 | Middlemarch (Penguin Classics) by George Eliot
Buy used from: $0.01 Seamless. "George" was at the top of her profession here and thats saying a lot for a 19th century author.
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 | Lost Illusions (Modern Library Classics) by Honoré de Balzac
Buy new: $11.96 / Used from: $4.00 A perfectly realized novel, it has it all. Timeless.You could meet the characters from this at Walgreen's.
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 | A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement by Anthony Powell
Buy new: $16.32 / Used from: $3.75 Read all 4 volumes. Powell drips of the literati.
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 | In Search of Lost Time, Vol. II: Within a Budding Grove (Modern Library Classics) (v. 2) by Marcel Proust
Buy new: $12.00 / Used from: $4.10 You dont need to start at the beginning. This is more like jazz than a ballad, imerse yourself, just keep an eye out for the subject of each sentence.
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 | The Wings of the Dove (Oxford World's Classics) by Henry James
Buy new: $9.95 / Used from: $0.62 Read each sentence twice, than see the movie, then ask yourself what happened? Still you will be satisfied. Incongrus but true.
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 | The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen
Buy new: $11.16 / Used from: $3.50 Bowen, like James above, is dense yet this is beautiful language, dark and humid.
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 | The Rainbow (Modern Library Classics) by D.H. Lawrence
Buy new: $9.35 / Used from: $0.52 Lawrence, ever crafty with his sentences, bends time with his patient pacing.
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 | The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York Review Books Classics) by Robert Burton
Buy new: $18.45 / Used from: $8.98 Stange, funny, erudite and very old with a 21st century sensibility. I was introduced to this by Powell, above. As Wm. Gass says in the intro "read a member a day"?!
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 | The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa
Buy used from: $0.01 How can so much be said in so few words? This author had only this one book in him. Is it genius or accidental? Only Salinger knows.
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 | Under the Volcano: A Novel (Perennial Classics) by Malcolm Lowry
Buy used from: $2.78 A surreal Joycean trip through one splintered Mexican day. A bile filled cocktail of despair written by another "one hit wonder" who knows of whence he speaks.
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 | To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Buy new: $10.04 / Used from: $0.01 She wasn't kooky, she was on acid.
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 | History of My Life, Vols. 5 & 6 by Giacomo Chevalier de Seingalt Casanova
Buy new: $35.00 / Used from: $13.49 Start in the middle and bring your preconceptions, they're true. How glorious; a well traveled, womanizing con man that's a literary giant. 12 volumes and it doesnt cover his last 30 years!
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 | Of Human Bondage (Modern Library Classics) by W. Somerset Maugham
Buy new: $9.56 / Used from: $0.74 How else could one know that there is so much satisfaction to be gained from so much despair?
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 | The Magus by John Fowles
Buy new: $11.55 / Used from: $3.52 Spooky, creepy and strange. This haunted tale loops and loops and twists and folds into itself in a double helix of blackness.
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 | Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $7.00 OK its not a classic - yet. It will be. This is one dark orgy of landscape, dreamscape and timescape. Don't attempt this without a dictionary, a very big dictionary.
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 | The Untouchable by John Banville
Buy new: $11.16 / Used from: $1.20 Also more contemporary than classic but a brillantly constucted tale of the weird spys in post ww2 England. Author wrote screenplay for Bowen's book above. You'll need the dictionary you used above.
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