"At an early point in this novel, Lessing’s heroine, Anna, says that she wishes she could write ‘a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life.’ That’s as good a way as any to describe this book and its effect on me—but it’s also a genuinely involving and surprisingly enjoyable read, especially given that it is by a writer with almost no sense of humor. There was a time when I believed that any modern woman had to read The Golden Notebook, but I’m no longer given to pronouncements that are quite so doctrinaire."

"This would have to be my favorite classic novel. It’s such a beautiful, tragic love story—a book that will just destroy you. And Faulkner’s language is so utterly descriptive. He can write an entire page that consists of only adjectives and two commas. Actually, he’s the reason I ended up passing high school English, because my punctuation was always kind of…eccentric. I would say to my teacher, ‘Well, you know, William Faulkner—he doesn’t use proper punctuation.’ And one of my teachers ended up devising a system with two grades, where you were graded on content and then on whether it was properly written."

"Huge, magical, realist epic about Indian Independence through the eyes of a child born on the stroke of midnight. Funny, dense, flowery, the story goes on huge tangents, but I love this crazy novel, which somehow manages to depict and sum up the essence of the incredible vast country of India. A real education for me as someone who grew up in London, who had never been to India while growing up. This book helped me better understand what my parents had been through, where they came from before they chose to travel across the world to settle in the the U.K., where I was born."

"The novel begins “Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions.” It’s in the bombed out London of 1945 at the end of the war in a shabby, genteel boarding house for young ladies called the May of Teck Club. We meet the various girls of slender means and follow their lives and love affairs. I love all Muriel Spark’s books and think she is witty and elegant and spiky and weird. I met her once in Italy when I was a teenager and she told me, “For the next ten years all you should do is sleep and go to parties.”"