"Yes, a few of the lines are easy to mock (“I love thee and thou art so lovely and so wonderful and so beautiful and it does such things to me to be with thee that I feel as though I wanted to die when I am loving thee.”) Yes, the constant use of “thee” is grating. But my love for this novel isn’t rational. I have no interest in defending it. I loved it from first to last. No final page has ever left me as shattered as this one."

"The first and only fan letter I wrote to an author (other than to Gloria Steinem) was to Wally Lamb. It started with, “How can a man have written this book?” I bathed in Wally Lamb’s creation of a flawed but fascinating heroine teen girl who morphs into a sometimes misled, powerful and flawed adult woman. Her life’s adventures and choices, both positive and positively horrid, still touch me on my third, fourth and fifth read of this novel. (I loved it so much I voiced the book on tape.)"

"The first novel that messed me up. I’ve read it so many times—first in my late teens, when I was in my full horror fan mode. In Ireland, where I lived, there was no such thing as a streetlight, so you looked outside and your own imagination would decide what was there. But there was something about the descriptions of the Bramford, the apartment that Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse move into, that was my first descriptive explanation of New York living. Way before I saw the movie, the story leapt off the page."

"This novel was handed to me on a silver platter by my husband, who said, "You cannot die without reading this." I keep coming back to it because it's so detailed in recording the inner life of Dick Diver, the central character. His yearning — to save his mentally unstable wife, Nicole — just keeps unfolding. That aching is quite destructive but also so understandable. The word I think of with this story is "fragile." I was utterly struck by the fineness of Fitzgerald's writing and the timelessness of Dick and Nicole's failures."

"A work of genius. But more important—and from a purely selfish point of view—a woman wrote it. That might seem ridiculous to male writers, but a man never has to think twice about the gender of genius. He’s got too many examples on his side of the fence. Eliot was the first woman I read who could go toe-to-toe with, say, Tolstoy. I was 15. Since then, I’ve learned how many grand achievements in the novel have been female, but when I was a teenager, that was news to me."

"In Argentina’s ‘dirty war’ in the ’70s, the military government had thousands of activists and political opponents ‘disappeared.’ This novel is about a mother and father dealing with the disappearance of their son. It’s a moving book that also has a lot of dark comedy in it. For instance, the parents accept free nose jobs in exchange for a debt. It also captures the comic absurdity of the bureaucracy of a dictatorship. What’s most interesting to me is, as one character makes clear, the truth tellers in life are so often written off as crazy."

"I normally wouldn’t find myself reading a Young Adult novel, but when something is as suspenseful and well written as this one, why not? The story is about a 17-year-old girl named Zoe who’s still in shock from a year’s worth of traumatic events. She gets involved with someone she’s not supposed to, and it makes her question whether she should or shouldn’t take a gamble on what might be perfect love. I’m sure they’ll make a movie about this eventually, but read the book first!"

"Youthful optimism and sexuality are thwarted by the bitterness of a crumbling town in Peter Bogdanovich’s lovely film of Larry McMurtry’s novel. One can feel the influence of John Ford and Orson Welles in both the deep focus compositions and the unexpected bursts of volatility. For example: there’s a fantastic scene where an argument between Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms escalates into a fistfight—the shots start to come faster and faster, almost every new shot from a different camera angle, culminating in a shocking moment of violence."

"I was 12 or 13 when was introduced to the fantasy/adventure books written by the author of the famous Tarzan series, and first read this novel. The idea of a huge mole machine burrowing to the center of the earth and discovering flying reptiles and other dinosaurish creatures was magical. The writing style now seems somewhat formal and clumsy, but as a young reader I was whisked along into the unknown. Later, in the 1930s, the author has Tarzan make the journey, too. How could that not work?"