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

[ultralinear]

No particular books, but on the basis of having read everything of theirs that I could find (and still re-read periodically):

J.G. Ballard
William Burroughs
Philip K. Dick
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Haruki Murakami
P.G. Wodehouse

[Spotted Horses]

De Lillo, White Noise
Boyle, Water Music
Wodehouse, Leave It to Psmith (How do you pick just one?)
Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance
Melville, Moby-Dick
Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

I read one book by Di Lillo, Underworld. I actually remember it, which is a plus, but I seem to recall not being entirely satisfied having finished it. It started with a brilliant vignette of Jackie Gleason in the VIP box at the baseball game which is the starting point of the plot.

[Karl Henning]

I read one book by Di Lillo, Underworld. I actually remember it, which is a plus, but I seem to recall not being entirely satisfied having finished it. It started with a brilliant vignette of Jackie Gleason in the VIP box at the baseball game which is the starting point of the plot.

I have something of a sentimental fondness for White Noise, so I'm not sure how it might break for you. I haven't really tried any of his others.

[Karl Henning]

Another Boyle title I should revisit is World's End.

[Iota]

De Lillo, White Noise
Boyle, Water Music
Wodehouse, Leave It to Psmith (How do you pick just one?)
Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance
Melville, Moby-Dick
Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

I sympathise with your Wodehouse and Dickens conundrum. And I loved Water Music when I read it years ago, I should either reread it or try one of his others.

[hopefullytrusting]

I sympathise with your Wodehouse and Dickens conundrum. And I loved Water Music when I read it years ago, I should either reread it or try one of his others.

I tried to read Wodehouse per @Karl Henning recommendation a long time ago (not my cup of tea, same with Dickens, although I did find why many could find them delightful).

[T. D.]

Not really a static set, as tastes change and I can only reread favorites so many times.

Nikolai Gogol (Dead Souls)
Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire)
P G Wodehouse (I think I've read everything...no longer revisit him often, but he's got to rank)
Melville (based mainly on Moby Dick)

Then there's a revolving cast of more obscure faves, including some guilty pleasures and thriller authors:

Richard Condon (Manchurian Candidate and others)
Flann O'Brien (The Third Policeman and others)
Ross Thomas (The Fools in Town are On Our Side and others)
T C Boyle (haven't kept up with everything and generally prefer his short stories, but he's very good)
Robert Penn Warren (All the King's Men, which completely blew me away on first reading, though less so on rereading)
Michael Chabon (greatly enjoyed Wonder Boys and The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, though I've found both earlier and later work somewhat disappointing and don't keep up with his output)
Eric Ambler (A Coffin for Dimitrios and for his pioneering spy fiction)
Graham Greene (the king of expat fiction, The Quiet American and many others)
Bill James, Welsh pseudonymous author (for the Harpur and Iles series)
Lawrence Block (maybe lowbrow, but I loved much of his Matt Scudder series)
Michael Connelly (maybe lowbrow, but many of his Bosch and Mickey Haller books are quite good)
Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita, though it shows up on many "overrated" lists)

In senior years I'm reading much more nonfiction.

Don DeLillo is an author I ought to like, based on plot synopses and blurbs, but I never dug anything I read.

[JBS]

Dream of the Red Chamber aka Story of the Stone

Austen: Persuasion*

Williams: All Hallows Eve

Graves: I Claudius

Sayers: Busman's Honeymoon

Twain: Life on the Mississipi

*if I was honest, this list would consist solely of Jane Austen novels

[Karl Henning]

Dream of the Red Chamber aka Story of the Stone

Austen: Persuasion*

Williams: All Hallows Eve

Graves: I Claudius

Sayers: Busman's Honeymoon

Twain: Life on the Mississipi

*if I was honest, this list would consist solely of Jane Austen novels

I didn't like omitting Twain. Big fan of Life on the Mississippi. 

[Karl Henning]

It should mildly sting, too, that I'm late to add Evelyn Waugh.

