 | The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier
Buy new: $9.50 / Used from: $0.49 A beautifully realized novel using a semblance of plot to tell a story of spiritual and human longing for both connection and transcendence. We are asked to ponder life's deepest questions.
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 | Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan
Buy new: $10.17 / Used from: $0.01 Magnificent writing. Different points of view inform this heartbreaking novel about the vagaries of truth and the power of the novelist.
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 | Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kirsten Bakis
Buy used from: $0.01 Read this novel as if you were interpreting a dream. Weird and absolutely compelling - filled with the symbols (and mysteries) of dreams.
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 | Housekeeping: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson
Buy new: $10.08 / Used from: $1.13 Abandoned sisters - one slips into madness, and the other tries in vain to fight the insanity she experiences around her. Imagery of terrible beauty.
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 | The Alexandria Quartet Boxed Set (Alexandria Quartet) by Lawrence Durrell
Buy used from: $56.92 These four novels are written like the best poetry, with the same stories and characters, but from four different views. Reality itself is profoundly challenged.
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 | The Riders by Tim Winton
Buy new: $10.88 / Used from: $0.01 A dark, powerful, obsessive journey into the psyche of a man tortured by the disappearance of his wife. Beautiful, haunting.
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 | Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman
Buy new: $9.80 / Used from: $6.47 Philosophical musings about life from the point of view of the theory of relativity. Trippy.
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 | Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light (P.S.) by Leonard Shlain
Buy new: $11.55 / Used from: $6.89 If your world view is based on the revelations of both cosmological and quantum physics, maybe you're an artist. Big questions, big coincidences.
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 | The Hours by Michael Cunningham
Buy new: $10.40 / Used from: $0.01 Relentless good writing in overlapping stories, each one luminous. A great novel whether you've read any Virginia Woolf or not.
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 | To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Buy new: $10.04 / Used from: $0.01 A beautifully hazy novel where things might not be how they seem at first. Subtle genius.
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 | Black Water (Contemporary Fiction, Plume) by Joyce Carol Oates
Buy new: $9.23 / Used from: $0.50 Joyce Carol Oates's obsessive style makes this deep and inevitable account of the Chappaquiddick incident a page-turner, even though we know the ending.
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 | The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
Buy new: $11.52 / Used from: $0.01 Great, singular writing. A unique voice. A great story with deep insight.
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 | Rumors of Peace by Ella Leffland
Buy new: $16.00 / Used from: $0.01 Profoundly moving account of a young girl's tangental experience of WWII. This is no ordinary coming-of-age story; it's written for grown ups.
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 | White Oleander: A Novel by Janet Fitch
Buy used from: $0.01 The truest description of the development of an artist and her art I've ever read, this novel is also enormously evocative of LA.
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 | Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $1.99 You'll laugh, you'll cry. You will definitely be moved by Lamott's intelligent musing about life and writing.
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 | 1984 (Signet Classics) by George Orwell
Buy new: $9.99 / Used from: $1.99 A paranoid fantasy I carry with me as if it were the daily news. Eerie, unrelentingly dark, too close to home.
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 | The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $1.79 Depicts the Japanese tension between the demands of social roles and the deeper truths of inner reality.
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 | The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel (P.S.) by Barbara Kingsolver
Buy new: $10.79 / Used from: $0.38 How Barbara Kingsolver could write a novel so complex, so well-written, so, well, good, is a mystery well worth exploring in this thoroughly absorbing novel of familial complications in Africa. Absolutely stunning.
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 | A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Buy new: $10.04 / Used from: $3.50 I read it in high school in the '60s - high school kids read it still. Only now it's not fiction.
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 | The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Buy new: $9.36 / Used from: $1.87 A Russian foray into the world of magic realism. A big and bold novel, incorporating psychological depth, questions about reality and an absurdist plot. Challenging, but entertaining to read, worth every minute.
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 | Garner's Modern American Usage by Bryan A. Garner
Buy used from: $14.49 The very best guide for the Grammar Police. Entertaining to an exquisite degree ... if you like that sort of thing.
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