is the only book to make me cry. Beautifully written, excellent characters - right down to the minor players - remember the town drunk, who's really drinking coca cola and pretending to be intoxicated so people just leave him be? Great sense of time and place too. I am so glad I read this myself rather than being force fed it at school. Damn funny at times too. Not surprised she never wrote another book.

Tis tough. Ragged Trousered Philanthropists changed my world view as much as yer actual punk rock did. Anything by James Lee Burke stuns and shatters me with its humanity and righteous wrath, whilst Kurt Vonegut can do little wrong. So it goes.

This is a fine topic well worth much pub embellishment, but the inherent problem is that my choices change constantly. Not just coz I'm capricious, honest, but I've only just narrowed my favourite albums down to a top 75. (Sugar's Copper Blue just has the edge at the mo...)

Grapes of Wrath. I only read it for the first time about seven years ago, and have re-read it a few times since. It's the most heart breaking tale- and the ending proved how the simplest, most honest of actions, can change a life. Inspiring.

You bastard. Off the top of my head, it'll be Catch-22. But give me half an hour and I'll have come up with a dozen that could take its place.

The true first-hand story of a fan's obsession with the Bay City Rollers. I bloody loved it.

Ian McEwan's Cement Garden. NIce and short and I've read everyone of his since.....

His books are all so similar in theme and tone that for me they all merge together into one huge, pleasurable whole. The amazing thing is they never get repetitive or boring. Dip in anywhere and anytime and you will smile, laugh and the world will briefly seem a kinder happier place.

Some other oldies but goldies.

Count of Monte Cristo - most exciting and gripping book ever, no contest. Genuinely unputdownable.
Vanity Fair - written and set long ago but so cynical and witty it could have been written yesterday.
Compleet Molesworth - Willans and Searle. After Wodehouse, the funniest book ever.

by Graham Smith would be my knee jerk reaction. It's the only novel I have read three times and would happily read again. It's evocation of place (the East Anglian fens) and the way the history of that place shapes the characters is beautifully drawn. However like other contributors I would have to say that I could compose a very long list.

A book that not only manages to out do Graham Greene in terms of an evaluation of faith but is also incredibly poignant and very funny.

Like you all I could name hunners, but if I had to name one it would be The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, with The Prisoner of Zenda a close second.

As for those who have gone before, I'd second Madrid's choice of the Molesworth. Must try The Count of Monte Cristo.

'The Old Man And The Sea' by Ernest Hemingway. Simple, short and profound.

Victory by Joseph Conrad. Not because it's particularly good, but because it was taught to me quite brilliantly in my fourth form Eng. Lit. lessons, which gave me a love for literature that I still haven't lost. (Props to Peter Charters. Thank you, sir!)

Middlemarch by George Eliot. Because I read it one summer while working in a bloody awful student-job as a janitor in a factory in Leicester and my lunch hours were consumed by a blissful escape into Dorothea and Casaubon's perfectly-drawn world.

Those are both more about time and place than the books themselves I guess, but ain't that always the way?

Has to be either Angelas Ashes by Frank McCourt or McCarthy's Bar by Pete McCarthy. Just for the way they make me feel. They are like old friends!

Books make a difference to you at certain points in your life, I don't think any one book could stay at the top of my list forever.

When I first read The Dice Man I was literally shocked by how amazing it was, but then I was about 15 and I had never encountered anything like it before. It was replaced by Stephen Fry's autobiography Moab is My Washpot when I was 17 (the age he is for a hefty chunk of the book) and then Catch 22 a couple of years after that. Then when I started actually taking responsibility for stuff and getting into a proper relationship for the first time High Fidelity spoke to me like nothing before.
The GLW is now 'in the family way' for the first time so I expect something else will come along to help me define this new chapter in my life.

plus suitability for repeat reading, I would go for Conan Doyle's 'Adventures of Sherlock Holmes'. There's the ingenuity of the plots, the greatness of the 2 main characters and the charm of the old fashioned language.

The Crow Road - Iain Banks

Best book ever written. I first read it in 96 and have read it roughly once per year since, and it still grips me till the last page.

