In-stock at the library
These were all written before 2005, which means you won't have to wait in an infinite queue to check them out.
86 books
★ 5Samuel Johnson Is Indignant
Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis can do more in two sentences than most writers manage in twenty pages. Tiny, strange, razor-sharp stories.
★ 5The Georges' wife
Elizabeth Jolley
The last of Elizabeth Jolley's Vera Wright trilogy, about a young woman who becomes maid to one sibling and mistress to another. Spare, tender, and quietly devastating — it swept the Australian book prizes for a reason.
★ 5Circle of Friends
Maeve Binchy
Binchy at her coziest, all friendship and first love and small-town Irish life in the '50s. Comfort reading that still has teeth.
★ 5The Garrick Year
Margaret Drabble
Aliza and I recently went to see Anne Lamott talk, and she lamented that no one reads Margaret Drabble anymore. I practically leapt out of my chair. “I do!!” I said. (Aliza leaned over and whispered: “overachiever.”) This book, a dark comedy about a marriage on the rocks, pulses with energy and life and feels shockingly contemporary.
★ 5At Weddings and Wakes
Alice McDermott
An Irish-Catholic family in New York, seen through the kids being shuttled to their grandmother's apartment. McDermott makes the ordinary ache.
★ 5The Greengage Summer
Rumer Godden
Children left mostly to themselves at a French hotel one hazy summer, right on the edge of growing up. Gorgeous and a little dangerous.
★ 5The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins
The Victorian mystery that basically invented the genre, and it still races along. Villains, secrets, and one unforgettable escape.
★ 5Vintage Munro
Alice Munro
A slim best-of from the master of the short story. If you've never read Munro, this is a lovely way in.
★ 5The Shipping News
Annie Proulx
A hapless man starts over in bleak, beautiful Newfoundland. Proulx's prose is like nothing else, and I'd follow it anywhere.
★ 5Waiting
Ha Jin
A Chinese army doctor spends eighteen years waiting to divorce one woman and marry another. Quiet, patient, and quietly heartbreaking.
★ 5Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen
Laurie Colwin
Warm, funny food essays that read like your smartest friend telling kitchen stories. Made me want to cook and to write better about cooking.
★ 5Guards! Guards! (Discworld, #8)
Terry Pratchett
Pratchett's City Watch arrives, a dragon terrorizes Ankh-Morpork, and it's both hilarious and weirdly wise. A great place to start Discworld.
★ 5Heartburn
Nora Ephron
A food writer's marriage falls apart while she's pregnant, told with jokes and recipes. Bitter, hilarious, and over far too fast.
★ 5Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
Jung Chang
Like Pachinko, Wild Swans is a beautifully written multigenerational saga spanning centuries and countries. Unlike Pachinko, it’s entirely true. Wild Swans charts the lives of three generations of Chinese women: a warlord’s concubine, a high Communist official, and the author herself, a Red Guard, then peasant, and finally student. It’s a memoir so compelling it reads like a novel.
★ 5Happy All the Time
Laurie Colwin
Colwin writing about happy people in love, which sounds boring and is somehow the opposite. Warm, witty, and completely charming.
★ 5Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Anne Tyler
The Tull family, wounded and prickly, told through the meals that never quite go right. One of Tyler's most bittersweet.
★ 5The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
Melissa Bank
A linked short story collection following one woman from her preteens to adulthood. Its exploration of love, dating, and ambition is sharp and funny and wonderfully honest; I’ve read it multiple times and always notice something different.
★ 5The Amateur Marriage
Anne Tyler
A story about a marriage that shouldn’t have happened. A gorgeous recreation of Baltimore from 1940s to present-day. I recommended it to Aliza, and she left me multiple voice notes about how much she loved it.
★ 5A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire, #3)
George R.R. Martin
The best book in the series, full stop. If you've made it this far, brace yourself.
★ 5The Time Traveler's Wife
Audrey Niffenegger
A love story between a man who time-travels involuntarily and the woman who spends her life waiting for and loving him. Cried, naturally.
★ 5Foundation (Foundation, #1)
Isaac Asimov
Asimov's grand idea: a science that can predict the fall of a galactic empire, and one man's plan to soften the dark ages to come. Big, brainy, and surprisingly readable.
★ 5Dune (Dune, #1)
Frank Herbert
Politics, religion, ecology, and giant sandworms on a desert planet. A sci-fi cornerstone, and it earns it.
★ 5Persuasion
Jane Austen
Anne Elliot, older and wiser, gets a second chance at the love she was talked out of. Austen's most quietly romantic. That letter.
★ 5No Way to Treat a First Lady
Christopher Buckley
A First Lady goes on trial for murdering the philandering President. Buckley's satire is gleefully sharp.
★ 5The Impressionist
Hari Kunzru
A boy of mixed race in colonial India remakes himself over and over to survive. Ambitious and dazzling.
★ 5The Shadow of the Wind (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #1)
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
A boy in postwar Barcelona picks one book from the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, and it upends his life. Gothic, bookish, and totally transporting.
★ 5Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides
The sweeping story of Cal, intersex, and three generations of a Greek American family. Eugenides makes the whole saga sing.
