My reading tastes run to international fiction, with the occasional American-authored doorstop like Don DeLillo's Underworld or Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. The list below, limited to six books, doesn't reflect my love of particular authors, like Orhan Pamuk, Cees Nooteboom, A.B. Yehoshua, Iris Murdoch, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima, Haruki Murakami and Javier Marias.  I'm also partial to 70s New Wave sci fi, like Samuel Delany's Dhalgren. For nonfiction, I read  mostly philosophy and theory.  But here's the short list, with a gun to my head:

P.S.  P.G. Wodehouse and Proust forever!