[Peter Power Pop]

favourite authors (in order):

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Aldous Huxley
Anthony Burgess
Richard Brautigan
Thomas Berger

[Karl Henning]

favourite authors (in order):

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Aldous Huxley
Anthony Burgess
Richard Brautigan
Thomas Berger

Love Brautigan

[Christo]

From the English-speaking world, four continents:

• Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940, UK)
• George Orwell, 1984 (1949, UK)
• Patrick White, Voss (1957, Australia)
• Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away (1960, USA)
• John Williams, Stoner (1965, USA)
• John Maxwell Coetzee, Foe (1987, South-Africa)
• William Golding, The Double Tongue (1995, posthumously, UK)
• Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004, USA)
• Philip Roth, Nemesis (2010, USA)

[Elgarian Redux]

...
Williams: All Hallows Eve
...

Fascinating, Jeffrey. You're the first person I've ever encountered who reads Charles Williams (apart from myself, I mean). I'm not sure I could choose a favourite: The Place of the Lion has had a lot of rereads, as has The Greater Trumps, but that's just a mood-based choice. There's nothing else quite like them, is there?

Anyway, now I've found myself in this thread (how did I miss it, back in 2008?), I'll see if I can offer a shot at my six favourite works of fiction:

P.G Wodehouse: Enter Psmith (or the larger book, Mike, from which it's derived)
Colin Wilson: The Philosopher's Stone
William Morris: The Well at the World's End
Erin Morgenstern: The Night Circus
Audrey Niffenegger: Her Fearful Symmetry
C.P Snow: The Search

Force me to choose just two of those, and it would be The Night Circus and The Well at the World's End.
Force me to choose just one, and I'd burst into tears.

Ask me for any 'bubbling unders', and I might choose Georgette Heyer: The Corinthian, mainly because when she has Sir Richard Wyndham go into a wayside inn and eat 'a dish of ham and eggs', she does it with such skill that she makes me want to do precisely likewise.

[Elgarian Redux]

...
Wodehouse, Leave It to Psmith (How do you pick just one?)
...

Interesting question.
Estimated number of my re-readings of Psmith books:

Psmith in the City: 5
Psmith, Journalist: 4
Leave it to Psmith: 3
Enter Psmith: 30? 50? I started reading it at the age of 11 or 12, and never stopped. Blessings upon my Uncle Les, who gave me his copy, and I read it (literally) to bits, eventually having to buy a new (old) one.*

* Uncle Les had the whole of Rimsky's Scheherazade on 78s. That seriously impressed this young lad, I can tell you.

[Christo]

