The 11 greatest novels I've ever read* (or those I find good enough to re-read annually)

[a_theistmonk]

* - up until March 2013, some twenty-two years' worth of reading! In no particular order:

1. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley;
2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald;
3. The Secret History by Donna Tartt;
4. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster;
5. Atonement by Ian McEwan**;

Comments

[perfect_munky]

I have to say that I have only read Frankenstein from that list.

I guess I will throw down my list...
I'm assuming this is only fiction, so I will omit any non-fiction.

1. Brothers Karamazov ~ Dostoevsky

2. The Castle ~ Kafka

3. War and Peace ~ Tolstoy

4. Viy (short story) ~ Gogol

5. The Interrogation ~ J M G Le Clézio

6. All Quiet on the Western Front ~ Erich Maria Remarque

7. One Hundred Years of Solitude ~ Gabriel García Márquez

8. Lolita ~ Nabokov

List

[a_theistmonk]

We really should try hard to read one book from each other's list in the next 12 months. I don't know what's stopped me from progressing with The Interrogation though, so I shall redouble my efforts. I think I might have been intending to leave it as a holiday read or something.

I've also started, then put down, Kafka's The Trial and Nabokov's Lolita at least twice each. It's sometimes like a boulder rolling along a flat and down a slope: I have to get past a "critical mass" in terms of pages or chapters to get hooked with books.