Pride and Prejudice. Above all for the incredible vividness of the characters. Lizzie seems so real. I can still see her beautiful, brave, laughing face. Think I've been in love with her all my life.
Tom Jones. Fielding wrote this in the 1740s, in a very different world, yet the morality is so modern. Tom is like some square-jawed American hero from a 1950s Western. I love Tom as much as Lizzie. It actually makes me happy that this novel exists, and that it was written when it was. Even in a world of public hangings and savage cruelty, you still get men like Fielding. Weirdly, that cheers me up.
David Copperfield. The only novel that makes me cry. The whole range of human life and experience is there, and there is no better example of Dickens' glorious imagination.
Goodbye to all That. I hate the word 'inspiring', but this really is an inspiring book. The courage and nobility of the WW1 generation is astonishing. A masterpiece.
The Picture of Dorian Gray. The dialogue mesmerized me. To this day I long to speak like that.
To the Lighthouse. I grew up in suburban Essex and went to a crappy comprehensive, so the world of Wilde's Oxford aesthetes and Woolf's Bloomsbury intellectuals was an escape.
Right Ho Jeeves. I read the dialogue out loud all the time (I do a pretty good Bertie and an feckin awesome Jeeves). The sparkling beauty of the language held me like a spell, and still does.
The Wasteland. Eliot is hellishly difficult, but I have never read anything so beautiful.
Philip Larkin's Poetry. Even more depressing than Thomas Hardy...but SO beautiful.