Oh dear: I've spent NO time thinking about this in the ensuing months. So, to save a little face and keep this topic alive, I'll crib and trim John's list as a cheap starting point:

MY FAVORITE BOOKS

• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
• Bleak House by Charles Dickens
• The Compleate Enchanter by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt
• Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula K. LeGuin
• "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" by Mark Twain
• Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter
• The Haunted Woman by David Lindsay
• The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
• Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
• Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Mabinogian
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville
• Narcissus and Goldman by Hermann Hesse
• The Oxford English Dictionary
• The Princess Bride by William Goldman
• Robots Have No Tails by Henry Kutner
• The Starship and the Canoe by Kenneth Brower
• Titus Groan and Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
• The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. by Robert Coover