Wharton: definitely one of my favorite novelists and, incidentally, the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize.

It may be the saddest book you'll ever read but it's also the best. It could be read as a guide on how to live your life (Levin) or how not to (Karenina).

So many people write this book off because of its runaway popularity and it's their loss. I still can't figure out how a man from NYC writes so convincingly from a Japanese woman's perspective.

This is a great book to read (and reread) in the teenaged years or young adulthood.

Mann's decadent prose couldn't make spiritual decay more beautiful or more terrifying.

Fowles is a mastermind of assuming the abnormal psyche; this novel, which is about a man who imprisons a young woman, reminds me of a certain Nabokov character.

This is more morally didactic than "Age of Innocence" but it is still Wharton at her finest.

This book is like going on a long jog in the hot sun - you'll hate every minute of it but when you're done, you know it was totally worthwhile.

More luxuious prose and spiritual decay - Wilde surpasses even Mann when it comes to portraying decadence and its horrific consequences.

This is best read right before "Lighthouse" - it's muddier and more experimental but you can almost hear Woolf's brain working out the themes that she refines in "Lighthouse."

Anyone who says that they were not moved by this book probably didn't finish it. This is a book about univeral truths.

Another most obvious classic - but for good reason. Then again, everything Nabokov writes is literary gold. He was just born that way.

Graves is a historian by trade but after reading this sprawling epic (with the most skillfully concise prose ever), you'll think of him as a novelist forever after.