Now I would like to add Winnie the Pooh by A.A.Miln. May it be sixteen? Or children books are excluded? Or we should exclude Gilgamesh? (Be sure I didn't translate it, Sui... I do not speak Sumerian... don't have Sumerian font in my PC anyway. )

Hmm, I always find these kind of questions rather hard. Same problem with "top 10 albums" for example, I wouldn’t know where to start.. and I'm such a doubter..

Anyway:

F. Scott Fitzgerald – the Great Gatsby
John Irving – The World According to Garp
John Irving – Hotel New Hampshire
Richard Yates – Revolutionary Road
D.H. Lawrence - Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary
Gerard Reve – De Avonden
Patrick Süskind – The Perfume
Truman Capote – In Cold Blood
J.D. Salinger - Catcher in the Rye
Haruki Murakami - South of the Border, West of the Sun
Donna Tartt - The Secret History

to be continued probably..

To Duda and Slavica;

You are like walking libraries!!! Its unbelievable!!!
Now i bend infront of you!

With regards your majesty!

Pardon me, Sui, but I am more a kind of sitting library... If I read less, I'd walk more... And I'd be slim as well.

Liked Elisa's list too... She inspired me to think more of some modern prosaists. My God, so many books, how can one decide? Now I'd like to add Malcolm Lawry and his "Under Vulcano"... and Peter Carey and his "Oscar and Lucinda"... and "The Blind Assasin" by Margaret Atwood... and... will someone stop me? Sui, Slavica, please... just stop me.



P.S. Elisa, suppose you recommend "The Parfume"? I saw it (translated! alas!) here and from the very start I have a feeling it's something worth reading. Can you compare it to something? I would like to hear somebody's personal impressions, for I don't like to read "noncertified" books.

This is so hard, but have made an attempt to select my favourite 15:-

Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austin
Emma - Jane Austin
The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Expery
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
A Passage to India - E. M. Forster
To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
I, Claudius - Robert Graves

Thanks for the idea, Sui. Though it will be your fault when I became a fat woman...

Aenigma (x) - you made my day with Trollop! Can I guess you are secret lover of Dickens too? (I use to read "Oliver Twist" again and again under my pillow still. )