A Map of the World - by Jane Hamilton (I love all of her books)
Daniel Deronda - by George Eliot
All the Sad Young Men, The Beautiful and the Damned , This Side of Paradise and of course, The Great Gatsby - by the inimitable F. Scott Fiztgerald
Stranger in a Strange Land - by Robert A. Heinlein
The Magician’s Assistant - by Ann Patchett (also Bel Canto and Commonwealth)
To Kill a Mockingbird - by Harper Lee (I read this way before it was assigned in English class…)
ALL OF THE BOOKS - by Philip Roth
My Name is Lucy Barton - by Elizabeth Strout (also Olive Kitteridge)
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit - by Jeanette Winterson
The Book Thief - by Markus Zusak
A Man Called Ove - by Fredrik Backman
The Catcher in the Rye - by J.D. Salinger
The Weight of Water - by Anita Shreve
The Bell Jar - by Sylvia Plath
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - by Milan Kundera
Solaris - by Stanislaw Lem
Tinkers - by Paul Harding
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men - by David Foster Wallace (I did enjoy Infinite Jest as well, but…it took me a whole year to read and then another half year to read all the footnotes. Worth it, though.)
The Town and the City - by Jack Kerouac. This was written before he hit the road and is very different than his other novels.
Confessions of a Crap Artist (and anything by Philip K. Dick (who wrote a lot of non sci-fi novels, btw, that are amazing)
For comic relief: check out David Sedaris. He is hilarious!
Of course, I love many more novels—but I’ll stop here for now…
