Mandatory "favorite books" discussion

So every group at any social site about X always has one of these "what is your favorite X" discussions. Then everyone always says, aww, it's so hard to pick only my one/three/five/ten/n favorite Xes. I'll set the number at five. You can post fewer if you'd like, or more if you really really want to. And you can post series as one item, or seperate items, however you like.

Here I go:
1) The Sandman - Neil Gaiman. Just started reading these. I'm on volume five and I LOVE it.
2) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams. I refer to the original book here. It's the funniest book I've read.
3) Foundation - Isaac Asimov. Have only read the first one so far. I definitely intend to read at least the first three books.
4) The Restaurant at the End of the Universe - Douglas Adams. A great follow up to the Hitchhiker's Guide. I enjoy all the rest of the series, but I feel only this one really lives up.
5) 2001: A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke. It's a beautiful book. I like the series as a whole, but not enough to include them all as one item.

Edit: Added reference links. Thanks to languagehat for pointing them out!

I'd encourage everyone to use the Wikipedia-like automatic-reference system they've set up: put brackets around the works and authors in your message (single brackets for works, double brackets for authors) and presto, it links to the appropriate LT page.

Against A Dark Background by Iain M Banks. Banks is my favourite author and I love the Culture series but this one (not a Culture novel) is my favourite of his.

Excession by Iain M Banks. My favourite of Banks' Culture novels since it features a lot of Ships/Minds as the main characters. Closely followed by Inversions - almost not a sci-fi/Culture novel but a sci-fi/Culture novel none the less.

Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett. I am a big fan of Pratchett's earlier books, and this is one of my favourites since it focuses on Death, one of my favourite Discworld characters.

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. I'm not normally into fantasy but this combination of fantasy in a real world setting and the original ideas made it really interesting. It changed the way I viewed London.

You need to use square brackets. Example using curly ones instead to demonstrate:
Man, I really love {MetaFilter: How To Scam Millions Of Dollars From Clueless N00bs} by {{Matt Howie}}, it changed my life!

Plus you can edit your previous posts by clicking the pencil button in the top right corner of the post.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk
Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
The collected poems of George Oppen by George Oppen
The Oulipo Compendium, edited by Harry Mathews

Edit: Found my number 5. Also, 2 that wouldn't necessarily be in my top 5, but deserve to be read more:

HA!: A self-murder mystery by Gordon Sheppard
Djinn by Alain Robbe Grillet

The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood (Who doesn't love a good dystopian novel? My all-time favorite book.)
The Stand, Stephen King (King's wicked clowns, rabid dogs and murderous cars never really scared me. Captain Tripps scares the bejesus out of me. Only book I've ever reread.)
Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger (Awesome and very sad read.)
Atonement, Ian McEwan (With a title like that, an author needs to deliver the goods; it's so broad and such a complex area of humanity, not to mention the basis for virtually every good character study. He delivers.)
A Passage to India, E.M. Forrester (As accessible and relevant to 21st Century Western society as to 1920's India.)
The Human Factor, Graham Greene (Or anything by Greene, really.)
The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold (Sad. But really, really good.)

Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut, or anything by him; this is my favorite.
Chaos - Making a New Science by James Gleick
Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Franny and Zooey or any of the Glass Family stories by J.D. Salinger
Outside the Dog Museum by Jonathan Carroll - really, if you don't know who he is, run, don't walk, to the library and check something out. Now.

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
When Gravity Fails - George Alec Effinger
Invitation to a Beheading - Vladimir Nabokov
Schismatrix - Bruce Sterling
It Happened in Boston? -Russell H. Greenan

1. currently rereading Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian
2. Briggflatts, a long poem by Basil Bunting
3. Selected Poems of W.H. Auden, especially the first one, "who stands, the crux left of the watershed"
4. jeez, I dunno, One Hundred Years of Solitude?

I think these are my top three . . . others will take more time to think about.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Wild Boys by William S. Burroughs
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein

1. Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar
2. The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
3. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
4. The Making of the Middle Ages by R. W. Southern
5. Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee/Walker Evans
And Their Children After Them by Dale Maharidge
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
We Have Always Lived in the castle by Shirley Jackson
Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke

Most stuff by Donald Barthelme and Richard Brautigan

My books are all packed for a move, but here're a few:
Cryptonomicon (and The Confusion) by Neal Stephenson
Things that Fall from the Sky by Kevin Brockmeier
McGee and Stuckey's The Bountiful Container by Rose Marie Nichols McGee for gardening stuff
Watership Down by Richard Adams

The Once and Future King, T.H. White - Lovely, contemplative King Arthur novel
The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster - This and the complete works of Roald Dahl should be in every kid's library
The Working Poor: Invisible in America, David K. Shipler - Amazing book. Should be required reading for every American.
A Civil Action, Jonathan Harr - Extremely detailed, well-written account of the famous case in Woburn, Mass. I hear it's not much like the movie.
The Godfather, Mario Puzo - Like the movie, a classic.
A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears - To call it a detective story would not quite do it justice, I think. Complex, intriguing, winding tale set in Restoration England.
Anything by Jasper Fforde, but start with The Eyre Affair - People familiar with British Literature will love these quirky fantasy-mystery books...I tend to think of Fforde as the English major's answer to Douglas Adams.

That's a bit more than five, but I couldn't help myself. More to come, I'm sure.

In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan
Spell of the Sensuous by David Abrams
Frog and Toad Are Friends by Arnold Lobel
Spring of my Life by Kobayashi Issa
The Best Recipe by the folks at Cook's Illustrated

The Corrections - Jonathon Franzen
Black Swan Green - David Mitchell
Girlfriend in a Coma - Douglas Coupland
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino
The Castle - Franz Kafka

And almost everything by Nabokov

Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
The Big Book of Hell by Matt Groening
The Illuminatus by Robert Shea
The Lorax by Dr. Seuss
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Beloved by Toni Morrison
A Scanner Darkly by Phillip K. Dick
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber

um, five off the top of my head:

the master and margarita by Mikhail bulgakov

maldoror by lautreamont

mysteries by knut hamsun

invisible cities by italo calvino

molloy, malone dies and the unnameable by samuel beckett

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

I'd like to split my favourites based on genre, and will limit myself to five genres. Can't really compare across genres, so.

Historical narratives: White Mughals by William Dalrymple
Travel: At the tomb of the inflatable pig by John Gimlette
In-glish Lit: Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Biographies: The Man Who Knew Infinity
Sci-Fi: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

(Which isn't really a list of my all-time favourites, just the ones I can reach from my bed at a moment's notice, and thus are featured here on my LibraryThing list.)

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
The Arabian Nights
Geisha: A Life by Mineko Iwasaki
Giants in the Earth by O. E. Rolvaag
The Know-it-All by A.J. Jacobs

Currently reading: Shogun by James Clavell and I'm certain it is destined to be on my all-time favorites list.

These are my all time favs:

Baltazar and Blimunda by Saramago
The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith by Carey
A Fine Balance by Minstry
Cloud Atlas by Mitchell
Wicked by Maguire
The Idiot by Dostoevsky
Years of Rice and Salt by Robinson

(there are more too, but these are the top 7)

i forgot this one--It belongs in the top 5, definitely -- Independent People by Laxness

My list (a top 6) is very much a work in progress, and I am tempted to add mountains of explanatory notes, but here goes:

The History Boys: A Play by Alan Bennett
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
So Long, And Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams
Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs by Leonard Cohen
Tommy's Tale: A Novel by Alan Cumming
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

I've spent far too long thinking about this now, so here goes:

Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon by Sei Shonagon
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Three to see the king by Magnus Mills

but maybe I'd swap the Magnus Mills for The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon on another day. Actually, on another day, I'd probably swap the whole list for something else.

(btw: I am a Mefite, under the same name, just a very quiet one)

Hello all. This is a pretty interesting list of lists. Very wide ranging. By me "favorite" means "books I read over and over again and never get tired of." Also, I've interpreted "five" to mean "seven." Here's my contribution, in no particular order:

Angels by Denis Johnson (which has nothing whatsoever to do with that stupid angels fad of the 90s)

Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (old Harry Sinclair, my hero)

Preston Falls by David Gates (who is way overdue to publish another novel--hurry up, Gates)

the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder (which have little to nothing to do with that stupid TV show of the 70s)

Studs Lonigan (the trilogy) by James T. Farrell (even though I'm not an Irish Catholic boy and I've never even been to Chicago)

Vanished by Mary McGarry Morris

And The Collected Stories of Richard Yates.

Love,
Scratch

Oooh, I'm terrible at these, but I'll try anyway...

The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the World War by Jaroslav Hasek
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay
Have a Nice Day by Mick Foley
The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mullah Nasrudin by Idries Shah
The Way To Play: An Illustrated Encyclopedia to the Games of the World by The Diagram Group

Different Seasons by Stephen King This book contains the novelas "The Shawshank Redemption", "Apt Pupil, and my favourite "The Body" aka Stand by Me.

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

Illusions by Richard Bach

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman

Mine are always changing. At the moment I'd go for -

an Austen - currently Persuasion
a Dickens - currently Little Dorrit
a Trollope - currently The Eustace Diamonds
and a representative children's religious novel - currently Patience and her Problems
and Stoppard's Arcadia

Bother it, that leaves out poetry and non-fiction, but it'll have to do.

right now, thursbitch by alan garner