The List

[Sammy]

so does anyone want to start making a list of what the best books are?

i'll start with a truncated version of must-reads:

Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Orientalism by Edward Said
Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

...and any short story collection by Borges

[Cyrus]

I'm on your side for Gorges's. And I'd like to add this list:
Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut)
The Death of Artemio Cruz (Fuentes)
Adieu, Gary Cooper (Gary)
From Among the Dead and Le roman policier (Boileau-Narcejac)
Greek Passion and Report to Greco (Kazantzakis)
Las armas secretas (Cortázar)
Green Pope (Asturias)
The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger)
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Calvino)
The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner)
Mysteries (Hamsun)
The Magic Mountain (Mann)
The Autumn of the Patriarch (Marquez)
I Am the Cheese (Cormier)
The Gambler and The idiot(Dostoyevsky)
The Feast of the Goat (Llosa)
and all Poe and Chekhov's short stories and Castaneda's

[Anna]

My best books include:

Luthiel's Song
Harry Potter
The Neverending Story
Lord of the Rings
Name of the Wind

[Naomi]

so many, how can you even start? Though Cyrus you made a great start and named some of my favs.

Dostoyevski's 'Brother's Karamazov'
Nabokov 'Lolita'
Dickens 'Bleak House'
Kunderas 'Unbearable lightness of being'
Eco 'Foucault's pendulum'
Austen 'Northanger Abbey'
Bronte 'The tenant of wildfeld hall'
Janet Frame 'Owls do cry'
Wilke Collins 'Woman in white'
James 'A portrait of a lady'
Waugh 'Brideshead revisited'
Byatt 'Possession'
Turgenev 'A month in the country'
Bulgakov 'Master and Margaretta'
Andrei Bitov 'Pushkin House'

a very biased and subjective list I must admit

[[deleted user]]

Hmmm, a lot of mine have been picked but I'll add...

Blindness - Jose Saramago
Maus Vol I&II - Art Spiegelman
Candide - Voltaire

and really just about anything by Steinbeck.

[Sandra]

This is so hard!

Ulysses
White Noise
Beloved
Cathedral
Gilead
Studs Turkel's Working
Martin Buber's I and Thou
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Ten Little Indians
Paradise Lost
Huck Finn
The Lovely Bones

[Jim]

DON QUIXOTE--
RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH--
THE DISTANT MIRROR--
THE ROAD --
CANDIDE--
IF ON A WINTERS NIGHT A TRAVELER--
CATCH 22--
THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT