The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It's the first in a trilogy of six books. I haven't read the last book but I would recommend reading 1 to 5.
The radio series and audiobooks are all worth a listen as well. There is a version narrated by Douglas Adams himself and another narrated by Stephen Fry and Martin Freeman. Both are great.
One of my favourite quotes from the Hitchhikers:
“You know,” said Arthur, “it’s at times like this, when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.” “Why, what did she tell you?” “I don’t know, I didn’t listen.”
I also love this quote from the fourth instalment of the series So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish:
The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying “And another thing…” twenty minutes after admitting he’s lost the argument.
The whole series is worth a read. You're bound to laugh over and over reading them.
The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong Six Records of a Floating Life by Shen Fu The Red Night Trilogy of William S. Burroughs (Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, The Western Lands) On the Road: The Original Scroll by Jack Kerouac Book of Haikus by Jack Kerouac The Stranger by Albert Camus The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky After Dark by Haruki Murakami The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain
I have a few favorites, but if I were stranded on a desert island, the one book I’d take with me would be Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky. The book is so layered, and the world is so unusual. It’s one of the few books I kept trying to put off finishing because I didn’t want it to end.
On mobile, too tired to write but... So many... But I honestly think Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy is as close to the perfect book as I can imagine (for me!). Also, Kafka for me is like the Final Boss, once you go through him, everything else pales in comparison
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