I don't feel worthy in these discussions as there are so many highly rated books that I have not read. But these were "my favourite book of all time" at one time or another:

Unreliable Memoirs - Clive James
Absolute Beginners - Colin McInnes
A Long Long Way - Sebastian Barry

Unbelievably refreshing at the time. Drove a horse and cart through the literary world. Welsh's use of phonetics was absolutely astounding. A hard, but remarkably rewarding read. The film is a pale imitation and doesn't scratch the surface.

1984 is still also very very prominent. I love books that twist and turn language - taking unusual phrasing and embedding them into your head forever. See also London Fields and A Clockwork Orange

I still love and re-read the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Ostensibly for the kids, but still a guilty treat!

Latest book I've loved is The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon. It's like a crash course in Yiddish!

At the time of writing Thomas Eisner is a professor of Chemical Ecology at Cornell University. One of his areas of interest is the chemical attacks and defences of insects. This book is part autobiography/part entomological study. True to its title, the writing is driven by the fascination and curiosity the author retains for his tiny subjects.

I think the Achilles heel of academia is the inability of those at the vanguard to effectively communicate their knowledge to the layman, either because they lack the language skills, or because they have lost sight of what it’s like to be a novice, and take too much of what they know as being self-evident.

Eisner adopts a friendly methodical tone, tailored to have a broad appeal, beyond his peer group. He devotes each chapter to a different facet of the chemical weapons arms race that engulfs the insect and arachnid kingdom, while avoiding too much reliance on dry technical data.

Instead he writes about the circumstances in which his experiments took place; the people who assisted him; the places he visited; the chance observations that formed the basis of fresh research; and the avenues that he didn’t explore, either because he didn’t have time or because he simply forgot. In laying his scientific methods bare, the humanity behind the methodology comes through. One is constantly aware of the spark of intelligence and creativity that drives him; how an insight gleaned from one experiment informs a new area of study.

His scientific processes veer from the meticulous to moments of improvisation that verge on slapstick. His attempt at broadcasting live footage of protozoans harvested from the guts of termites almost ended in failure when, at the last minute, he discovered that light was leaking in through the junction between the TV camera and the microscope:

“There was only one thing to do. We ran to the nearest men’s room, grabbed a roll of toilet paper, unwound it, and once we had the tubular core ran back to the studio and used the tube as a shield junction.”

Throughout his experiments, Eisner seems to be either learning new ways of doing things, or dreaming up novel uses for pre-existing equipment. His study of the defensive eye patterns of caterpillars, evolved to ward off bird attacks, inspired the design of a baseball cap with fake eyes on the back. This was intended to discourage the attentions of some very aggressive magpies, which had been responsible for the death of a cyclist. However, the results were inconclusive.

It’s no secret that science has a massive public image problem. One only needs to think back a few days to the hysterical coverage that accompanied the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider, or dwell on the fact that millions of people will risk their health by using treatments that have no proven efficacy, as opposed to medicine that has undergone rigorous clinical trials.

We could do with a few more people like Eisner who are able to show off the human side of science without dumbing down their subject matter. The reason I like the book and still occasionally dip into it, is that it offers me an insight into the thought processes of a mind much brighter than my own, but does so without being intimidating or arrogant.

I can read this over and over and over again and get completely carried away by it. It still, after having read it the best part of 30 or 40 odd times, scares the bejeezus out of me in places - and the whole book is so evocative - if you've ever stood (outside Mick Jaggers gaff) on Richmond Hill and looked down along the Thames you can't help imaging great big tripod war machines striding along the landscape towards London.

Proust? 'Swann's Way' in particular. Such a dense, compulsive read. The French landscape at Combray is almost alive at times. If you haven't attempted young Marcel's Jupiterean epic yet then I urge you to do so. Yes, I know it's long and that it makes 'Lord of the Rings' look like a takeaway menu but you'll thank me for it one day. You really will.

My nostalgic treats are the Molesworth books and George MacDonald Fraser's McAuslan books, all guaranteed to bring me back to life when I'm feeling particluarly lo-res.

Salinger's "The Catcher In The Rye" got a bit of a shoeing in the "worst books" thread, but it's "a classic" for a reason, and yes, I've read it since I was a teenager...

