Hmmm..so many to mention...lets try a brief intro to my tastes book wise:
1. Moby Dick- Herman Melville
2. The Divine Comedy- Dante
3. The Drowned World- J.G.Ballard

and as for authors, (this is impossible):
1. Robert Louis Stevenson
2. Jorge Luis Borges
3. Shakespeare
I don't have time to write a truly exhaustive list. I was particularly impressed by the poster who recommended Joseph Mitchell's- Up in the Old Hotel. That collection of essays is criminally neglected. Mitchell deserves far more praise than someone like Fitzgerald, for example.

Right now, I'm really into the classics. Anna Karenina is probably my alltime favorite book, followed by Wuthering Heights.

For escapist reading, I love Victorian mysteries, so I love The Woman in White. Although not Victorian, I also love My Cousin Rachel.

Irish literature holds a special place in my heart and I love Angela's Ashes, anything written by William Trevor, and the prose of Edna O'Brien. My favorite "O'Brien book" is In the Forest.

I Served the King of England is my favorite comic novel and I love Eastern European literature. The stories in The Noonday Cemetery are beautiful.

Favorite books are so hard to name...

I loved The Woman in White. The plot was so intricate and captivating. And I adore Jane Austen because of her ability to portray women. Her characters come alive. Tolkien is a master of worldbuilding, of course. I am specifically attached to a short story of Robert Louis Stevenson called Olalla. It deals with vampirism and heredity, and is a joy to read.

quote:

Originally posted by Sunsplashed:
Anna Karenina is probably my alltime favorite book.

I actually surprised myself by picking up this book on my own a few years ago and just tearing through it. I really enjoyed Tolstoy's writing and the way he picked at subtle nuances of the human psyche.

As for my favorites, I don't really know... I remember really liking Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Nabakov's Lolita from back when I was reading more regularly. Unfortunately, I know very little about more recent books, because I just don't know what to pick up.

Oh, I remember what book I really loved. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. I'll go with that one as my all-time favorite.

I agree with those who say that this is almost an impossible enterprise, largely because different works have resonated with me at different times in my life. Catcher in the Rye devastated me when I was 14 or 15, but wouldn't do so for me today.

The authors that have held up for me throughout most of my life have been Melville, Conrad, Kafka and Dostoevsky. Pretty cheerful crowd, neh?

As to what more contemporary stuff you should pick up, MN, let me suggest the following to get you started, based on your stated preferences: Never Let you Go or Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro (despite the name, an English author), Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa, and White Noise by Don DeLillo. All should be available in paperback, relatively cheaply, and all represent, imo, different strains of modern fiction that fit comfortaby in the catergories you mentioned.

I'm into satire, and I'd probably have to say the author that I've found consistently funny and witty is Kurt Vonnegut. I have read eleven of his fourteen books and have loved ten of them (I didn't really like Bluebeard - for some reason it never caught me).
Favorite book? Oh, this is impossible. I can't even begin to answer...let's see...I can't think. I'll meditate over that - and try to come up with at least 5 favorites (or one if I can think of one that I've found better than all the others).

Thanks a lot for the recs, ken. I'll definitely look into those the next time I'm at a bookstore. I'll let you know what I think.

I can recommend Never Let Me Go, at least.

I think my favorite by Ishiguro is The Unconsoled. I think I'd endorse anything my Murakami and probably most from DeLillo. I'd recommend Baudolino by Umberto Eco. It's a bit dense, but it's actually a pretty funny story.

...Most things by Eco are "a bit" dense.

I've read all of Eco's fiction (I think). My favorite by a huge long shot is The Name of the Rose. It is, now that I think about it, one of my 10 or 12 favorite books of all time. It brings together so many of my favorite elements: medieval history, medieval theology, the birth of rational thought, language, architecture, and, above all, books.

I liked Baudolino, but found it less substantive. The story is good, but I found it less philosophically dense. My second favorite Eco was Foucault's Pendulum. That, imo, is the book Dan Brown wishes, in his wildest imagination, that he could have written.

Weakest Ecos, imo, Island of the Day Before, and Flame Queen of Lenane.

Eco's essays were my door into his terrifyingly learned world. I read Travels in Hyper-reality when I was about 20, and upon finishing it, came to the conclusion that I knew nuthin', would never know nuthin', and must follow this man my whole life if I was ever to learn sumthin'.

Recently re-read Name of the Rose. Love it beyond rational thought.

I've tried to read Eco a few times. I like less dense things usually (like Vonnegut), but I'm going to read Eco someday.

