My favourite fiction is:
Most novels, short stories, and novels by Thomas Hardy, but       especially "The Mayor of Casterbridge"
Waterland by Graham Swift
Gulliver's Travels by the other Swift
Most Roddy Doyle, but especially "Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha"
The Bridge by Iain Banks
The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan
Lanark by Alisdair Gray
Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh
Both "Slaughterhouse 5" and "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut Jr
Most Harlan Ellison, but especially "Strange Wine."
Catch 22- Joseph Heller
The Grapes of Wrath by John Stenibeck
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemmingway
Any Graham Greene
In Case of Emergency by Georges Simenon
The Gormenghast Triology by Mervyn Peake
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
The Best of Robert Block
The Time Machine by HG Wells
Captive Universe by Harry Harrison
Dying Inside and Tower of Glass by Robert Silverberg
Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock
FLuke by James Herbert
and I like the stories of Brent Dorman that appear in Forum but which, as far as I am aware, yet to be collected.

......... and best political books are:
Heroes by John Pilger
The View From the Ground and The Face of War by Martha Gellhorn
Deferring Democracy by Noam Chomsky
The Heavy Dancers by EP Thompson
The Thomas Paine Reader
Essays by George Orwell

.... and best history books:
The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson
Cromwell:Our Chief of Men by Lady Antonia Frasier
William Cobbett; The Poor Man's Freind by George Spater
Thomas Paine:A Political Life by John Keane
Industry and Empire by Eric Hobsbawm


I am reading Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom, which is proving fascinating.