My vaguely left-field choice would be Gunter Grass' "Dog Years", the only book I've ever read twice in succession (i.e. finished it and started back at page 1 straight away.) It's huge, utterly absorbing, and manages to be surreal and hyperreal simultaneously, a good trick if you can do it... I doubt a week goes by when some image from it doesn't pop into my head.

by George Eliot.

and marquez - one hundred years of solitude.

I also love the Sherlock Holmes series. nothing better on a cold winters night.

Golding is my favourite author - endlessly fascinating. Instead of producing a variety of stories and plots in a recognisable style, he actually seemed to keep returning to the same obsessions, but using radically different ways of detailing them from book to book.

Anyone who has only read 'Lord of the Flies' is really missing out. 'Pincher Martin' is not an easy read, but is guaranteed to make you go 'Bloody hell!' after closing it. Probably best book of all time for me.

Best book I've read recently is Indian gangster epic 'Sacred Games' by Vikram Chandra. Incredible piece of storytelling.

Favorite- At Swim Two Birds - Flann O'Brien
Endlessly inventive, constantly surprising, always hilarious, please can every human being read it? Sometimes I feel like the only Flann fan in the world.

Honestly best?
I read War and Peace last year. It took three months for me to get through. It was worth it, genuinely. The book is not a struggle, it's brilliantly written, exciting and perceptive. There's just a lot of it. Anyone who occasionally reads "the classics" will like it, seriously. Donning my amateur critic hat I can't think of a "better" book that I've read (and I've done Ulysses, Middlemarch, Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment and quite a lot of that ilk in my time).

Can't be bothered with a long one? Huckleberry Finn is also brilliant. I think Mark Twain is under-rated.

I once said this in a drunken moment of clarity and I pass it on cheerfully. I've never read anything crap by a Russian.

"The Stars, My Destination" by Alfred Bester has to be it for me. Brilliantly written. Reads nothing like science fiction. This is Count Of Monte Cristo taken to another level. The storyline is absolutely gripping and entertaining to the end. Bester's other great novel is "The Demolished Man" which is equally as good as "The Stars...", but just misses out b/c Gully Foyle is such a brilliant character. Hard to believe these two books were written in the 50's.

What´s Bred in the Bone - Robertson Davies

by Leo Tolstoy. Completely unrepresentative of my usual reading material (SF or non-fiction mainly), and Anna herself is a pain, but totally mesmerising.
My wife would say Middlemarch by George Elliot.

because it closely mirrored my own thoughts on relationships with the fairer sex and for the obsession with music.
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks is probably my favourite war novel.
Down and out in Paris and London is another favourite from way back which i think i will look out and read again.
Killshot by Elmore Leonard - best dialogue writer in crime fiction by a country mile.
The Onion Field - Joseph Wambaugh - true life crime and subsequent court case that is written as a novel and draws you in to the complexities of the legal world - great stuff.

If it is prose, then surely we all bow before "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole? Still a treasure, and I'm looking forward to reading it again (don't count any more, 7 or 8 times anyway).

For poetry (is this too divergent ?) I'd go for "Other Men's Flowers" a beautiful collection selected and annotated by Lord Wavell. A rich treasury of language, always worth having to hand for a ten minute dip. (Which becomes half an hour in the blink of an eye)

Jerome K Jerome's (far superior) sequel to Three Men In A Boat: it features the same characters, only this time they're cycling round Germany. There are half a dozen comic set pieces that have never failed to reduce me to helpless tears of laughter whenever I've read them over the past 30 years. (Blimey, is it really that long?)

I've read many 'serious' novels that I value very highly, but no other book has given me so much sheer pleasure.

..especially the section wherein Ben's prog "masterpiece" is sabotaged by Birminghams first punk.

The Plot Against America by Phillip Roth
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier , Spy - John Le Carre
and the best one this year
Austerlitz - WG Sebald

I started reading the top of this thread and thought "I'm going to say 'Puckoon' by Spike Milligan and then, damn it, you did.

In which case I'll say "Moab is my washpot" by Stephen Fry. The funniest yet still most moving autobiography I have ever read.