I like loved On the Beach

Good pick

Here's ten from me (I'm not saying it's official)

Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell

Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch - Henry Miller

The Death and Life of Dith Pran - Sydney Schanberg

Denial of Death - Ernest Becker

Cosmos - Carl Sagan

Woman in the Dunes - Kobo Abe

Road to Los Angeles - John Fante

Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

Black Rain - Masuji Ibuse

Death on the Installment Plan- Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Cosmos is an excellent pick.

If I were to stick to fiction, as grindy did, my list would probably go:-

The Solid Mandala by Patrick White
Nausea by J-P Sartre
A Room With A View by E.M. Forster
1984 by George Orwell
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Woolf
Eyeless In Gaza by Aldous Huxley
A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens
Titus Groan (and follow-up volume) Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake "Counts as one choice!"
Emma by Jane Austen
The Hours by Michael Cunningham (thus saving the trouble of reading a Virginia Woolf book!)

With runners up:-

The Magus by John Fowles
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
The Volcano Lover by Susan Sontag
Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler

And some previously mentioned books that might've been on my list, but ten is ten so what can you do :-

A Scanner Darkly, Down And Out In London And Paris, The Naked Lunch, Lolita, Night , The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh and The Death and Life of Dith Pran. Good choices, all!

So cheery!

^ LOL Who says reading should be fun?

Watership Down - Richard Adams
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - PKD
Metamorphosis - Kafka
Animal Farm - Orwell
Ariel - Sylvia Plath
95 Poems - e.e. cummings
Calvin and Hobbes - Bill Watterson
Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
The Sunset Limited - Cormac McCarthy


Sooooo whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiite. :(

Bitch you are white.

Calvin and Hobbes >>

Bitch, I know, it's self-deprecation.

I came very close to putting Flowers for Algernon on my list.