Only in normal languages, partly read in (Dutch/German/whatever) translation (not everything has been translated into English, as indicated). A few more titles than allowed, of course (with friends, I often read Nobel laureates, relatively many of which are on this list):
1321 Dante Alighieri, La ("divina") commedia (Florence)
1806/1831 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I & II (Saxe-Weimar)
1866 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (Russia)
1886 Lev Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Russia)
1901 Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (Germany)
1924/1938 Willem Elsschot, Lijmen/Het been ("Convincing/The leg", Belgium)
1929 Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz (German exile)
1932 Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March (Austrian exile)
1934 Sándor Márai, Egy polgár vallomásai ("Confessions of a Citizen", Hungary)
1942 Stephan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (Austrian exile)
1944 Jan Karski, Courier from Poland: The Story of a Secret State (Poland)
1951 Gustaw Herling Grudziński, A World Apart: Imprisonment in a Soviet Labor Camp During World War II, (Poland)
1951 Margerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian (France)
1958/1963, Primo Levi, If This Is a Man/The Truce (Italian deportee)
1959 Czesław Miłosz, Rodzinna Europa ("Homeland", Poland)
1960 Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate (USSR)
1961 Naguib Mahfouz, The Thief and the Dogs (Egypt)
1966 Shusako Endo, Silence (Japan)
1969 Augusta Roa Bastos, Moriencia ("Slaughter", Paraguay)
1970 Anatoly Kuznetsov, Babi Yar (Ukraine)
1971 Ismail Kadare, Chronicle in Stone (Albania)
1979 Gregor von Rezzori, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (Bukovina-German)
1981 Saulius Kondratas, Žalčio žvilgsnis "The Gaze of the Snake", Lithuania)
1985 Mario Vargas Llosa, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (Peru)
1991 José Saramango, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (Portugal)
1995 Jaan Kross, Mesmeri ring ("Messmer's Circle", Estonia)
2001 Per Olov Enquist, Lewis resa ("The Journey of Lewi Pethrus", Sweden)
2002 Amoz Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness (Israël)
2004 Orhan Pamuk, Snow (Turkey)
2007 Sofi Oksanen, Puhdistus ("Purge", Finland/Estonia)
2010 Laurent Binet, HHhH (France)
2013 Stephan Hertmans, War and Turpentine (Belgium)
2014 Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob (Poland)
2015 Susan Abulhawa, The Blue Between Sky and Water (Palestine)
2019 David Grossman, More Than I Love My Life (Israël)
2019-21 Jon Fosse, The Other Name: Septology I-II, I Is Another: Septology III-V, A New Name: Septology VI-VII (Norway)
2022 Eva Manasse, Dunkelblum schweigt ("Dunkelblum remains silent", Austria)

[Florestan]

1932 Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March (Austrian exile)

1942 Stephan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (Austrian exile)

1960 Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate (USSR)

1966 Shusako Endo, Silence (Japan)

1979 Gregor von Rezzori, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (Bukovina-German)

2004 Orhan Pamuk, Snow (Turkey)

Excellent choices.

Have you read Roth's "The Tomb of the Emperor" (sequel to "Radetzky-Marsch") and Rezzori's "The Snow of Yesteryear" and "Tales of Maghrebinia"?

"Snow" is the only Pamuk novel that I enjoyed, a page-turner actually. All his other novels I found prolix, interminable and dull.

[Christo]

Excellent choices.

Have you read Roth's "The Tomb of the Emperor" (sequel to "Radetzky-Marsch") and Rezzori's "The Snow of Yesteryear" and "Tales of Maghrebinia"?

"Snow" is the only Pamuk novel that I enjoyed, a page-turner actually. All his other novels I found prolix, interminable and dull.

Answer, no, I didn't ("yet", as Jeffrey would say; but I'm just 63 and working). And: fully agreed, read a handful of heavy-loaden novels by Pamuk while visiting Turkey (many times), but enjoyed only Kar (Snow) and his personal book on Istanbul. But, but ... do the two of us really share some tastes?? E.g. Chopin's "Second" concerto in the original setting for sextet I heard last Saturday? (Superbly performed by Anna Fedorova and friends?) Could we ever bridge the gap between you, as a European, and me (Low Saxon)?? 

[Jo498]

This is difficult because I don't really trust myself here. I read most of the "great books" that I read between ca. 16 and 30, so this was 20-30 years ago or more and I honestly don't know if I'd finish "War and Peace" if I re-read it or if I'd find great favorites (that I read at least twice) like Hugo's Les Miserables or several of Dostoevsky's too sentimental and melodramatic.

Also my memory starts to fail as many books were borrowed. E.g. I am pretty sure I read Roth's "Kapuzinergruft" but not sure if I read the more famous "Radetzykmarsch" was well. Neither would be on the shortlist, though, Austrohungarian melancholy is not really my thing, my favorite author from that time & region is probably the middlebrow Leo Perutz.

[Florestan]

read most of the "great books" that I read between ca. 16 and 30, so this was 20-30 years ago or more and I honestly don't know if I'd finish "War and Peace" if I re-read it

I'm currently re-reading it after 30 years and I enjoy it more now than then. One aspect that back then escaped my attention is Tolstoy's humor. And of course, I am 30-years older, ie more experienced and (presumably) wiser.