What are your six favourite fiction books (or authors) ?

[vandermolen]

Mine are:

St Exupery: The Little Prince
Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment
Herge: Tintin in Tibet
Willans and Searle: "Compleet Molesworth"
Dickens:David Copperfield
Monsarrat: The Cruel Sea

[Henk]

Just three come to mind:

Mulisch - Discovery of Heaven
Kafka - The Proces
Tolstoj - Anna Karanina

[Sergeant Rock]

Vladimir Nabokov Ada

Vladimir Nabokov Lolita

Milan Kundera The Unbearable Lightness of Being

J.P. Donleavy The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B

Thomas Pynchon Gravity's Rainbow

John Barth Giles Goat-Boy (or The Sot-Weed Factor...I can't decide)

Sarge

[matti]

Choosing the (or authors) option for now, and even this is far from carved in stone:

Chekhov
Gogol
Kundera
Camus
Chandler
Mankell

[drogulus]

    Pretentious but good anyway: Gravity's Rainbow

    Funny: Catch-22

    Serious: The Plague

    Classic: Anna Karenina

    Historical: Julian

   

[lukeottevanger]

This is very hard. As I do with questions of this type concerning music, I want to discard the classics straight off - they go without saying. My list of true, personal favourites is not inordinately long, but just a little too much for this list (why six, of all numbers?  ) - I could list about 15 books which I would want here. So

1.

Mulisch - Discovery of Heaven

You're not alone - put me down for that one too. A book that contains everything. Including quite a bit of Janacek.

Also:

2. The Baroque Trilogy  (Neal Stevenson - Pynchon fans take note) - the three enormous books count as one! Finds new ways to cope with the problem of 'the extra-long book' just as Bruckner did for 'the long symphony'. Extraordinary plotting, zesty, virtuosic writing, outrageously detailed, very funny, thought-provoking, intelligent and stirring

3. A children's book that I loved as a boy and am now loving reading to (with) my daughter- The Hounds of the Morrigan (Pat O'Shea). Not just a beautiful, magical reinvention of Irish Celtic myth, but a treasury of witty language, comic characterisations, delightful, playful fantasy and wild, windy countryside.

4. Possession (AS Byatt). Just superb understanding and recreation of literary history and style. Browning (on whom one of the two poets is evidently modelled) is one of my favourites, and Byatt's pastiches of his style are miraculous.

5. Either of Lempriere's Dictionary or The Pope's Rhinoceros (Lawrence Norfolk). The former is simply a brilliant book; the latter, more ambitious still, contains two purely descriptive chapters which stand a mile above anything else in the book - pure musical prose-poetry

6. House of Leaves (Mark Danielewski) Well, it's like nothing else in existence. Another all-encompassing, wildly inventive, intelligent, mystifying book, and a work of (visual) art in its own right.

Among others, books by Eco, Fowles, Ian Pears, Pamuk, Perec, Powys, Pasternak (hmmm, suspicious number of 'P's!), Hesse and Anthony Burgess (Earthly Powers) could easily be swapped for those above.

[BorisG]

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) - Lewis Carroll
Darkness at Noon (1940) - Arthur Koestler
Wise Blood (1952) - Flannery O'Connor
Lolita (1955) - Vladimir Nabokov
Pale Fire (1962) - Vladimir Nabokov
Gravity's Rainbow (1973) - Thomas Pynchon

[MN Dave]

Some authors who inspire, or have inspired, me:

Robert E. Howard

Gene Wolfe

Stephen King

Kurt Vonnegut

Larry McMurtry

Thomas Ligotti

[Brian]

Wow, lots of Pynchon love here. 

5. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. I dated a girl like the Esther of the book's first half (ie before she tries to kill herself), so the novel has even more resonance for me than for most people.

4. General author: Mark Twain. Hard not to love!

3. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. Powerful stuff. Not necessarily really in my top 5; chosen to represent the wide category of novels from the past 25 years which I have come to love; a category which includes Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Edward P Jones' The Known World and Michael Chabon's Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

2. General author: Jean Shepherd. I only hope that someday I will be able to write as well as Jean Shepherd, as beautifully and simply. Mark Twain's legacy among 20th century authors was divided in two, in my humble and probably ridiculous opinion; his social commentary and anger went to Kurt Vonnegut, and his gentle country humor went to Shepherd.

1. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. In England this is marketed as a mature teen book, but this is probably my all-time favorite novel; I actually start to miss its presence if I loan it to someone, so when friends express interest in reading it, I buy them their own copies. It's that kind of book.

[SonicMan46]

Well, I don't read much fiction anymore (too busy reading numerous non-fiction books, plus have to keep up w/ my medical reading as a radiology professor - our residents are outstanding, so no BS them!  ).

But in my early years (i.e. high school & college), I did a lot of fictional reading; just to list a few favorite authors based on reading 'multiple' books by them are listed below; although I read dozens of other novelists at the time, the number of their books were limited to one or a few:

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) - A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, and others.

Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) - Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, & Dodsworth.

John Steinbeck (1902-1968) - The Red Pony, Of Mice & Men, Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, & Travels w/ Charley.

[ChamberNut]

The Exorcist - William Peter Blatty

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

2001:  A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke

Jaws - Peter Benchley

The Elementals - Michael McDowell

The Island of Dr. Moreau - H.G. Wells

[gomro]

The Stars My Destination - Alfred Bester
The City and the Stars - Arthur C. Clarke
The Reproductive System (aka Mechasm) - John T. Sladek
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward - H.P. Lovecraft
Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury

[Norbeone]

My list isn't based on a very highly informed experience of reading. Only recently have I really started to read a lot. Here is a very 'immediate' list:

Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment
Dostoevsky: The Idiot
Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Eco: The Name of the Rose
Eco: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four

[Brian]

Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury

Haven't read that, but what a great title for a book.

[Haffner]

Dostoevsky: The Idiot
Stephen King: The Stand
Ernest Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea
Dickens: David Copperfield
Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five
Norman Mailer: The Naked and The Dead

[Novi]

Haven't read that, but what a great title for a book.

I haven't read the Bradbury book, but I think that's a quotation from Macbeth

Authors I like:

Thomas Pynchon (yep, another fan )
Henry James
J. M. Coetzee - beautifully stark prose to counteract James's prolixity
Graham Greene - I used to like him a lot, but haven't read one in almost ten years
Roald Dahl - a nostalgic vote purely for Fantastic Mr Fox. Loved loved loved this one when I was a kid.

[orbital]

Musil - The Man Without Qualities
Camus - The Stranger
Hesse - Steppenwolf
Mann - The Magic Mountain
Doblin - Berlin Alexanderplatz
ando
Eco - Foucault's Pendulum (the ultimate un-put-downable book IMO )

[Kullervo]

Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain
Honoré de Balzac - Cousin Bette
André Gide - The Immoralist
Hermann Hesse - Narcissus and Goldmund
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - The Sorrows of Young Werther
Nikolay Gogol - The Nose, The Overcoat

[Kullervo]

Vladimir Nabokov Ada

Buying this the next trip to the bookstore. Thanks.

[Bogey]

To Kill A Mockingbird-Harper Lee

LOTR- J. R. R. Tolkien

Sherlock Holmes(Complete)-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with illustrations by Sidney Paget

All Creatures Great and Small-James Herriot

Dracula-Bram Stoker

Nicholas Nickleby-Charles Dickens

and a fairly recent contender to my favorites' list, but still needs to pass the test of time:
The Picture of Dorian Gray-Oscar Wilde