What are you favorite books from the literary canon?

The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall by Camus are all good reads -- especially together. Camus is my favorite 20th century philosopher and I feel that those books are the real gems of his bibliography.

"The Myth of Sisyphus" is also a good collection of essays, especially the titular one.

If you'd like to reach out beyond the Western canon, would you be interested in some classical Chinese texts? The following are some of my favourites.

• Mencius
• Zhong Yong Not exactly a book, but considered canonical.
• Tao Te Ching There was a translation by Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Art of War by Sun-tzu, if you like warlike stuff.
• Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian. Also a classical text, even if you don't have the appetite for the whole RGH, is Sima Qian's Letter to Ren An, his intimate self-account of suffering and deliverance.
• Novels, short stories, and verse by Lu Hsun. Most famous among them is Real Story of Ah-Q.
• Anything by Lao She.

First of all Ted Gioia has a piece on the post 1985 canon that is worth a look: http://www.thenewcanon.com/

Second, most of "The LIterary Canon" is usually considered controversial. The traditional list is rather one sided as you would expect from a historical list put together almost a century ago. There's even a great book by David Denby called Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World which tells of his taking two college courses on one version of the canon.

But you asked about favorites, and mine would be the stories of Jorge Luis Borges, because of their density and depth. To be honest, Borges wasn't on the old canon list, but is on one I found and is copied here:

The Lifetime Reading Plan, by Clifton Fadiman (3rd edition)
The Beginning

Homer, The Iliad
Homer, The Odyssey
Herodotus, The Histories
Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War
Plato, Selected Works
Aristotle, Ethics, Politics
Aeschylus, The Oresteia
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone
Euripides, Alcestis, Medea, Hipploytus, Trojan Women, Electra, Bacchae
Lucretius, Of the Nature of Things
Virgil, The Aeneid
Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations 

The Middle Ages

Saint Augustine, Confessions
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales 

Plays

William Shakespeare, Complete Works
Moliere, Selected Plays
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
Henrik Ibsen, Selected Plays
George Bernard Shaw, Selcted Plays and Prefaces
Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard
Eugene O'Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey into Night
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape
Contemporary Drama, edited by E. Bradlee Watson and Benfield Pressey 

Narratives

John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Jonathon Swift, Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, Meditations upon a Broomstick, Resolutions when I Come to be Old
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Emma
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Our Mutual Friend, Little Dorrit
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass
Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge
Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
James Joyce, Ulysses
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves
D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Collected Essays
George Orwell, Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Franz Kafka, The Trial, The Castle, Selected Short Stories
Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
Voltaire, Candide and Selected Works
Stendhal, The Red and the Black
Honore de Balzac, Pere Goriot, Eugenie Grandet
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
Andre Malraux, Man's Fate
Albert Camus, The Plague, The Stranger
Edgar Allan Poe, Short Stories and Other Works
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, Selcted Tales
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Bartleby the Scrivener
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Henry James, The Ambassadors
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying
Ernest Hemingway, Short Stories
Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Humboldt's Gift
Miguel de Cervantes de Saavedra, Don Quixote
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, Dreamtigers
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, Dead Souls
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov
Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, War and Peace
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Pale Fire, Speak, Memory
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, Cancer Ward 

Philosophy, Psychology, Politics, Essays

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 

Selected Other Works

Sigmund Freud, Selected Works
Niccolo Macchiavelli, The Prince
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Selected Essays
Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method
Blaise Pascal, Thoughts
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Works
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience
William James, The Principles of Psychology, Pragmatism and Four Essays from The Meaning of Truth, The Varieties of Religious Experience
John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct
George Santayana, Skepticism and Animal Faith, Selected Other Works 

Poetry

John Donne, Selected Works
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Lycidas, On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, Sonnets, Areopagitica
William Blake, Selected Works
William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Selected Shorter Poems, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, 1800
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan, Biographia Literaria, Writings on Shakespeare
William Butler Yeats, Collected Poems, Collected Plays, The Autobiography
T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems and Collected Plays
Walt Whitman, Selected Poems, Democratic Vistas, Preface to the first issue of Leaves of Grass (1855), A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads
Robert Frost, Collected Poems
Poets of the English Language, edited by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, edited by Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair 

History, Biography, Autobiography

Basic Documents in American History, edited by Richard B. Morris The Federalist Papers, edited by Clinton Rossiter
Jean Jacques Rousseau, Confessions
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century 

Annex

William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization
Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People Page Smith, A People's History of the United States
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World
Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics
E.H. Gombrich, The Story of Art
Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book 

Not 100% sure what's considered part of the literary canon, but I feel like Steinbeck's a good guess, so I'll give Cannery Row a recommendation.