★ 5A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Dave Eggers
Eggers raising his little brother after both parents die, told with wild, self-aware energy. Funny and gutting.
★ 5A Little Princess
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Sara Crewe loses everything and holds onto her kindness anyway. I loved it fiercely as a kid, and it still gets me.
★ 5Dealing with Dragons (Enchanted Forest Chronicles, #1)
Patricia C. Wrede
Princess Cimorene is bored of being a proper princess, so she runs off to keep house for a dragon instead. I loved this as a kid — funny, fizzy, and quietly feminist.
★ 5Alanna: The First Adventure (Song of the Lioness, #1)
Tamora Pierce
Alanna disguises herself as a boy to train as a knight. I devoured this whole series growing up.
★ 5Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
One of my favorites, forever. Small, fierce Jane refuses to be anything but herself.
★ 5A Long Way from Chicago (A Long Way from Chicago, #1)
Richard Peck
A boy and his sister spend summers with their larger-than-life Grandma Dowdel in small-town Illinois. So funny.
★ 5Bel Canto
Ann Patchett
Bel Canto by Anne Patchett is, I think, her masterpiece. (And I’ve read all of her books!) The plot sounds like it’s ripped from an airport thriller: An opera singer is performing at a millionaire’s birthday party when terrorists take the entire mansion hostage. But what happens next is anything but predictable, and the prose is gorgeous. I read it every few years and recommend it to all of my friends.
The Giver (Giver, #1)
Lois Lowry
The book that made a lot of us fall for dystopias. A boy discovers what his tidy, colorless world quietly traded away, and it stuck with me for years.
Lonesome Dove (Lonesome Dove, #1)
Larry McMurtry
Two aging Texas Rangers drive cattle to Montana, and somehow it's 900 pages I never wanted to end. Funny, brutal, and completely alive.
Plainsong (Plainsong, #1)
Kent Haruf
Interwoven lives in a small Colorado town, including two old bachelor brothers who take in a pregnant teenager. Spare and deeply humane.
Amy and Isabelle
Elizabeth Strout
Strout's first novel, about a mother and teenage daughter in a Maine mill town and the affair that cracks them open. You can already see how good she is.
The Shell Seekers
Rosamunde Pilcher
A big, warm family saga anchored by Penelope and a beloved painting. The kind of sprawling book you sink into for a week.
The New Girls
Beth Gutcheon
Five girls at a New England prep school in the '60s, growing up as the Vietnam War and the women's movement crash into their sheltered world. It opens on their reunion, where we learn one of them didn't make it.
Erasure
Percival Everett
A Black novelist, sick of what publishing wants from him, writes a cynical parody that becomes a smash. Furious and very funny. The basis for American Fiction.
The Color of Magic (Discworld, #1)
Terry Pratchett
The very first Discworld, with a hapless wizard playing tour guide to the disc's first tourist. Very silly in the best way, if a bit rougher than the later books.
Into Thin Air
Jon Krakauer
Krakauer's firsthand account of the 1996 Everest disaster he survived. I could not put it down and felt cold the whole time.
Postcards from the Edge
Carrie Fisher
Fisher's sharp, hilarious semi-autobiographical novel about an actress in recovery and the Hollywood around her. She was so funny on the page.
The Thorn Birds
Colleen McCullough
A sweeping Australian family saga and a forbidden love that spans decades. Big, old-fashioned, and totally absorbing.
The Accidental Tourist
Anne Tyler
A travel writer who hates leaving home, and the chaotic dog trainer who shakes him loose. One of Tyler's most beloved, and I get why.
The Pursuit of Alice Thrift
Elinor Lipman
A prickly, socially clueless surgical intern gets courted by a fast-talking charmer. Lipman is so good at awkward, funny people.
Truth & Beauty
Ann Patchett
Patchett's memoir of her fierce, complicated friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy. One of the great books about platonic love.
Drinking: A Love Story
Caroline Knapp
Knapp's clear-eyed memoir of loving alcohol and then leaving it. Honest in a way that stays with you.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays
Joan Didion
Didion's essays on 1960s California, cool and precise and a little chilling. The prose everyone's still trying to copy.
Sex and Rage
Eve Babitz
Babitz makes 1970s LA feel like the most glamorous place on earth. Sun-drenched and gossipy, and sharper than it first looks.
The Thief (The Queen's Thief, #1)
Megan Whalen Turner
A quest fantasy narrated by a cocky young thief, and then that ending. I did not see it coming.
The Informant
Kurt Eichenwald
The stranger-than-fiction story of an ADM executive who turned FBI informant on a price-fixing scheme, then turned out to be his own kind of unreliable. Eichenwald makes corporate crime genuinely gripping.
What I Loved
Siri Hustvedt
Two families in the New York art world, and how love and loss ripple through both. Cerebral and devastating.
Towards Zero (Superintendent Battle, #5)
Agatha Christie
Christie building toward a single murder at a seaside house, with the crime saved for the end instead of the start. A clever twist on her own formula.
The Pleasing Hour
Lily King
King's debut, about a young American au pair for a family in France with its own quiet fault lines. You can already feel the writer she'd become.
