1. Moby Dick, Herman Melville, 1851
2. The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky, 1880
3. Being & Time, Heidegger, 1927
4. Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky, 1864
5. The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner, 1929
6. Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky, 1866
7. Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett, 1951-1953
8. Hunger, Knut Hamsun, 1890
9. Ulysses, James Joyce, 1922
10. Critique of Pure Reason, Kant, 1781
11. Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges, 1944
12. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin, 1921
13. Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, 1885
14. Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne, 1767
15. Pan, Hamsun, 1894
16. The Trial, Franz Kafka, 1922
17. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, 1902
18. Jacques the Fatalist, Denis Diderot, 1796
19. Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre, 1938
20. The Crocodile, Dostoevsky, 1865
21. Catch-22, Joseph Heller, 1960
22. The Outsider, Camus, 1942
23. The Seducer’s Diary, Kierkegaard, 1843
24. The Bacchae, Euripides, 406 BC
25. Being and Nothingness, Sartre, 1943
26. Pierre, or the Ambiguities, Herman Melville, 1852
27. Swann’s Way, Proust, 1922
28. Danton’s Death, Buchner, 1835
29. Buddhist Wisdom: the Diamond and Heart Sutras, Anon. (trans. Conze), (1958)
30. The Hunting of the Snark, Lewis Carroll, 1874
31. The Double, Dostoevsky, 1846
32. The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Duras, 1964
33. Temple of the Gold Pavillion, Mishima, 1956
34. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner, 1930
35. The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford, 1914
36. The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien, 1954
37. The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard, 1849
38. The Lover, Duras, 1984
39. King James Bible: Ecclesiastes the Preacher, 250 BC
40. Account of My Hut, Kamo Chomei, 1212
41. Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger, 1953
42. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce, 1914
43. 1984, George Orwell, 1949
44. Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, Nagarjuna (Ed. Garfield), 2nd century
45. Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard, 1843
46. Blue Eyes, Black Hair, Duras, 1986
47. Hamlet, Shakespeare, 1600
48. Eugene Onegin, Pushkin (trans. Johnston), 1833
49. The Aeneid, Virgil (trans. Dryden), 19 BC (1697)
50. Lolita, Nabokov, 1955
with some more favorites in alphabetical order:
* The Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1852
* Collected Stories of H. P. Lovecraft, 1917-1935
* Dune, Herbert, 1965
* Either/Or, Kierkegaard, 1843
* The Idiot, Dostoevsky, 1869
* The Immoralist, Gide, 1902
* Lord of the Flies, William Golding, 1952
* The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot, 1917
* Medea, Euripides, 431 BC
* Mysteries, Hamsun, 1892
* The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Hogg, 1824
* The Rubaiyat, Omar Khayyam (trans. E. Fitzgerald), 1120 (1859)
* Season of Migration to the North, Salih, 1966
* The Soldier and Death, Minghella, 1988
* Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys, 1966