Listmania!
In no particular order-25 great books.
Cosmos and PornografiaCosmos and Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz
Buy new: £6.39 / Used from: £3.64
I put this at the top to raise it's profile. A sorely ignored master in the traditon of Dostoevsky.
Lolita (Penguin Classics)Lolita (Penguin Classics) by Vladimir Nabokov
Buy new: £5.36 / Used from: £1.66
Possibly the best prose writer of the last century...and English was his second language.
Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (Penguin Modern Classics)Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (Penguin Modern Classics) by Jorge Borges
Buy new: £6.47 / Used from: £4.34
The best Latin-America writer without question. Absolutely amazing.
The Complete Novels: The Trial; America; The CastleThe Complete Novels: The Trial; America; The Castle by Franz Kafka
Buy used from: £4.21
My favourite is 'The Castle'. The short stories are worth reading too. Masterpieces of feeling as well as thought.
Jacques the Fatalist: And His Master (Classics)Jacques the Fatalist: And His Master (Classics) by Denis Diderot
Buy new: £7.12 / Used from: £3.04
Makes nonsense of the term modernist. An exercise in how to write a playful book.
Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics)Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics) by Gustave Flaubert
Buy new: £4.97 / Used from: £0.23
Great, great novel from Flaubert....A merciless dissection of Provincial life and so much more. Monsieur Homais has since inherited the world!
The Outsider (Penguin Modern Classics)The Outsider (Penguin Modern Classics) by Albert Camus
Buy new: £5.97 / Used from: £2.50
Together with 'The Fall' his best fiction work. The Rebel and Myth of Sysiphus are worth reading too.
Nausea (Penguin Modern Classics)Nausea (Penguin Modern Classics) by Jean-Paul Sartre
Buy new: £5.73 / Used from: £3.57
The populariser of Heidegger but this is a decent novel regardless.
Thus Spake Zarathustra (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature)Thus Spake Zarathustra (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature) by Friedrich Nietzsche
Buy new: £3.23 / Used from: £1.98
Occasionally the Poshlust and Romantic lyricism take it off the rails but Nietzche remains, despite all his many faults, a genius.
Ulysses (Oxford World's Classics)Ulysses (Oxford World's Classics) by James Joyce
Buy used from: £2.20
The last word in experimental fiction...nobody has sucessfully emerged from the shadows of Joyce. Will they ever?
"Six Characters in Search of an Author" and Other Plays ("Henry IV" and "So It Is, If You Think So")"Six Characters in Search of an Author" and Other Plays ("Henry IV" and "So It Is, If You Think So") by Luigi Pirandello
Buy new: £5.67 / Used from: £2.53
A wonderful collection of plays by a modernist master.
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage classics)If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage classics) by Italo Calvino
Buy new: £4.98 / Used from: £2.55
This and Invisible cities are well worth reading. Another master of playfulness.
Dead Souls (Classics)Dead Souls (Classics) by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
Buy used from: £0.01
In Nodryov one of the great Russian characters. Given the eminence of Kafka/Borges does Gogol not deserve a re-appraisal?
The Brothers KaramazovThe Brothers Karamazov by F.M. Dostoevsky
Buy new: £6.46 / Used from: £1.50
Freud called it 'The most Magnificent novel ever written'. Praise indeed. Perhaps my favourite book, perhaps my favourite writer.
The Steppe (World's Classics)The Steppe (World's Classics) by A.P. Chekhov
Buy used from: £0.01
All of Chekov's short stories are worth reading the the plays are excellent too. Straddles that fascinating period between the centuries.
Death of Artemio CruzDeath of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes
Another Latin-American master. His best book without doubt.
Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric by Johannes de Silentio (Classics)Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric by Johannes de Silentio (Classics) by Soren Kierkegaard
Buy new: £5.84 / Used from: £2.40
Great stuff from a nobel mind. Lovers of Nietzche and Dostoevsky take note!
Mrs Dalloway (Penguin Popular Classics)Mrs Dalloway (Penguin Popular Classics) by Virginia Woolf
Buy new: £2.16 / Used from: £0.01
Great book about a great city. Beautiful prose and one of the best books ever written in English.
The Quiet AmericanThe Quiet American by Graham Greene
Buy used from: £0.01
How our time sorely needs a Greene. Could he have explained and brought to attention the tragedies of the Middle East?
The Satanic VersesThe Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Buy new: £5.87 / Used from: £3.57
Any book that gets in a Tyrants beard is always commendable. A magical book that provoked reality so strangely.
Breakfast of ChampionsBreakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
Buy new: £5.07 / Used from: £2.89
The great pricker of bubbles. Amusing and concise, Vonnegut belongs with the best of American fiction
White Noise (Picador Books)White Noise (Picador Books) by Don DeLillo
Buy new: £4.76 / Used from: £0.72
A novel about Jack Gladney, Head of Hitler Studies in one of those anonymous Nabokovian American Universities...says it all really.
The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Modern Classics)The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Modern Classics) by Saul Bellow
Buy new: £8.37 / Used from: £6.25
Very hard to choose Bellow's best book. Seize the Day, Herzog, Humboldts Gift all excellent.
1984 Nineteen Eighty-Four1984 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
Buy used from: £1.45
Perhaps the greatest poltical novel ever written.
Love in the Time of CholeraLove in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Buy used from: £0.01
A better book than One Hundred Years, which I can't help thinking is sorely over-rated.