I am somewhat hampered in my attempts to complete this list by the fact that many of my babies are in storage and are thus more likely to be missed.
In any case, here follows some of my all-time favourite books, with an attached admission that I have soooo much more to read!:
Australian Fiction
- Illywhacker by Peter Carey (my review)
- True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
- Oscar & Lucinda by Peter Carey (my review)
- 30 Days in Sydney by Peter Carey
- Bliss by Peter Carey
- Jack Maggs by Peter Carey
- Voss by Patrick White
- A Fringe of Leaves by Patrick White
- Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
- Breath by Tim Winton (my review)
- Eucalyptus by Murray Bail
- The Pages by Murray Bail
- Remembering Babylon by David Malouf (my review)
- The Sound of One Hand Clapping by Richard Flanagan
- Death of a River Guide by Richard Flanagan
- Gould’s Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan
- Wanting by Richard Flanagan (my review)
- The Secret River by Kate Grenville (my review)
- The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville (my review)
- That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott (my review)
- Past the Shallows by Favel Parret (my review)
- A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz (my review)
- Lights Out in Wonderland by DBC Pierre (my review)
- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (my review)
- Every Secret Thing by Marie Munkara (my review)
- Bring Larks and Heroes by Thomas Keneally (my review)
- The Commandant by Jessica Anderson (my review)
- The Plains by Gerald Murnane (my review)
- Maurice Guest by Henry Handel Richardson (my review)
- The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard (my review)
Classics
- To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
- Persuasion by Jane Austen
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (my review)
- Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (my review)
‘Modern’ Classics
- The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (my review)
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (my review)
- The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (my review)
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (my review)
- The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
- The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
- The Stone Raft by Jose Saramago
- The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- The Essential Tales of Chekhov, by Anton Chekhov, ed by Richard Ford
- Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
- The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery – a petite gem!
- The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien (my review)
- As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (my review)
- The Wayward Tourist by Mark Twain (my review) Okay, not a classic, but deserving of note here!
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (my review)
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker (my review)
International Fiction
- Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
- East West by Salman Rushdie – a collection of nine short stories
- The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie
- Shame by Salman Rushdie
- Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie (my review)
- Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie (my review)
- The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
- The Famished Road by Ben Okri
- Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – ok, so not exactly fiction, but it reads like one of his books – the first of an intended, yet uncompleted trilogy of autobiography/memoirAmulet by Roberto Bolano
- Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (my review)
- Silk by Alessandro Baricco
- Ocean Sea by Alessandro Baricco
- The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth
- If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
- Last Orders by Graham Swift
- White Teeth by Zadie Smith
- On Beauty by Zadie Smith
- Headlong by Michael Frayn
- The Girl on the Landing by Paul Torday
- The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie – a wonderful example of an ‘unreliable narrator'(!)
- Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (my review)
- Possession by AS Byatt (my review)
- Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch (my review)
- Ghostwritten by David Mitchell (my review)
- Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (my review)
- Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (my review)
- A Song of Fire and Ice series by George RR Martin
- Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (my review)
- The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (my review)
- Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (my review)
- Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor (my review)
- Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (my review)
I’ll add more as I remember them! …
Plays:
- The Tempest by William Shakespeare
- Romeo & Juliet by Shakespeare
- Away by Michael Gow
- Copenhagen by Michael Frayn
More to be added here…!
Non-Fiction: I’m not a big non-fiction reader, but for what it’s worth:
- The Creators by Daniel Boorstin – a big, beautiful tome on the history of creators & their genius.
- An Intimate History of Humanity by Theodore Zeldin
Musings of a Literary Dilettante's Blog 
Love your list – some favourites of mine here too: the Austens, Eucalyptus, and Voss to name a few – but really, I’d probably have many of these on my list too. So hard to compile though aren’t they?
BTW No Dickens? An accidental omission, or he’s not a favourite?
Er, um, a confession: the closest I have got to Dickens is Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs(!) I know, I know, the shame. I have no defence, other than to say … nope, no defence… I do have a few Dickens on my TBR though, I even have Tale of Two Cities in The Bookshelf Rainbow, but each time I rummage through my unreads, I seem to pick something else up. It’s the same with Joyce’s Ulysees.
As my promise to you – and to my good friend Suzanne – who loves Dickens, I shall get to him soon, that’s all I can promise 🙂
jb
LOL, I know it’s hard to read everything – and I have only dipped into Dickens myself but he is worth reading. You might find him quite surprising – then again you may not!
Mmm, yes, nice list, and I’m pleased to see The Pages there – that’s the one that made me reappraise Bail because I hadn’t much liked Eucalyptus.
How are you going with Moby Dick? I found that one a bit of a struggle, and in the end I only finished it because I felt I ought to, though since then there have been a couple of times that it’s echoed when I was reading something else. Most recently in the whaling scenes in That Deadman Dance (though I didn’t say that in my blog so as not to put anyone off reading it LOL).
Ha, I’m struggling with Moby Dick too. There is some wonderful writing, poetic and full of rhythm, but overall there’s just a whole lot that’s not very engaging at all and quite boring. I’m half-way through and have considered ditching it, but, like you, will perservere! 🙂
jb
More about whales and whaling than you want to know, eh?
Call me an uncultured swine, but I mourn the lack of high-fantasy or sci-fi, is it just not your genre? I personally am a great fan of many of the books on your list, however I also enjoy authors such as Raymond E Feist, Janny Wurts, Robert Jordan and Orson Scott Card….
Hi Zachery, Well, I’m not about to call anyone uncultured swine! I read some fantasy and I am reading a sci-fi book at the moment, but I don’t a lot of them and so I usually don’t blog about them here. For instance, I’ve read George RR Martin and enjoyed him a lot, but not reviewed him. I’ve got Jordan’s first Wheel of Time book on my shelf waiting to be read, too. (I have a friend who is always giving me new, mostly high fantasy stuff!) But most of what I read is what would be called ‘literary fiction’. I think there’s a lot to admire about speculative fiction and New Weird fiction. I think the labels we put on genres, while helpful most of the time, sometimes don’t do us readers service. China Mieville seems to be one of those authors who can straddle across genres and invite those of use who read literary fiction to widen our horizons a bit, which is great. There are other authors who perhaps work the other way. Take Haruki Murakami. There’s lots of literary and weird stuff going on in his writing! I’d recommend you read ‘Kafka on the Shore’ which I reviewed on this blog. Mostly it gets down to a matter of time for me. If I had more of it, I read more fantasy for sure. But I’m not sure I’m ever going to know enough about the genre to think that I can review it well enough! Cheer, John
PS: What you have done is remind me to update this page more often with the books I have read and enjoyed whichh I might not have reviewed here. Thanks. John