My favorite novel: indelible and lovely.

Didion has style to burn, and a terseness of tone no one has ever quite captured again. Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a classic collection of essays.

The first book in Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” series. Check out the audio version in which a full-character cast includes the author’s dynamic narration. I find the daemon to be one of the most remarkable conceits in literature.

If I’d pursued a dissertation, it would have involved the Aubrey/Maturin books, with a particular emphasis on his three major female characters. O’Brian is a master of the anti-climax, and this series is superb.

A tautly plotted thriller. Waters explores class and sex in a style uniquely her own.

My copy of And Her Soul Out Of Nothing is trashed. I’ve read these poems so often that I sometimes dream in Davis’s language.

Oh, the best of Munro’s short story collections. Violence often informs these stories; though frequently outside the action, it is ever present. No one compresses time and characterization as well. The title story in this collection is unforgettable.

A fun, smart book. If you’re familiar with Jane Austen’s work, Fowler’s novel will resonate that much more deeply.

For years I carried The Great Fires in my backpack. Gilbert taught me that grief and love are different names for the same god.

Ann Patchett's State of Wonder is a difficult novel to shake. With her usual subtle elegance, she's pulling apart race and class and art and sex and the primitive. She's writing about children and parents. She's writing about arrogance and science. Come to the Amazon.

I clenched my jaw most of the time I was reading Room. Jack sends me. I trust him even when we’re rolled up in a rug being dead.

Inferno is the book the Modernists meant to write. Eileen Myles captures the actual experience of being alive.