Sinister, if you like less dense things that are still challenging, I highly recommend J.G. Ballard.

I won't go into some big explanation of his works or his obsessions, in case you already know him, but I wrote my Honours thesis on his early disaster novels, and he simply became more interesting after I analysed him to death.

Let's see what you recommend by Ballard, ishy, because I think "Crash" is likely a bit much for a 14 yr old!

Well, yes, Ballard can stray into twisted territory, but in his more wholesome fictional world, I recommend his thrilling environmental science fiction books:- 'The Drowned World', 'The Crystal World', 'The Drought'.

For an excellent memoir of the young Ballard living in Shanghai during WW2, read 'Empire of The Sun'

'Concrete Island' is a wonderfully strange novel about a man trapped beneath a freeway flyover. I don't remember anything too heavy there.

Finally, Ballard did a terrific job of transplanting Heart of Darkness to the science fiction genre in 'The Day of Creation.'

Read on, young warrior.

I need something to do until I'm 16, when I'm finally allowed to read some 10,000 books.

I once got up to 150 books a year at my peak, so I don't think I'm gonna crack 10, 000 any time soon.

Life gets in the way..

That is a lot of books. 10,000 is probably a little exaggerated .

This is probably a bad topic for me to write about, as I'm likely to go on forever once I get started! But I love talking about books, and I'm finally reading more again, after slowing down a lot in college (sad, but true - you'd think you'd read more in college, but it doesn't turn out that way).

I started reading at 4 and never looked back. I can't even remember not being able to read. As a child I read everything I could get my hands on, and regularly toted bags full of books out of the library. In addition to loads of children's mysteries and the like, my favorite authors which I discovered early on were L. M. Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott (who wrote far more than Anne of Green Gables and Little Women, by the way!). As a pre-teen though, I fell into a little bit of a rut, as I collected Babysitters Club books and took no interest in more "serious" reading, much to my mom's dismay. But to her credit, she continued to let me make my own choices, as she always did, and I read plenty of adult level popular fiction as well. Everything soon changed however, once I picked up a copy of Pride and Prejudice, when I was still in the 7th or 8th grade. That book was solely responsible for causing me to seek out the classics, literary fiction, and so on. And to this day, if you made me pick only one favorite book, Pride and Prejudice would be that book.

My favorite authors soon included: Austen, Dickens, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, Shakespeare, etc. Then I started reading American literature, from Hawthorne and Twain to Edith Wharton and Henry James. Then Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, and more I can't even remember.

So that's a brief summary. Of course I haven't even come close to reading everything those authors have written, much less a lot of other great stuff, but now I'm more interested in tackling what I haven't read again, and even trying some more unusual authors.

Some of my recent favorites from contemporary fiction/bestsellers are:
Atonement and Saturday by Ian McEwan
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

And speaking of Jonathan Strange, while I tend to dislike most of what I think of as genre fantasies (that is, what you'll find if you go to that section of the bookstore or library), I love the fantasy classics, such as LOTR and Narnia (and I'd include Harry Potter as well, although some might argue with that).
I've read very little sci-fi, and probably should try more.

After a steady diet of mysteries through my teens, I'm rather burned out on them now (I read all 80+ Agatha Christie books, for instance) but I still read a few favorite authors. P.D. James and Ian Rankin are my absolute favorites, and I still keep up with most of Anne Perry (who writes Victorian-era novels) and Laurie King, who has written a wonderful Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series. My favorite Holmes stories are not even in the actual Doyle canon, but are in fact written by King and Carole Nelson Douglas (who wrote the Irene Adler series).

What else have I not mentioned? To Kill a Mockingbird has to be among my top five favorite books, and I also enjoy biographies and historical narratives. Alison Weir and Antonia Fraser are two historical authors I have appreciated, chiefly because I love reading about England and Europe in the 16th-18th centuries. But lately I've taken to more contemporary memoirs and literature, such as:

A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Lipstick Jihadby Azadeh Moaveni
And there are others which aren't coming to mind right now. If only more people would read and study about Africa and the Middle East! The ignorance so many people have about these countries and areas is astonishing and makes the demonization and warmongering efforts so much easier for those in power.

Oh, and as an English and grammar geek, I have to mention Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss, a humorous book about punctuation and its frequent misuse. If I could shove a copy of that book into the hands of every person, I would.

Well, that's a start (see, I said this would be long!). But I like to remind myself every now and then of what I've read and remember how much more I'd like to read and learn.

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