A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (Scribner, $13). Set on the Italian front during World War I, this is simply one of the best novels ever written about innocence, love, and loss. The first five paragraphs comprise a perfect miniature war story, full of grim foreboding about the beating that both the troops and Hemingway’s characters would take.
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A Death in the Family by James Agee (Vintage, $13). An American classic about a summons home that takes a tragic turn, and a hymn to small country towns, porch rockers, screen doors, and dewy summer nights. Because I spent part of my childhood abroad, I always missed having that sense of belonging, and Agee’s rootedness, his powerful sense of place, is mesmerizing.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (Modern Library, $10). The first epic Russian novel I read, and the one that showed me there was much to learn in the pages of literature about a woman’s place in the world, the pitfalls of living life according to society’s mores, and the price of defiance.
Burger’s Daughter by Nadine Gordimer (Penguin, $14). Gordimer is South Africa’s Tolstoy, and in this book she movingly chronicles a young woman’s coming of age against the background of turbulent social change, masterfully demonstrating how the political inexorably becomes personal.
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