For good old miserable sea story it is hard to beat The Cruel Sea. For excitement, I am very impressed by all the Hornblower books without exception.
A wonderful book. Mark Helprin isn’t so much an author as he is an artist with words.
Good Omens was great, too. And I also loved “Till We Have Faces.”
I’m going to have to bookmark this thread.
I’ll nominate “Gone With The Wind”. I remember reading it and after every paragraph I would say to myself “I could never write anything so descriptive, ever.”
If you’ve seen the movie, and never read the book, I encourage you to do so. Not only is it different, but Mitchell paints such a vivid picture of the pre and post war south that no history book has ever matched for me.
Moore’s “Watchmen” takes it for recent-ish, and I agree with “Good Omens”
I have a soft spot for Sartre’s Nausea and Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”
and Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” never fails to move me, staged or read.
The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy, a collection of short stories by the late and lamented Avram Davidson, set in the 19th Century, in the mythical southeastern European state, the Triune Monarchy of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania (modeled, clearly, on the Austro-Hungarian Empire). The hero is Dr. Engelbert Eszterhazy, a brilliant and largely autodidact polymath of the minor nobility – urbane, broad-minded, gentle, philosophical yet practical, endlessly resourceful. He works (when he is working at all, and not alone studying) as a kind of detective, but unlike Sherlock Holmes he has no fear that his mind is like an attic, of limited storage capacity; he studies everything. Even magic. (Many of the stories include supernatural elements.)
From “Writ in Water, or the Gingerbread Man”:
From “The Autogondola Invention”:
Just can’t get enough of Davidson’s prose! 
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Grendel by John Gardner
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
John McWhorter, The Power of Babel
Leo Tolstoy, Ana Karenina
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths
Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Ram Dass, Be Here Now
Richard White, The Middle Ground
Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid
That would be something like my Top Ten.
Thanks to this thread, my Amazon Wish List just got a lot longer.
Lord of the Barnyard: Killing the Fatted Calf and Arming the Aware in the Cornbelt–by Tristan Egolf.
Just read it. You will thank me.
Galapagos and The Breakfast of Champions and Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut, jr
The Ishmael series by Daniel Quinn
The Lucifer Principle by Howard Bloom
Finding Darwin’s God by Kenneth Miller
Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx for me, mostly because of the extraordinary plot, a madly intricate and twisty-turny story about a young boy trying to discover the secrets behind a certain will. I can’t say anything more about it without giving it away; it’s the kind of book where it’s dangerous to peep even a few pages ahead for fear of spoiling yourself. The first time I read it I found it so immersive that I almost forgot I was undergoing a major operation, and they practically had to rip it out of my hands to administer the anaesthetic.
Um… are you me? That’s eerie.
I append to that short list Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which should never be underestimated.
For non-fiction, the above mentioned Gödel, Escher, Bach, and also Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, by Umberto Eco.
I forgot an important one:
The Jade Peony, by Wayson Choy. When I first bought this book I sat my ass down and read it straight through. I was emotionally wrecked when I put it down, only partly because I was physically exhausted after reading through the night.
Since then I’ve given it away and replaced it twice. No profound intellect in it, but I don’t recall any other book having such an emotional impact on me.
Permutation City by Greg Egan - a very thoughtful exploration of what it actually means to exist as a person.
I’ll echo the praises for Good Omens, 1984 and Brave New World
I tried Gravity’s Rainbow - tried really hard, but it just seemed like a stream of rambling incoherent doggerel and I gave up about one third of the way through; what am I missing?
The Discoverers By Daniel Boorstin. It’s the story of man’s learning about the world, himself and the universe.
And Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee . The first book that made me cry.
These are the three books that have had the deepest impact on me. Illuminatus! might be dismissed by some as hackery but if you read it at the right time in your life it can be a mind-blowing experience.
The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe
The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
Science and Sanity, by Alfred Korzybski
Four books that were doors to new understandings of the world for me:
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Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “The Gulag Archipelago”
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Noam Chomsky, “On Power and Ideology”
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and 4) Alexander and Ann Shulgin, “PiHKAL” and “TiHKAL” (“Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved”, and “Tryptamines…”)
And a book that didn’t exactly “new” me out, but rather provided the best summary of my basic worldview that I have yet seen… yes, it’s been mentioned already here, Carl Sagan’s “Demon-Haunted World”
I only realised a few years ago that The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane is some of the most gorgeous writing I have ever seen. I studied it in school and I guess it just went way over my head.
You can read it online and enjoy the continuation of this:
*The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, amber-tinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army’s feet; and at night, when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile camp-fires set in the low brows of distant hills.
Once a certain tall soldier developed virtues and went resolutely to wash a shirt. He came flying back from a brook waving his garment bannerlike. He was swelled with a tale he had heard from a reliable friend, who had heard it from a truthful cavalryman, who had heard it from his trustworthy brother, one of the orderlies at division headquarters. He adopted the important air of a herald in red and gold.
“We’re goin’ t’ move t’morrah–sure,” he said pompously to a group in the company street. “We’re goin’ ‘way up the river, cut across, an’ come around in behint 'em.”*
The Sand Pebbles by Richard McKenna is an oft-overlooked masterpiece and a personal favorite of mine.
I could list dozens (or even hundreds) of books here, but I’ll leave it at this one in the hope that someone else might become interested and find a copy.
Huxley’s BRAVE NEW WORLD- Si. Not sure I’d class Orwell’s 1984 as brilliant, but still double-plus good G
I have to name something by Ayn Rand. I love ATLAS but it’s not brilliant. Being able to say the basically same thing in much shorter space is brilliant. Thus- ANTHEM.
Eco’s FOUCAULT’S PENDULUM - hell yeah!
I don’t know if I see the ILLUMINATUS TRILOGY or COSMIC TRIGGER I as closer to brilliant, but I gotta give a nod to Robert Anton Wilson for throwing in the wildest most diverse stuff into an actual worldview- straddling brilliance & bullshit.
One reason- Teddy Roosevelt!