Fun Home is a brave book, and beautifully rendered. I’ve never experienced a story like this, and the restraint is poignant.’

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.

I’m not entirely sure that I get Nightwood, but I love the language and the characters, and I go to the bookcase sometimes just to touch its spine and reconnect with the story.

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

I cried like a child at the end of the Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. And several times before the end. If there is a spell against the dark, it must be, “Someone will come.”

Mad and operatic. During my first reading, I remember having to remind myself to breathe. And the scene where the web-footed woman takes her gondola to the house of her married lover in order for her poor insane friend to steal back her still-beating heart is, even now, the way I conceptualize breakups. Messy, furtive, dreamy, improbable.

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

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

Nobody Owens lives the most unusual tale of heartbreak I have ever read. Gorgeous, and unpredictable, and eerie.

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.

Housekeeping is the kind of story that you want read to you at night, so that you can dream in this language with these characters.