Lordy!
This question is going to have a lot of people on QOTW creaming their pants with anticipation. Here are some of mine for what it's worth:

Nick Carter - a series of American pulp spy novels full of sex and violence with titles like Plague Doom of Death and The Nympho Assassin. They were pure storytelling fodder and everything a teenage boy could desire.

James Bond - tallied perfectly with my fantasy of being a self-sufficient, cold-hearted man who women wanted to shag. Rather than a no-friends geek virgin.

Catcher in the Rye - a book that demonstrates how a writer can totally embody and capture the spirit of their narrator while still being able to stand outside and comment.

Tropic of Cancer - a book about becoming a writer. No plot - just a man teaching himself to feel, and to write abut it.

Kurt Vonnegut - anything by the master. His prose style is perfect and he created a philosophy to laugh at a world so tragic that no god or meaning could exist in it.

Fahrenheit 451 - a book predicting a future when no one would read and when the lack of language results in a lack of thought. That world is here.

Elmore Leonard - nobody writes like this. Only Vonnegut, and he's dead. Leonard writes like we think.

Edgar Allan Poe - he invented sci-fi, horror, adventure and detective fiction. An alcoholic genius whose writing was so good only because he was so off the scale in his near insanity.

Moby Dick - Life - in book form.

The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann's novel about time. Feels like it takes a whole lifetime to read. I read it while staying in an ex sanatorium, and it's about staying in a sanatorium.

And while we're at it, here are some overrated ones:

Shakespeare - wonderful language, but his plots are shit and characters one-dimensional.

James Joyce - written for the student, not for the reader.

Dickens - great humour and local colour, but a weepy melodramatist.
(frankspencer, Thu 15 May 2008, 16:04, 9 replies)

Largely, I agree
Moby Dick is the single greatest novel ever written. (For what it's worth, Melville has also written some of the greatest ever stories - Bartleby the Scrivener, in particular, is tremendous.)

I read The Magic Mountain a few months ago. Didn't get it, really - but I will read it again. Buddenbrooks is stunning.

Some of Shakespeare's characters are a bit naff - but you couldn't call Hamlet, Iago, Othello, Lear, Edmund, or Lear's fool one-dimensional. Nor Prospero. Or his Richard III.

Dickens is... ahem... overrated.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Thu 15 May 2008, 16:09, closed)

shakespeare
My problem with his characters is that they do and say only what is necessary to move the plot forward. That's not character - it's a plot device.

Why does Iago want to fuck Othello over? There's never a clear or consistent reason. The reason is because nothing would happen otherwise.

Why does Lear give all his lands away and then go senile? Because without it there's no story. He's a symbol - nothing more

Hamlet? Dithering isn't character. He represents a rag-bag collection of motives and feelings that are necessary to (and change according to) the plot. These days he'd be an emo.

Without the poetry of his prose, Shakespeare is Dan Brown.
(frankspencer, Thu 15 May 2008, 16:16, closed)

I've just read...
Brave New World and Huxley's follow-up Brave New World Revisited.

Blooody Hell, fifty years on and Huxley was just about right in everything.

I'll give Moby Dick another go one day, just can't get past the first fifty pages.
( Scaryduck LIKES EGG, Thu 15 May 2008, 16:19, closed)

...
I've just re-read Brave New World, too - largely for professional reasons. I was underwhelmed, it has to be said. Sappy and romantic, on the whole...
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Thu 15 May 2008, 16:23, closed)

I mostly agree with Frank about Shakespear
but I feel that MacBeth is a masterpiece.
( Colonel Dracula Two manky hookers and a racist dwarf, Thu 15 May 2008, 16:33, closed)

macbeth
My favourite, too. Who cares about the "Ooh, I'll kill the king for no reason.." plot. The language is sublime.
(frankspencer, Thu 15 May 2008, 16:39, closed)

Macbeth was a man hounded by his social climbing bitch of a wife
It could be re-titled, "Macbeth - Ok Ok, anything for an easy life. Jeesh"

"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in at this petty pace". Or as Ed Norton says in Fight Club, "This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time".
( Colonel Dracula Two manky hookers and a racist dwarf, Thu 15 May 2008, 16:50, closed)

Catcher in the Rye
A book that will no doubt get some praise this week was sadly ruined for me by a total cunt soup of an English teacher - until i saw a parody in comic form by Evan Dorkin (of Milk and Cheese comic fame) to really convert me back - have re-read it a few times now but cannot shake mental images of that person who made reading (and writing) anything but a pleasure. grrr. spleen vented sorry.

Must give Moby Dick another go for that review.
(i anglepoise, Thu 15 May 2008, 17:08, closed)