What are your 5 favourite books of all time?

I guess these are the five I re-read the most:

Funland - Richard Laymon
The end of Mr Y - Scarlett Thomas
The magic cottage - James Herbert
IT - Stephen King
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

I love so many of the books already mentioned - Cold Comfort Farm, A Prayer for Owen Meany, Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow and lots of others!

But here are five that haven't - I think - been on anyone's list so far:

Charlotte's Web - E. B. White (the first book to make me cry)
Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome
The Passion - Jeanette Winterson
The White Hotel - D. M. Thomas
Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes

Loads mine change so much as i read a book a week!
All time fave always has been Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier though
Hannibal Series - Thomas Harris
Tom Thorne Series by Mark Billingham
Room - Emma Donough
The Shining/Dr Death - Stephen King
The Cellar - Natasha Preston

Contemporary(ish) favourites
Wolf Hall
The Goldfinch
Catcher in the Rye
Oranges are Not the Only Fruit
We need to talk about Kevin

I have loads of others which I could list thematically.. getting carried way now

Another vote for Cold Comfort Farm, it's my go to book when I want to be cheered up.
100 years of Solitude -Gabriel Garcia Marquez
House Of The Spirits- Isabel Allende
Tales of the City- Armistead Maupin
Far from the Madding Crowd- Hardy

ClockS.

Other favourites, but which I haven't read more than once:

Sweetland -Michael Crummey
The Bone Clock and also The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet - David Mitchell
The Road -Cormac McCarthy (I could never read this again.)
Blindness -Jose Saramago
Room -Emma Donahue

Mine are pretty low brow...but great!

Reggie Perrin series - David Nobbs
Adrian Mole - Sue Townsend
Moomin books -Tove Jansson
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
A Month in the Country by JL Carr

Stratter5 - I love your list!!!

So many favourites but here are 5 that really blew me away:

Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
Regeneration by Pat Barker
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

The enchanted wood -it got me into reading and as a child I read it over and over.

Now I only tend to read a book once -too many books too little time.

The best in more recent times have been

The book thief

Life after life

Perfect

Her fearful symmetry.

If a whole series is allowed to be counted as one, I would have added the Harry Potter series. I loved them (as an adult, and looking forward to sharing them with the DC).

David Copperfield
The tin drum
The whole Laura ingles wilder series (little house on the prairie)
Half of a yellow sun
Germinal

Les Grandes Meaulnes
Decline and Fall
The Go Between
Remains of the Day
Miss Smillas Feeling for Snow

I'm really struggling to narrow down to just five, but here goes:-

1. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
2. Persuasion - Jane Austen
3. The Woman in Black - Susan Hill
4. Untold Stories - Alan Bennett
5. The Bone Clocks - David Mitchell

(In reserve The Railway Children - E Nesbit, Emma - Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen)

The Group - Mary McCarthy
My Son My Son - Howard Spring
The Quincunx - Charles Palliser
Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens
The Secret History - Donna Tartt

I don't re-read much but books that have stayed with me.

Tess of the D'Urberville, Thomas Hardy (I am still reeling from it and it was over 4 years ago).

The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society (or similarly titled, the order of the words escape me). It leaves me feeling all warm and fuzzy and makes me smile just thinking about it.

The Count of Monte Christo, Alexandre Dumas (I simply loved every single second of the month it took me to read it).

Señor Vivo and the Coco Lord, Louis de Bernieres (vivid memories of being on holiday and sobbing and then snorting with laughter). I was torn for this choice between Señor Vivo and Birds Without Wings.

The Foundation Pit, Andrey Platanov (unexpectedly funny and I will never lose the image of Communist chickens).

Since others have taken liberties when including children's books I will add Black Beauty and concur with those who have mentioned Goodnight Mister Tom.

Beloved Toni Morrison
The Time Traveller's wife
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Use of Weapons Ian M Banks
The Book of Strange New Things by Michael Faber

Can't beat a list!

Difficult - I used to keep a regular list of my Top Twenty books, maybe I'll update that !
But : Gaudy Night ,DL Sayers
Thud, Terry Pratchett
The Ivy Tree, Mary Stewart.
The Valley of Song,Elizabeth Goudge
The Ready-made Family, Antonia Forest.

Maybe...

The Lord of the Rings (all of it) (Tolkien)
The Once and Future King (TH.White)
The Darkness is Light Enough (Chris Ferris, nature diary)
The Sunne in Splendour (Sharon Kay Penman)
Good Omens (Gaiman/Pratchett)

Of Human Bondage - Somerset Maugham
The Power of One - Bryce Courtenay
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Balkan Trilogy - Olivia Manning
The Silver Darlings - Neil Gunn

Wuthering Heights
Jamaica Inn
A Short History of Nearly Everything
I Am Pilgrim
His Dark Materials (Yes I'm counting a trilogy as once choice)

Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman
Hangover Square
Anne of Green Gables
Jane Eyre
The Stand

I would be suspicious of someone who didn't like any of those books.

cote I have. They were both contenders for my list. As were several John Courtenay Grimwood's.

A scanner darkly is fab but Valis shades it maybe because it was my first PKD

First four are easy. In no particular order (and again, favourite, not 'best')

The Dispossessed by Ursula le Guin
Mansfield Park
The Diary of a Provincial Lady
Pride and Prejudice

Adding a fifth is harder, probably two of the stories from the collection The Birthday of the World by Ursula le Guin (Solitude, and Paradises Lost).