"If I was really stranded on a desert island, this novel would be good to have. The movie is also good, but the book would help to pass more time. Both make surviving on a desert island seem like a walk in the park. What’s great about this adventure—which I find rare in pop culture—is the celebration of the mind, invention, and science."

"Jorge Luis Borges thought this short, hypnotic novel to be one of the best ever written, and Gabriel García Márquez said it freed him to imagine the world of One Hundred Years of Solitude. A man is told by his dying mother to go find his father. He embarks on the journey and falls into a nightmarish world that may be populated entirely by ghosts."

"A novel set in Tudor England that continues to move me on each reading—a beautifully written and emotionally complex book about Anne Boleyn that is courageous enough to resist easy explanations of the English queen’s appeal and creates a woman who could change the course of history with intelligence, style, and nerve tinged with recklessness, and driven by a dark ambition that eventually devoured her."

"There is a scene in “Tampa” where Celeste marks her territory, if you will, with her own vaginal moisture. That, in many ways, tells you everything you need to know about “Tampa” and Alissa Nutting's immense talents. This novel is disturbing, uncomfortable, irreverent, and compelling. Nutting makes us complicit in Celeste's crimes and still, she leaves room for empathy where most writers would not."

"One of the few novels I’ve ever read twice (though it’s been about 20 years, so it might be time for a re-read). A philosophy book in the form of a novel that has very little to do with motorcycle maintenance. Instead, it has a lot to do with the elusive aspects of “quality,” and the importance of attitude in your approach to life."

"PG Wodehouse is not a writer for those who want to read about the rah-rah world of aristocratic fops, he’s a writer for those who love reading sentences that shimmer with brilliance and wit. He is the preeminent English stylist, and I find it impossible to read him without purring with pleasure and hooting with laughter. This particular Jeeves and Wooster novel is a real corker."

"It’s now my favorite novel—it’s just the greatest explosion of imagination, craziness, satire, humor, and heart…There are passages that have become everyday Russian sayings. For instance, ‘Manuscripts don’t burn.’ If it had ever come out that this book was being written, Bulgakov would likely have disappeared permanently. That phrase stands for the fact that nothing is more powerful or more indestructible than the written word."

"A big, bold novel that spans six decades of the 20th century and opens with one of my favorite lines in literature: ""It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me. Earthly Powers is like a big over packed old mansion you enter and never want to leave"

"Imagine being an 18-year-old girl, on holiday with two radical poets, and coming up with an idea for a Gothic horror novel which also more or less invents the genre of science fiction, which then goes on to become such a huge and enduring success, constantly open to reinterpretation and reimagining, that it still seems vivid and alive two hundred years later."