I've started, will I finish?
Chekhov - Stories - If it has to be one of the many volumes, make it the later stories, 'The Black Monk', 'The Bishop' and 'The Lady with the Little Dog', although 'The Kiss' means most to me. Chekhov's stories are beautiful, painful, unresolved and heavily pregnant with meaning.
Joyce - Ulysses - I'm sticking this on here even though I only got up to 'Sirens' so far - because I know from reading that far that this is a book that contains everything you need from a book, and is one of the only books to tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but.
Tolstoy - Anna Karenina - Another book I've not finished. I got halfway through, convinced it was the only novel I ever needed to read. Like Final Fantasy 7, which I was convinced was the greatest game ever made, until I stopped playing it because I got stuck. One day!
Milton - Paradise Lost - Staggering blank verse tour de force. Obviously terribly boring in parts but in large part pretty (surprisingly) thrilling. Satan one of the best characters ever created. Book 9 I would suppose to be some of the best poetic drama ever written outside Shakey.
Yeats - Collected Poems - I've not really investigated Blake or Eliot enough to include them, but I've read a fair number of Yeats's, and he's the daddy afaic. Ridiculous, humourless but also DA DADDY. If it came down to one collection I suppose it would be The Tower.
Terry Pratchett - Thief of Time - Bit of a random choice but I remember this being one of my favourite Discworlds. Obviously not 'high' literature but I've always loved Pratchett's Discworld novels. Right up my street, having grown up loving Maid Marian and her Merry Men and Blackadder, and escapism, of course.
Shakespeare - King Henry IV pt. 1 - Could have picked a few Shakeys, obvs, not least Othello, but this is definitely my favourite of those I've read. Amazing blend of 'low' comedy and 'high' history, featuring one of the most entertaining, tender and poignant depictions of friendship ever (Hal and Falstaff).
Swift - Gulliver's Travels - Not read this since uni tbh but it made a big impression on me at the time. Still genuinely funny, bracingly misanthropic, imaginative.
Martin Amis - The War Against Cliché - I'd be dishonest not include this, one of my most well-thumbed books. Aside from the lit crit, very influential on me because it showed me an article about chess could be exciting, given the right writer. (Most of his novels are failures though.)
Philip Larkin - Collected Poems - feel deeply ambiguous about Larkin. In many ways I can see his achievement is quite narrow, even parochial, compared to Eliot, say. Anyway, having been depressed and lonely for great swathes of my life, Larkin's poetry speaks to me in a frankly uncomfortable way. And poems like "An Arundel Tomb" and "The Whitsun Weddings" are so extraordinarily artful. What can I say? I wasn't into poetry. I read Larkin and I was instantly hooked - and speared.
Would like to have included Madame Bovary, The Trial and Gombrich's Story of Art. But no space.