The poetry of Benny Andersen
• starkly beautiful and Danish; goes well with strong coffee

"Africa," Maya Angelou
• I am convinced that this poem is a masterpiece. Notice how Angelou breaks down the meter and rebuilds it, imbuing the final stanza with a striding power. She also uses assonance (similar sounds) and parallel grammatical structures to share meaning between words in the poem.

The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
• particularly fun to read when the government is being run by right-wing extremists

The Clan of the Cave Bear, Jean Auel
• humanity at an evolutionary fork, set in prehistoric Eurasia

Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
• 200 years old and still funny

Mythologies, Roland Barthes
• a collection of short essays debunking modern myths — these are great at bedtime

The Second Greatest Story Ever Told, Gorman Bechard
• a tongue-in-cheek novel of the life of a modern Messiah

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino
• will forever change your view of literature — a masterful metanovel

Ten Little Indians, Agatha Christie
• my favorite by the Dame of mystery; scary and suspenseful

The Hours, Michael Cunningham
• should be read as a companion piece to Mrs. Dalloway

"Differance," Jacques Derrida
• an essay deconstructing the binarism that privileges speech over writing

The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book, Jasper Fforde
• detective Thursday Next's adventures take her across literary and chronological boundaries

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, Fannie Flagg
• lots of fun, whether you saw the movie or not

A Room with a View, E.M. Forster
• passion meets independent thought on the Mediterranean

The Women's Room, Marilyn French
• a great 1970s feminist novel

Sophie's World, Jostein Gaarder
• a foray into philosophy, in the guise of a (long) children's story

Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
• a tale of passion and the transcendence of love

Smilla's Sense of Snow, Peter Hoeg
• a chilling mystery set in Denmark and Greenland

Lily White, Susan Isaacs
• a great beach read with a twist, by Andy's mom

Native Speaker, Chang-rae Lee
• a novel of alienation and identity, gorgeously written

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, Gregory Maguire
• The Wizard of Oz story from the perspective of Dorothy's foil

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, Alexander McCall Smith
• Botswanian farmer Precious Ramotswe uses her inheritance to open a detective agency

The Nice and the Good, Iris Murdoch
• an English bureaucrat's suicide sets in motion a chain of awakenings

The Eight, Katherine Neville
• an adventure spanning two centuries and three continents, woven together with number theory, chess, and mysticism

All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
• Southern politics, seen through the eyes of a poet laureate

Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• an early twentieth-century utopian novel

À la Recherche du temps perdu, Marcel Proust
• a man, a madeleine, a memory, a 3,000-page novel

Thinking Out Loud, Anna Quindlen
• a collection of her New York Times columns

Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
• a thousand-page celebration of human potential (Rand has a rabid following among neo-conservative libertarian types, but nonetheless I found this a powerful philosophical novel)

The Female Man, Joanna Russ
• a 1970s feminist science fiction novel of parallel selves

The poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay
• ah, the sexual freedom of the 'twenties...

Last Orders, Graham Swift
• this road novel through coastal England develops into an intimate portrait of men's friendships

Exodus, Leon Uris
• an American nurse and an Israeli freedom fighter meet in the violent birth of a nation

The Color Purple, Alice Walker
• love, endurance, forgiveness, hilarity, and silence

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
• Mrs. Dalloway's day is torn by the violence of war as she prepares for the civilities of a party

The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
• the Arthurian legends as experienced by his half-sister, Morgan le Fay; historically rich and infused with the power of the "old religion"