The Inn at Lake Devine (Vintage Contemporaries)
Elinor Lipman
A Jewish girl becomes quietly obsessed with a Vermont inn that won't take Jewish guests. Lipman turns prejudice into something wry and human without letting it off the hook.
A Complicated Kindness
Miriam Toews
A sharp, funny teenage girl chafing against her strict Mennonite town. Toews makes you laugh and ache at once.
Otherwise Engaged
Suzanne Finnamore
A wickedly funny account of one woman's year-long engagement, and how a perfectly rational person slowly comes undone in the countdown to the wedding.
The Soul of a Chef: The Journey Toward Perfection
Michael Ruhlman
Ruhlman goes deep on what it actually takes to cook at the highest level, from a brutal certification exam to Thomas Keller's kitchen. Will make you hungry and a little in awe.
Fingersmith
Sarah Waters
A Victorian con to swindle an heiress, and then a twist that flips the whole thing. Waters plots like a magician.
Second Foundation (Foundation, #3)
Isaac Asimov
The hunt for the hidden Second Foundation, with the Mule still looming. Asimov's ideas carry you right along.
Foundation and Empire (Foundation, #2)
Isaac Asimov
The Mule arrives and blows up Seldon's tidy plan for the galaxy. The most gripping stretch of the trilogy.
The Wife
Meg Wolitzer
A woman flying to Finland to leave her celebrated novelist husband, and the secret behind his success. Wolitzer is so sharp about marriage and ambition.
I Capture the Castle
Dodie Smith
Narrated by 17-year-old Cassandra, writing from the crumbling castle her eccentric, broke family calls home. One of the most charming coming-of-age novels there is.
A Wrinkle in Time (Time Quintet, #1)
Madeleine L'Engle
Meg travels across the universe to rescue her father, armed with love and stubbornness. A childhood favorite that holds up.
Memoirs of a Geisha
Arthur Golden
The life of a geisha in pre-war Kyoto, lush with detail. Immersive and hard to put down.
Daughter of Fortune
Isabel Allende
A young Chilean woman stows away to Gold Rush California chasing her lover. Allende at her sweeping, romantic best.
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
Eric Schlosser
Schlosser pulls back the curtain on the American fast-food industry, from the feedlot to the counter. It'll change how you eat.
The Namesake
Jhumpa Lahiri
Gogol Ganguli, saddled with an odd name, caught between his Bengali family and his American life. Quietly gorgeous.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Mark Haddon
A boy with a singular way of seeing the world sets out to solve the mystery of a dead dog and turns up much bigger ones. Tender and clever.
Life of Pi
Yann Martel
A boy adrift on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, and a story about story itself. Strange and unforgettable.
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
Winifred Watson
A prim, down-on-her-luck governess stumbles into one glamorous, madcap day. Pure delight — I finished it grinning.
Interpreter of Maladies
Jhumpa Lahiri
Lahiri's story collection about Indian and Indian American lives, longing and distance. Each one is quietly perfect.
White Teeth
Zadie Smith
Two tangled families in multicultural London across generations. Smith wrote this dazzler absurdly young.
A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
Bill Bryson
Bryson and his hopelessly unfit old friend attempt the Appalachian Trail. I laughed out loud more than once.
The Language of Threads (Women of the Silk #2)
Gail Tsukiyama
Pei carries on from Women of the Silk, building a new life in Hong Kong through the war years. Quiet and moving.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Michael Chabon
Two cousins invent a comic-book superhero in the Golden Age while the war closes in on the family left behind in Europe. Chabon's sentences are a joy.
Empire Falls
Richard Russo
A decent man running a diner in a dying Maine mill town, hemmed in by everyone's expectations. Russo's warmth and wit carry it.
Women of the Silk (Women of the Silk #1)
Gail Tsukiyama
Girls in a Chinese silk factory who take vows never to marry and build a fierce sisterhood instead. Absorbing and tender.
Rebecca
Daphne du Maurier
A shy new bride at Manderley, haunted by the first Mrs. de Winter and the terrifying housekeeper who worshipped her. That opening line lives in my head.
To Die For
Joyce Maynard
A woman who'll do anything for local TV fame, including talk a lovestruck teenager into murder. Maynard makes her chilling and weirdly funny.
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
Heathcliff and Cathy and a love that poisons everyone around it. Not romantic so much as feral — and I couldn't look away.
The Secret History
Donna Tartt
The Secret History by Donna Tartt is one of the books I’m jealous of other people for getting to read for the first time. In the opening sentence, you learn that a boy has been murdered, and the narrator, Richard, has helped murder him — the mystery, of course, is why. We go back in time, following Richard as he transfers to an elite New England college and becomes fascinated with a tight-knit, charismatic group of friends. The first time I read this book, I was completely carried away by the plot. The second (and third and fourth) times, I’ve been able to appreciate its exploration of beauty, morality, and the allure of belonging.
Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen
Austen on sisters — one all feeling, one all restraint. Not my top Austen, but still a delight.
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
My favorite Austen, obviously. I reread it whenever I want to feel better about everything.