Best Books Ever Written......EVER

[The Black Spot]

The Ginger Man  by JP Donleavy.

The hero(?) is a drunken, cheating waster, but you can't help but be on his side.

[Swatopluk]

Rudyard Kipling: Stalky & Co (get a complete edition, many are abridged)
The school story to end all school stories!
Honestly, he would have deserved the Nobel Prize for this alone, in my opinion.
Kim is also worth reading.

To go a bit further into the past:
The Elder Edda
The Epos of Gilgamesh (may we find the missing parts some day!)
Homer: Ilias&Odyssey

[Bruder Cuzzen]

DaveL,
             I thought of you a sibling a year ago, now that you rank Silmarillion above LOTR i'm convinced of this.I think it would make a great 100-200 episodal series.
 
I'm rather surprised at the  number of books/authors  listed to this date have been favourites of mine as well.
With this in mind I highly reccomend the "Shrike" series which includes Hyperion,Endymion and Hyperion"s end.

The Riverworld series was fabulous although the last tweenty pages out of 5,000 or so was a disappointment.

[Griffin NoName]

Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson  Aaaaaaargh!!

All of Charles Dickens