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Interesting range here. My selection is based on those I've re-read most (but no doubt I can think of others as well--I've read most of Agatha Christie many times since I started reading them in the 60s0
1. Great Expectations
2. Pride and Prejudice (that basically covers my 19th C authors)
3: Wreckers Must Breathe, Hammond Innes
4: The Snow Tiger, Desmond Bagley (story involves, among many other things, an avalanche in New Zealand)
I think of Asimov as primarily a short-story man, since I'm not that fond of his final rather long-winded volumes, so I'll run with
5: I, Robot, linked short stories. The movie was a travesty of the book. Asimov is still turning over in his grave.
6: Hiassen, Skinny Dip (don't ask me why this one above others, I don't know myself)
7: Bryson, Neither Here nor There, OR Bill Bryson Down Under. Tossup. I'm an Aussie and his take on Oz is spot-on and very funny.
8: Shirer, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Still the most readable book on the subject, all 1,500 pages of it. I've read it three or four times since the 60s, always right through, no stops and starts.
9: Death of a Lake, Arthur Upfield. OR An Author Bites the Dust, also Upfield. The first is set on a station in outback NSW during the most ferocious heatwave in NSW history (over 120 degrees in the shade, and it really happened, Upfield exerienced it himself in exactly that place). Even if you don't like whodunits, the description of its effect on people and animals as a shallow lake vanishes in days is very powerful. An Author Bites the Dust on the other hand is a rather biting satire on the "Literary Fiction" v "Popular Fiction" literary snobbery world of Victoria in the 1950s, and Upfield puts himself in as Clarence B Bagshott... I've read both several times, including recently.
And finally a wild card:
10: Men Martians and Machines by Eric Frank Russell. Well before Star Trek, it has a motley crew of humans, aliens and a robot going boldly where no man has gone before, in four linked novelettes. Humour, sense off wonder, well-worked out truly alien worlds. My copy is a hardback which has survived any number of readings.
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