by Andre Dubus III
W.W. Norton & Company, 1999, 365 pages

In “House of Sand and Fog,” the central characters all have reasonable goals and desires, but they all confront problems that are largely beyond their control.

by Jeffrey Eugenides, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993, 256 pages

“The Virgin Suicides” marked a breathtaking debut for Jeffrey Eugenides, who would later win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction with “Middlesex.” The only important question he leaves unanswered is “why?” What would lead five perfectly healthy, radiantly beautiful, precociously intelligent young women to take their own lives?

by Howard Norman,
Picador, 1994
289 pages

Fabian Vas, the narrator and protagonist of Howard Norman’s 1994 novel “The Bird Artist,” reveals two key personal details within the book’s opening paragraph. First, he explains that he is, as the title suggests, a bird artist. He makes a modest living drawing the native species of the small fishing community where he resides, sketching ibises, ospreys, sandpipers, kittiwakes, mallards, garganeys and even his least favorite bird, the cormorant.

The second detail has a more confessional tone: “Yet I murdered the lighthouse keeper, Botho August, and that is an equal part of how I think of myself,” Fabian explains in the fifth sentence.  

Few beginnings could be more enticing than this. What could have possibly compelled this seemingly gentle bird artist with whom we’ve so recently become acquainted to murder the lighthouse keeper? With this question tingling in our brains, we read on, and Norman obligingly unfolds the tale.

Trade paperback publisher Picador chose a big personality to anchor “Violence,” the first entry in its “Big Ideas, Small Books” series. Slavoj Žižek is referred to as the “Elvis of Cultural Theory,” and like any good rock star, has a model for a wife. A self-described Marxist Communist, Žižek has run for president in his native Slovenia, written several books that marry sociological theory with pop culture, and continues to teach and lecture all over the world. 

by Mark Dunn
208 pgs, 2001, Anchor Books

When Mark Dunn’s fresh and fabulous little novel “Ella Minnow Pea” was first released, the title was “Ella Minnow Pea: a progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable.” That’s quite a mouthful. So, for the paperback version, the title was changed to “Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters.” Succinct, and also clever, for in choosing the word “letters” it describes both the books format and conditions. Confused? You’ll see.

It all starts with the letter “Z.” On the fictitious island of Nollop there stands a monument to the island’s namesake, resident Nevin Nollop, who created the pangram “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” (A pangram is a sentence that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet, and is usually kept to 35 letters in length.) When the letter “Z” falls from the cenotaph, an emergency meeting is called by the townspeople. Should they replace the letter? Is it a sign from a higher power that the letter “Z” is no longer needed?

by Cormac McCarthy
Alfred A. Knopf, 1992, 302 pages

Few modern American writers are able to encapsulate the continent’s rugged southwestern landscapes—and the human emotions imbued in those landscapes—like Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy’s writing seems to rise from the country’s pores like so much desert vegetation, stark and solitary against the horizon, its canted shadows stretching over vast surfaces, its network of roots groping for the core of things. His simple prose illustrates the divinity of earth, horse and man, how each is endowed with equal measures of beauty and pain, and how that beauty and pain is inextricably linked.

by J.R.R. Tolkien, George Allen & Unwin, 1954, 479 pages

It’s been more than 50 years since “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the first book of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, was initially published. While any author would be honored to be remembered so well after a half-century, surely Tolkien never foresaw that his life’s work of imaginative literature would not only endure, but become indelibly etched into the popular culture of the world like the fiery writing on the One Ring itself.

The book is still a great read in its own right, an epic adventure about a handful of home-loving hobbits who are swept up into a dangerous world of evil and magic, power and war. From their quite land of The Shire they are forced into a long journey across Middle-Earth in the company of a dwarf, an elf, a wizard and men from far-off kingdoms, first in flight from menacing Black Riders, and later with a perilous mission to destroy a magical ring in an effort to thwart the enemy, Sauron.

