 | Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan
Buy new: $19.80 / Used from: $0.01 The first third of this novel is the only perfect thing I've ever read. The middle section is very good, and the last is excellent. Throw in the twisty ending, and you've got a great novel. My current fave.
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 | Little, Big by John Crowley
Buy used from: $2.96 A huge, sprawling Tale in the classic John Gardner sense. Beautiful, allusive, and endlessly inventive.
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 | Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Buy used from: $0.01 Gorgeously written, it'll break your heart.
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 | Dubliners: Text and Criticism; Revised Edition (Critical Library, Viking) by James Joyce
Buy new: $12.24 / Used from: $1.51 The best short story collection I've read, featuring "The Dead" -- the best short story ever written.
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 | Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $7.00 If you've ever wondered what it means for landscape to become a character in a story, read this.
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 | Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $3.00 Perhaps the best fiction-writing, overall, I've ever read, even though Nabokov treats his characters viciously (as he does in _Pale Fire_).
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 | The Hiding Place: A Novel by Trezza Azzopardi
Buy new: $11.05 / Used from: $0.01 Should've won the Booker Prize (lost to Margaret Atwood). Creates an intensely real world and pulls the reader completely into the narrator's experience of that world.
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 | The Quiet American (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) by Graham Greene
Buy used from: $0.01 Didn't impress me that much as I was reading it, but has remained vividly in my head. I take that as a sign of its excellence.
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 | Middlesex: A Novel by Jeffrey Eugenides
Buy used from: $0.01 Just a great read. Strong story that pulls you along. Excellent protagonist/narrator.
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 | Middlemarch (Penguin Classics) by George Eliot
Buy new: $8.00 / Used from: $0.02 Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) was a terrifically sharp observer of the social scene. Want to understand America's "heartland?" Read this novel about 19th-cent. England's.
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 | William Trevor: The Collected Stories by William Trevor
Buy new: $19.80 / Used from: $4.94 Best read in small doses, but Trevor is the best short story writer working. "The Ballroom of Romance" is the only short story I've read that approaches Joyce's "The Dead."
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 | Waterland by Graham Swift
Buy new: $10.17 / Used from: $0.38 Absolutely brilliant. Another one that should've won the Booker. (The movie is top-notch, too.)
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 | Eclipse: A Novel by John Banville
Buy new: $10.36 / Used from: $1.76 For sheer beauty of sentences and images, it's the best I've read.
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 | The Iliad (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) by Homer
Buy new: $11.56 / Used from: $4.61 Where Western Literature begins. And for reasons I can't figure out, I just like it. Much better than _The Odyssey_ in my opinion.
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 | Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: A Novel by Susanna Clarke
Buy new: $18.45 / Used from: $0.01 Fun 'n' breezy historical fiction, and how often do you get to say that? Great job of integrating the fantastic into a real, historic world and making it seem perfectly normal.
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 | The Grapes of Wrath (Centennial Edition) by John Steinbeck
Buy new: $11.05 / Used from: $2.98 Helped me learn as a young man how to be an American and have a social conscience.
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 | Metamorphoses (Penguin Classics) by Ovid
Buy new: $8.64 / Used from: $3.46 Every plot in Western Literature is here, and one can almost hear Ovid cackling in the background.
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 | To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) by Harper Lee
Buy new: $10.87 / Used from: $4.56 It's a classic and an easy read -- a combination one doesn't run across every other Thursday. Even better than the movie.
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 | Omensetter's Luck (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) by William H. Gass
Buy new: $12.75 / Used from: $5.92 I can't describe it. Give it a look at the bookstore and see what you think before you buy.
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 | A Tale of Two Cities (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens
Buy new: $8.00 / Used from: $0.01 If you're willing to play along with his 19th-century preachiness, Dickens can be a blast. I like this one even though he went way over the top with the annoyingly stereotyped (even for Dickens) Lucie Manette character.
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 | Kissing in Manhattan by David Schickler
Buy new: $11.90 / Used from: $0.01 A fabulous (in both senses) collection of interrelated short stories. Great fun.
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 | The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Buy used from: $0.01 Very strong storyline, and 6 characters who'll become completely real in your mind.
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 | At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill
Buy used from: $0.24 Beautifully written. Interesting story. Lifelike characters. What else do you want?
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 | Instances of the Number 3: A Novel by Salley Vickers
Buy new: $11.70 / Used from: $0.32 Vickers has astonishing insight into her characters and, by extension, her readers.
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