Pale Fire is an amazing book. Nabakov's writing is so good that you have to stop again and again just to enjoy it.

Ulysses is a book that many start and few finish.

Both the Count of Monte Cristo and the Three Musketeers are great, fun reads. The Michael York movies of the latter was one of the few movies that managed to be enjoyable and hold true to the book.

Red October is a taut, well-paced thriller. Subsequent books have pretty much failed to maintain the pace set by his first. The Sum of All Fears degenerated into a kind of hapless have-somebody-do-something-stupid-in-order-to-further-the-plot. This may have been his nadir, but I have read nothing of his since.

Generally people like Rand for her philosophy, which underlies Atlas and The Fountainhead. However, she is an awful writer.

Just about any of the McGee novels are great reads. They are good airplane reads, engrossing and portable (used bookstores usually have a number of paperbacks).
The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything is a bit of a sidetrack for him and seems to have been written for TV. Not very successfully.

The White Castle is definitely a more accessible book than Red, although the latter has garnered more international publicity.

In January 2006 charges against him for insulting the Turkish identity were dropped after international outcry. The charges were filed after he made comments about the 1915 Armenian massacres.