Fear & Loathing On The Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S. Thompson
The War Of The Worlds by H.G. Welles
Bride Of The Rat God by Barabra Hambly
Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. I heard I had to read the series, so I started off, thinking it’d just be regular fantasy stuff, but I was blown away by the political nature of the book and the in depth work into the houses and the entire world. I rushed out, got the next two books, read them quickly, and then picked up AFFC and just finished. The rest of my reading list is in shambles (which is next?). I started on a new book, and then discoved, WAIT, he wrote short stories in this world? So I put everything down and just finished “The Hedge Knight”.
It’s like a drug… where’s the next book? 
The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham.
I agree with Ulysses and Crying of Lot 49.
‘Brilliant’ is the perfect word for Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall.
Personal favorites that I consider brilliant:
The Dollmaker by Harriette Arnow.
Paradise Falls by Don Robertson. The book is tragically out of print, but the link goes to a website with info about the author and a few paragraphs from the book. Robertson also wrote a Civil War trilogy that will knock your socks off.
I’ve only read 14 of the books mentioned so far, so I’m also bookmarking and making a list. 
Insight:
[ul]
[li]M.-D. Chenu, Towards Understanding Saint Thomas[/li][li]Alasdair McIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry[/li][/ul]
Composition: I’ll second the nominations of Nabokov and Joyce, and add
[ul]
[li]Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy[/li][li]John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse[/li][li]Penelope Fitzgerald, The Beginning of Spring[/li][/ul]
Honorable mention for insight and composition: Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
I forgot to mention my actual favourite book!
The Recognitions by William Gaddis. Astounding book (there are about fifty pages in the second third of the book which are hard to slog through - and the whole book ain’t easy) - I particularly love Gaddis’ ear for dialogue.
As well as Tufte’s similar Envisioning Information .
Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kozinski
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
Steel Beach by John Varley
If I wasn’t so tired, I’d probably add to the list.
Concpicuously absent from these lists are dozens of “Western classics” that today’s high schools and universities assign to undergrads.
One of my favorites of all novels easily – but I know many people who just couldn’t deal with his ability with language and several of the antique languuages and modern romance and germanic and slavic languages he was never shy about intersparsing. I knew some very learned folks of both genders who spent no small amount of time compiling and completing a lexicon for Gaddis in “The Recogns” – my opinion of these bright, personal friends of mine has plummetted over the past decade or so, though. Seems like a painful way to “force” oneself through a novel that is, to me, a very bright pleasure regardless of how much one understand prima facie.
Now, JR I wish I could, though, i.e., “get to.” It reminds of sitting on a sidewalk slkightly drunken and listening to some trripping people dealing in various, demented, illogical conversations, sort of out-there (and how!) talks. It’s the more well-regarded of Gaddis’s novels, I think, but I can’t quite get it, somehow.
I’ll toss in Georges Perec, "Life : A User’s Guide [La vie : mode d’emploi], and finish up with some of Italo Calvino’s best-beloved, by me “The Baron in the Trees,” for example.
So many. I love threads like this because I remind my self of the terrific experience of discovering these works, and sometimes I go back and re-visit them.
On the Beach – Neville Shute
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
Native Son – Richard Wright
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
A Bright Shining Lie – Neil Sheehan
The Best and the Brightest – David Halberstam
Downbelow Station – CJ Cherryh
Rendezvous With Rama – Arthur. C. Clarke
Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain
I Claudius – Robert Graves
Ringworld – Larry Niven
The Forever War – Joe Haldeman
American Tabloid – James Ellroy
The Guns of August – Barbara Tuchman
The Price of Power – Seymour Hersch
1984 – George Orwell
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
Gateway – Frederick Pohl
Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynmann – Richard Feynmann
84 Charing Cross Road – Helene Hanff
Generation Kill – Evan Wright
The Tin Drum by Günter Grass is probably the most well-written book I’ve ever read. I would also place John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces and Larry McMurty’s Lonesome Dove very comfortably high on that list.
Naming those three works is somehow so deeply personal to me that I have this vague hope that merely sharing my love of them will somehow spark a intrigued and flirtatious private message. Heh.
The Zombie Thread Survival Guide, by Max Brooks
I was unable to read The Grapes of Wrath with a fresh viewpoint, as it is such a part of our culture that I recognized bits of it from other reading and movies on the first reading. Still, I’m a sucker for Steinbeck’s prose, so there’s that. I’m fond of Cannery Row. Again, the prose, and I liked the story of poor people doing the best they can, trying to help others, and trying to do right, despite their own weaknesses & frailties (and it’s so much less bleak then Wrath). It’s like the opposite of many more recent stories I’ve read.
I started reading Under The Dome by Stephen King yesterday, and like too many books I’ve read, it looks like the selfish, obtuse, self-important and unjustly self-confident guy is going to drive the plot and cause more trouble than will be necessary as the story unfolds. Contrast that to Cannery Row and how it’s characters mean well, even if their faults and incompetence sometimes prevents them from effectively acting on it. Maybe I just need to vary my reading material a bit more than I have been.
I liked* Owen Meany*. I should check out some more Irving.
A few more:
Robert Musil, “Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften” [“The Man Without Qualities” – a very long novel with unusual publication history and editorial scholarship and commentary. I learned a lot of my popular German by going slowly through this long novel with dictionary and notebook, neither of which process has anything to recommend the terrific scope and detail of this narrative on its own, though.
One of the few 20th Century novels which might be held in comparison immediately and fruitfully to Prousts’s “Recherche/,” which has a much great universality in terms of its appreciation by those who purport to claim some kind of French culture by reading this long novel with the more important marginalia and obscuralia by the literary critics and the author themselves, respectively.
Huckleberry Finn
Moby Dick
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Siddhartha
Conrad, all.
Eliot, “Middlemarch”
James, Henry: point and shoot.
Dumas, Verne, are, I think the two of the oldest of the young great, impoverished chroniclers who wrote huge swaths around their obsessions.
I recently reread John Fowles’ The Collector which has more WOW factor than any other book I have read. It makes use of an amazing plot device. It is the story of how Frederick abducts Miranda and holds her prisoner in an isolated cottage. First time around I read the first half of the book and really enjoyed it, then Miranda dies and Frederick discovers her journal. And lo and behold Fowles begins to tell the same story again from her point of view. And rather than being anticlimactic, it gets better.
It’s a quick read but wonderfully thought provoking.
The linked review reveals what I have spoilered.
An idiosyncratic pick, but Watership Down by Richard Adams. Brilliant in concept, marvelous in execution.