* = top ten
Novels:
Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
The Life and Times of Michael K by JM Coetzee
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Mao II by Don DeLillo
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Doestoevsky
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
Howard's End by EM Forster
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
*The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford by Ron Hansen
*Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
*Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
*A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome
Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Frances Johnson by Stacey Levine
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken
*Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
*Beloved by Toni Morrison
*The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
Diversadero by Michael Ondaatje
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
True Grit by Charles Portis
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins
*Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
*Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger
Hotel World by Ali Smith
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
*The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
The Gardens of Kyoto by Kate Walbert
Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
Written on the Body by Jeannette Winterson
PG Wodehouse
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Short Stories:
"One of Star Wars, One of Doom" by Lee K. Abbott
"The Toughest Indian in the World" by Sherman Alexie
*"Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin
"The Healer" by Aimee Bender
"Ralph the Duck" by Frederick Busch
"His Son, In His Arms, In Light, Aloft" by Harold Brodkey
"The Thing in the Forest" by AS Byatt
"Why Don't You Dance" by Raymond Carver
"Big Me" by Dan Chaon
"The Country Husband" by John Cheever
"The Shell Collector" by Anthony Doerr
"In the Cemetary Where Al Jolson is Buried" by Amy Hempel
"The Shared Patio" by Miranda July
"The Hunger Artist" by Franz Kafka
"Crazy Glue" by Etgar Keret
"The Girl Detective" by Kelly Link
*"The Smallest Woman in the World" by Clarice Lispector
"The Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
"The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
"The Secret Goldfish" by David Means
"Bartleby the Scrivener" by Herman Melville
"Dangerous Laughter" by Steven Millhauser
"Eisenheim the Illusionist" by Steven Millhauser
"Demonology" by Rick Moody
"How To Become an Other Woman" by Lorrie Moore
"The Elephant Vanishes" by Haruki Murakami
*"The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien
"My Date with Satan" by Stacey Richter
*"The Laughing Man" by JD Salinger
"Pastoralia" by George Saunders
Children's/Young Adult:
*Watership Down by Richard Adams
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume
*The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
*A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
*The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
*The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More by Roald Dahl
*Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
The Long Secret by Louise Fitzhugh
The Diary of Anne Frank
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norman Juster
*To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis
The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill
*The Borrowers by Mary Norton
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
*The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean, Noel) by Ellen Raskin
Harry Potter series by JK Rowling
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
Charlotte's Web by EB White
Nonfiction:
Collected Nonfiction by James Baldwin
The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings by James Baldwin
The Ninemile Wolves by Rick Bass
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
In The Shadow of Man by Jane Goodall
84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
River Town by Peter Hessler
Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson
A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid
My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso
The Habit of Being: Selected Letters by Flannery O'Connor
Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje
Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett
"The Santaland Diaries" by David Sedaris
Primary Colors by Alexander Theroux
"A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" by David Foster Wallace
Collected Essays by EB White
Collected Letters by EB White
Books on Craft of Writing
*Burning Down the House by Charles Baxter
The Art of Subtext by Charles Baxter
*The Half-Known World by Robert Boswell
Aspects of the Novel by EM Forster
The Art of Fiction by John Gardner
*Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
*Mystery and Manners by Flannery O'Connor
The Art of Time by Joan Silber
*The Eye of the Story by Eudora Welty
Poetry:
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson
Good Woman by Lucille Clifton
Some Things Words Can Do by Martha Collins
Names Above Houses by Oliver de la Paz
Furious Lullaby by Oliver de la Paz
The Pallbearer Envys the One Who Rides by Stephen Dobyns
Kinky by Denise Duhamel
The Tunnel by Russell Edson
The Angel of History by Carolyn Forche
The Poetry of Robert Frost
Never be the Horse by Beckian Fitz Goldberg
Without by Donald Hall
This Clumsy Living by Bob Hicok
Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
The Orchard by Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Song by Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Dien Cai Dau by Yusef Komunyakaa
New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver
The Cinnamon Peeler by Michael Ondaatje
Graphic "Novels":
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
Ghost World by Daniel Clowes
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Drama:
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee
*Six Degrees of Separation by John Guare
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee
*Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard
