

Below top 5: Sons and Lovers (Lawrence), My Life (Casanova), Confessions of a Mask (Mishima), Seagull (Chekhov), Rich Boy and other short stories (Fitzgerald) etc.

[vandermolen]

Mine:

Stendhal, Red and Black
Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund
Thomas Mann, Tonio Kroger
Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Dostoevsky, Idiot

Below top 5: Sons and Lovers (Lawrence), My Life (Casanova), Confessions of a Mask (Mishima), Seagull (Chekhov), Rich Boy and other short stories (Fitzgerald) etc.

I would choose Crime and Punishment and Herman Hesse +
Dickens: David Copperfield
Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities
Saint-Exupery: Le Petit Prince

[Mandryka]

The Iliad
Gargantua and Pantagruel
Hamlet
Ulysses
A Dance to the Music of Time

[San Antone]

The Hamlet, Faulkner
Light in August, Faulkner
Blood Meridian, McCarthy
Suttree, McCarthy
The Civil War, Foote (3-vol. narrative history)

[Jo498]

I don't reread books so often, which includes Great books. And even for some I've read two or three times (like all I am going to name), it's sometimes been a long time ago, so my appreciation might have changed considerably in the 20 years since I last read them.

Dante Alighieri: The divine comedy (I hope I'll eventually read Italian well enough to have another go with a bilingual edition)
Th. Mann: The magic mountain/Der Zauberberg (but see above, I read it once with 19 and once in my late 20s and totally loved it the second time, but it's been more than 20 years since then)
Tolstoi: The death of Ivan Ilich (partly because I read his "big books" only once and too long ago and I wanted to include a shorter prose piece)
Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment (I loved most of them in my 20s and read several at least twice, but it's a long time ago and C&P seems the least sprawling
Hugo: Les miserables (mainly because this was the first really "Great book" I read at 12, I've read it once again but this is was also long ago...)

next bunch:
Dostoevsky: Idiot, Brothers Karamazov, Demons
Hugo: Notre Dame de Paris
Bulgakov: Master and Margarita
Dickens: Great Expectations
Homer: Odyssee
Potocki: The manuscript found in Saragossa
Bronte: Wuthering Heights
Döblin: Berllin Alexanderplatz
Stevenson: Treasure Island (the first almost Great book I read with 8 or 9)

[DavidW]

Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
War and Peace
Jude the Obscure
Lonesome Dove

[San Antone]

Lonesome Dove

Could've easily made my list.  Great read.

[Karl Henning]

With the understanding that I am skipping titles I should normally have listed, which have already been mentioned:

Melville, Moby-Dick
Jn Barth, The Sot-weed Factor
Jan Potocki, The MS. Found at Saragossa
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
Chas Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

[LKB]

Leaves of Grass
Lonesome Dove
The Iliad
Moby Dick
Cannery Row

[Florestan]

Cervantes - Don Quijote
Alessandro Manzoni - The Betrothed
Victor Hugo - The Toilers of the Sea
Joseph Conrad - Lord Jim
Selma Lagerlöf - The Story of Gösta Berling
Henrik Pontoppidan - Lucky Per
Mikhail Bulgakov - The White Guard

[Roasted Swan]

the trouble with this thread is it makes me realise how poorly read I am........ sigh.............

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

I don't feel like I can play this game, but I can comment.

Suttree, McCarthy

This is on my list to read this summer. It looks quite formidable. The only McCarthy I've read is The Road, which didn't impress me that much.

Potocki: The manuscript found in Saragossa

Interesting that both you and Karl listed this. I started reading it years ago, but somehow lost the thread of it and never finished it. (Coincidentally, this was about the time I first read Ulysses. Maybe too much complexity in a short time?)

Von Rezzori: An Ermine in Czernopol

I didn't know he wrote novels. I've only read his autobiography, The Snows of Yesteryear.

Henry Fielding, Tom Jones

I reread it last year (first time in decades). It's undoubtedly a great book, but there are so many characters and the plot is so convoluted that it's easy to get lost while reading.

[San Antone]

I don't feel like I can play this game, but I can comment.

