What is the best book of all time?

Question:

What is the best book of all time?

my vote is for the Lord of the Rings

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: It depends on what you mean by 'best'. I'm not the kind of lit snob who thinks that Lord of the Rings is a bad book - actually I like it, but there are other and more powerful books, IMO.

Best novel about the wild weird wonderfulness/awfulness of life: Leo Tolstoy, 'War and Peace'

Best 20th century novel in English for sheer vim, talent and courage: James Joyce, 'Ulysses'

Best religious text for preaching stuff that I happen to (more or less) agree with: The Gospel of Matthew (note: I'm an atheist)

Best book of philosophy in terms of upsetting received ideas: Friedrich Nietzsche, 'Towards a Genealogy of Morals'

Best book of 20th century English poetry: TS Eliot, 'The Waste Land and other poems'

Best book by any English poet: William Blake, 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'

Best comic novel in English: toss-up between PG Wodehouse, 'The Code of the Woosters' and Douglas Adams, 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'. Wodehouse wins if you love perfect plotting, Adams if you don't care about story but just want great jokes.

Best novel about 20th century history: Thomas Pynchon, 'Gravity's Rainbow'.

Best collection of short stories since 1940: toss-up between Jorge Luis Borges, 'Fictions'; Donald Barthelme, 'Sixty Stories'; and Flannery O'Connor, 'A Good Man Is Hard To Find'. If you extend it to the beginning of the 20th century, then you have to include Franz Kafka, 'Metamorphosis and other stories' and James Joyce, 'Dubliners', at the very least.

...and so on.