I've come late to the game, but this is wonderful......
I cannot believe there are so many Vanity Fair fans out there - I've spent my adult years feeling strange because if I say it's my favourite people look at me funny
Wide Sargasso Sea is the only modern sequel to a classic that I've read all the way through, and it's very good, and Jane Austen, well I came very close to signing up for a Oxford course just on her for next year, and then got pg.... I'm still thinking it was the less interesting decision! If you want to give yourself a task, read Northanger Abbey, after reading Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, so you can see how she was playing with the gothic novels that were so popular at the time.
Can I vote for Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love in the Time of Cholera (also One hundred Years of Solitude), and
Graham Greene's The End of the Affair? I don't think either have been mentioned yet... Like all Greene's other titles too, although they're radically different to that one, and each other.
Otherwise, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones is a fantastic choice, as would be Proust's Rememberance of Things Past.
Cannot agree on anything Bronte - just read Agnes Grey and hated it. Pointless and complaining! Also, have tried and tried with Middlemarch and just can't get into it. I like Elizabeth Gaskell, which probably doesn't make sense, but anyway....
Nobody has mentioned Virginia Woolf or Tolkien which is fine by me, but thought someone might love them.........