This [Suttree] is on my list to read this summer. It looks quite formidable. The only McCarthy I've read is The Road, which didn't impress me that much.

The Road is the only McCarthy book I have not read, since the premise does not interest me - and a sense is that it does not exhibit aspects of his style that appeal to me the most (descriptions of rural Southern people and life, dialog of same).  But Suttree, Blood Meridian, and The Border Trilogy, are among my favorite novels of all.  No Country for Old Men and Child of God are good, but not ones I like as much as the others.

[Brian]

Love love love this thread idea. But...I am going to cheat!!

FICTION
Alpha by title:

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, G.B. Edwards
The Door, Magda Szabó
Emma, Jane Austen
Middlemarch, Mary Ann Evans
Summer Lightning, P.G. Wodehouse

Sixth place: The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
I had a very hard time assessing the Russians. The first 600 pages of War & Peace could make the top five easily, but I need to reread it and acclimate myself to the second half of the book to give it a full assessment. I also thought quite a bit about Bulgakov, Platonov, "Eugene Onegin," and especially "Dead Souls." But Dead Souls, like War & Peace, is better in the first half, I think.

And because I have a particular interest in detective fiction, here's a top five all about crime and mystery:

In a Lonely Place, Dorothy B. Hughes
The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
The Man Who Died Twice, Richard Osman
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie
Original Sin, P.D. James

[Karl Henning]

Leaves of Grass
Lonesome Dove
The Iliad
Moby Dick
Cannery Row

Oh, I'm kicking myself for neglecting the Whitman!

[Brian]

Stendhal, Red and Black

I read this for the first time last year, and Charterhouse of Parma for the first time last month. Lots of good fun and good writing.

Suttree, McCarthy

This is high on my to-read list.

I didn't know he wrote novels. I've only read his autobiography, The Snows of Yesteryear.

Oh! Is this the reference/inside joke behind the Catch-22 line, "Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?"?

[Jo498]

[Potocki Saragossa]
Interesting that both you and Karl listed this. I started reading it years ago, but somehow lost the thread of it and never finished it. (Coincidentally, this was about the time I first read Ulysses. Maybe too much complexity in a short time?)

Getting lost in the nested stories and between dream/fantasy and reality seems part of the point. I think it's just brilliant fun. (Although it might be more, Potocki REALLY killed himself with a silver bullet because he thought he was turning into a werewolf!)
I got through Ulysses once in translation (and with a helpful "guide book"), never tried the Original and overall didn't like it enough to try again, although I certainly should eventually.

[Tom Jones]
I reread it last year (first time in decades). It's undoubtedly a great book, but there are so many characters and the plot is so convoluted that it's easy to get lost while reading.

This is one I started but didn't get very far. I recall that he has a description of a catfight between to girls in mock-homeric style but this is about as far as I got...
Of renaissance and early modern prose I only read the Decamerone and Simplicius Simplicissimus (the most famous German baroque novel from the 30 years war, it's grotesque and funny but also sprawling), I never tried Rabelais or Chaucer or Cervantes (although I want to read at least Don Quixote). Failing with Tom Jones I also didn't even try Sterne's Tristram Shandy or Defoe or Swift.
My largest gap in the 19th century is probably the French, except for Hugo and a few shorter pieces (Maupassant's Carmen and Bel ami and maybe another one); I never read any of the Balzac novels neither Stendhal nor Zola, I never finished Madame Bovary...

[Jo498]

Oh! Is this the reference/inside joke behind the Catch-22 line, "Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?"?

The "snows of last year" is at least as old as a 15th century poem by Francois Villon (used in the Three penny opera), maybe the phrase is even older in some Latin medieval (or earlier) poetry.

[ritter]

Let's see...

Cervantes, Don Quijote
Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Louis Aragon, Aurélien
Paul Claudel, Le Soulier de satin

[Jo498]

Summer Lightning, P.G. Wodehouse

There is an old Drone's Club rule that you cannot pick a non-Jeeves-book if you pick only one Wodehouse book!
(Don't remember this one well enough to say if it might a be an admissible choice of non-Jeeves books, but I never liked Galahad, I think my favorite Blandings was the very first one "Something fresh" although some key characters are still missing from the cast)