If it sounds like stock fantasy fare, it is, but that’s because Tolkien unwittingly created the mold from which much of the next half-century of fantasy writing would be cast. From Ursula K. Leguin to Robert Jordan, it’s hard to find a fantasy series that can’t trace at least part of its heritage back to the Ring trilogy. Tolkien didn’t just inspire imitators, he helped spawn an entire section of the bookstore.

by Doug Stanton
339 pages, 2001, Henry Holt and Company

For people born in the last few decades, the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis is a mere pop culture reference at most, having been briefly referenced in the 1975 classic, “Jaws.” As the men sit adrift in the middle of the ocean, drinking and sharing battle scar stories, the wonderful Robert Shaw, as Quint, delivers his monologue about being aboard a fictionalized version of the doomed cruiser: “You know that was the time I was most frightened... waitin’ for my turn. I’ll never put on a lifejacket again. So, eleven hundred men went in the water; 316 men come out and the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb…” Needless to say, Quint wins the tough guy contest.

by Terry Pratchett
375 pages, 2003 Harper Collins

A precocious young girl, aided by mythical creatures, must travel to another world to get her annoying baby brother back after he is stolen by Elfen royalty. No, it’s not “Labyrinth,” but it’s equally fun and twice as funny, thanks to the zany imagination of Terry Pratchett. Nine-year-old Tiffany Aching lives on a farm in The Chalk, a small town in the countryside, where she helps with the chores and watches her candy-loving baby brother, Wentworth.

“Anything could make Wentworth sticky. Washed and dried and left in the middle of a clean floor for five minutes, Wentworth would be sticky. But it didn’t seem to come from anywhere. He just got sticky. But he was an easy child to mind, provided you stopped him from eating frogs.”

by Charles Bukowski
307 pages, 1977, Black Sparrow Press

by Ellen Raskin
1978, 185 pages, E.P. Dutton

“I, Samuel W. Westing, declare this to be my last will and testament and do hereby swear that I did not die of natural causes. My life was taken from me—by one of you!”

by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine
222 pages, William Heinemann Ltd., 1990

Few people like to be preached at—especially when they have already taken it upon themselves to read a book about a heavy subject, like endangered species, for example. We already know the facts: Since our appearance on this planet, humans have polluted and poached their way through all corners of the world, destroying and eliminating thousands of different species of animals, birds, insects and plants. In short, we suck. We know this. But our simple little brains don’t want to feel guilty, they want to be entertained. So why not take a man famous for writing funny books that include aliens, the existence of which has yet to be proven, and let him tell the story of creatures who may not exist much longer?

On Feb. 28, 1955, a windy gale swept eight sailors over the side of a Columbian Navy destroyer and into the Caribbean Sea. Seven of those sailors drowned that day, but 20-year-old Luis Alejandro Velasco managed to fling himself aboard a small life raft, which became his temporary home on the surface of a vast and desolate sea. When he washed up on the northern Columbian shore 10 days later, he was weak, emaciated and blistered by the sun, having eaten nothing but a couple of bites of raw fish and a mysterious root, and having drunk only a few swallows of salty seawater. But he was alive. The account he later relayed to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, then a young newspaper reporter in Bogotá, offered thousands of eager and curious readers a taste of what it is like to be lost and alone at sea.   

by Jeanette Winterson
157 pages, 1987, Grove Press

It’s that time of year again. You know, the one Hallmark invented to sell cards? That’s right, Valentine’s Day, when people show their affection for one another with confections and flowers, while the holiday’s spokesperson, Cupid, supposedly flutters around with his bow poised, hoping to strike love between two lucky people. Right. Because nothing induces romance and makes someone feel all is right with the world like the idea of being skewered with an arrow by an androgynous flying midget in a diaper.

In reality, love isn’t a store-bought creation. Love is more like a fairytale. Not one of those Disney yarns, with singing bluebirds and mice doing the laundry, but a Grimm fairytale, with blood and torment and sometimes a happy ending, sometimes not. That’s a realistic love story. Hell, things even end badly in the book version of “The Princess Bride” (which is every bit as good as the film).

In nearly every romance ever portrayed on paper or screen, there is always something that threatens to separate the happy couple—another person, a war, an illness, an iceberg. But in Jonathan Lethem’s “As She Climbed Across the Table,” never before has the threat been so real ... and yet so nonexistent.

Of the 6 billion people on the planet, 1 percent of them have red hair. Until recently (or possibly still), redheads had been regarded in many cultures as evil or other-worldly, quick to temper, afraid of the sun. So, it makes perfect sense that Tom Robbins, himself a 1-percenter, would fuse redheaded lore with the angst of love and teenagedom.

