Good choice of Brontė, Katherine. Wuthering Heights is wonderful! [img]smile.gif[/img]
I tend to agree with you about fantasy - there's a difference between a well-written fantasy novel and truly great literature. I do read lots of fantasy though, as a means of relaxation. There are notable exceptions to the 'badly written' rules: I really enjoyed Robin Hobb's books, also Tad Williams' Otherland series. And of course Pratchett is fantastic!
But as for my favourite books apart from that - there are SO many of them! A short selection of things that left a big impression:
Anthony Burgess - Earthly Powers
A.S. Byatt - Possession; Angels & Insects; Babel Tower
Iain Banks - everything he's ever done, whether fiction or SF
Emily Brontė - Wuthering Heights
Thomas Pynchon - The Crying Of Lot 49
Shakespeare, Marlowe - everything either of them has ever written
Milton's Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes and Lycidas
Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead
Samuel Beckett - Waiting For Godot
Nietzsche's complete oeuvre
Süskind - Das Parfum
Hesse - Demian
Oscar Wilde's complete oeuvre
Umberto Eco - The Name Of The Rose, Foucault's Pendulum
Vestdijk's De Kellner en de Levenden (had to include the only Dutch novel to touch me so profoundly - though I really should mention Komrij's Dit Helse Moeras and Dorrestein's Buitenstaanders as well then [img]tongue.gif[/img] )
Sartre's Huis Clos
De Beauvoir - probably called No One Is Immortal or somesuch in English...
oh - I shouldn't forget Will Self and especially Ian McEwan - great authors!!
As for poetry, oh my...
I adore Donne's work, also Yeats, Milton, Keats, Blake, Frost, Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath, Edwin Morgan, Craig Raine, Shelley, George Herbert, Spenser, Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Wilde, so many many more.... my hands hurt now....