Lusty, busty, redheaded Leigh-Cheri could almost pass for a normal teenager, were it not for the fact that she is a princess from deposed European royalty under CIA-protection in suburban Seattle. She lives with her mother, Queen Tilli, who is fond of opera and her Chihuahua, and her father, King Max, who loves to gamble and has a prosthetic heart. (“The noise that his heart valve produced sounded like two mechanical mice making love in a spoon drawer.”)

by Ayn Rand
1943, 752 pages, Bobbs Merrill

Every once in a while, you pull a novel from the stacks that unexpectedly delivers a philosophical kick to the head. I didn’t know much about “The Fountainhead,” by Ayn Rand, until my brother, an architecture student, handed it to me. Rand’s philosophy of selfishness as a virtue was familiar, and I knew the book had something to do with architecture, but I had no idea that, in the midst of reading it, I would be forced to question some of my deepest held convictions.

One snowy day, Mole and Troll decide that, with Christmas fast approaching, it would be a perfect time to pick out a Christmas tree. So, they get all bundled up in their coats, hats and scarves and set off into the forest to choose one. Mole could hardly contain his excitement.

“‘Let’s see,’ he said. ‘I will take that one and that one. No, wait! I want those three and that little one and that one, too!’”

Troll has to rein Mole in a little before he chops down all the trees in the woods. So, Troll decides he will spin Mole around and whichever tree Mole staggers into first, that will be the one they pick.

Long before Harry Potter was introduced, there were other Potters in literature—Ben, Tom and Lindy, to be exact. Mary Poppins, aka Julie Andrews Edwards, brought them into existence two decades before J.K. Rowling had written a word about the boy wonder of Hogwarts. The similarities between Harry and the other Potters are remarkable. They are all young, restless children leading dull lives who learn that there are, in fact, other places and creatures out there in the world, unbeknownst to most adults. Wait, that’s almost every kids’ story ...

by Ian Frazier
1986, 123 pages, Picador

Don’t be put off by the title. Well, certainly, we encourage you to be turned off by the title, but just because it sounds like a how-to book authored by Oedipus, don’t let it deter you from picking it up. “Dating Your Mom” is actually a hilarious collection of essays by author and frequent New Yorker contributor Ian Frazier.

Ok, so this isn’t really a book, but it’s a whole lot of fun.

From the introduction:

Living electrically is a modern art. It contributes at once to the convenience and comfort, the pride and pleasure, the health and happiness of the home and the family. It is an art in which every woman should be well versed.
The woman who understands the Art of Living Electrically can become truly a queen of the home, with the equal of an army of well-trained servants at her command.

by William Monahan
223 pages, Riverhead Books

We know, we know—Tome Raider is supposed to be about old books, and “Light House” was written in 2000. While seven years may not seem like a long time (unless you’re referring to milk or hamsters), if you’ve never encountered “Light House” before, you’ve gone seven years too long without reading the funniest book ever. William Monahan, who recently picked up an Oscar for Best Screenplay for “The Departed,” has written a perverse and hilariously disturbing novel.

Think “Fawlty Towers” meets “Scarface.”

Tim Picasso is an amazingly talented art student, but too uncompromising to make it in the commercial art world. So, to make a little money, he takes a job in Florida running drugs for Jesus Castro, a Shakespear-quoting Spanish gangster. Tim’s dally with crime is brief, and he soon decides instead to steal a huge amount of money from Jesus and take off for New England to hide out.

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1774, 167 pages

Love sucks. If you’re breathing, at some point in your life, love has probably bashed you over the head ... and then continued to kick you while you were down until you thought you might die. While most people believe the torment they experience over unrequited love is exclusive to them, “The Sorrows of Young Werther” realistically attests to the fact that heartbreak began occurring way before you confessed your love for someone, only to have him or her remove you as a MySpace friend.

by Edgar Rice Burroughs
1913

Make no mistake: this is your grandfather’s Mars.

Or, maybe, your great-grandfather’s. Originally published serially in All-Story Magazine in 1913, “The Gods of Mars” is the second of 11 books that Edgar Rice Burroughs set on Mars—a Mars with breathable air and peopled with warring civilizations using fantastic technologies, both barbaric and advanced - written before anyone could prove otherwise.