All the Pretty Horses

• Cormac McCarthy• 320 pages• 1993• All The Pretty Horses

follows the progress of laconic 16-year-old Texan John Grady Cole, his pal Lacey Rawlins, and the mysterious young sharp shooter Jimmy Blevins as they ride across the border into Mexico in search of adventure.

East of Eden• John Steinbeck• 602 pages• 1952• Set in the rich farmland of

California’s SalinasValley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families-The Trasks and Hamiltons-whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.

American Gods

• Neil Gaiman• 624 pages• 2003• Shadow dreamed of nothing but leaving

prison and starting a new life. But the day before his release, his wife and best friend are killed in an accident. On the plane home, he meets Mr. Wednesday—a beguiling stranger who seems to know everything about him. A trickster and rogue, Mr. Wednesday offers Shadow a job as his bodyguard. With nowhere left to go, Shadow accepts, and soon learns that his role in Mr. Wednesday's schemes will be far more dangerous and dark than he could have ever imagined. For beneath the placid surface of everyday life a war is being fought—and the prize is the very soul of America.

100 Years of Solitude

• Gabriel Garcia Marquez

• 448 pages

• 1967

• The rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the Buendia family. In the noble, ridiculous, beautiful, and tawdry story of the family, one sees all of humanity.

Charms for the Easy Life

• Kaye Gibbons• 254 pages• 1995• Three generations of

women finding happiness in NC on their own terms in often unexpected ways.

Love Medicine

• Louise Eldrich• 367 pages• 1984• The story of 2 families-

Kashpaws & Lamartines: a multigenerational portrait of new truths and secret whose time has come, of strong men and women caught in an unforgettable drama of anger, desire, and the healing power that is Love Medicine.

Life of Pi• Yann Martel• 420 pages• 2002• When Pi Patel, the Indian son

of a zookeeper, becomes stranded on a lifeboat with a 450-lb Bengal tiger, he must use his knowledge and cunning to survive. But when rescuers refuse to believe his story, Pi tells a much more conventional “second story” that compe4ls readers to question the narrator’s reliability, the significance of truth in storytelling, etc..

Bel Canto

• Ann Patchett• 352 pages 2005• A birthday party is being held in honor of Mr.

Hosokawa, a Japanese businessman. Opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening -- until a band of gun-wielding terrorists breaks in. But what begins as a panicked scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different countries and continents become compatriots.

• Life on the inside becomes more beautiful than anything they had ever known before. At once riveting and impassioned, the narrative becomes a moving exploration of how people communicate when music is the only common language.

Kite Runner• Khaled Hosseini• 400 pages• 2004• Despite their class differences, Amir, the

son of a wealthy businessman, and Hassan, his devoted sidekick and the son of Amir's household servant, play together, cause mischief together, and compete in the annual kite-fighting tournament -- Amir flying the kite, and Hassan running down the kites they fell. But one day, Amir betrays Hassan, and his betrayal grows increasingly devastating as their tale continues. Amir will spend much of his life coming to terms with his initial and subsequent acts of cowardice, and finally seek to make reparations.

All the King’s Men• Robert Penn Warren• 678 pages• 1946• Set in the 1930’s, this novel traces

the rise and fall of Willie Stark, who resembles the real-life Huey Kingfish Long of LA. Stark begins his political career as an idealistic man of the people but soon becomes corrupted. Generally considered the finest novel ever written on American politics.

Secret Life of Bees

• Sue Monk Kidd• 336 pages• 2003• tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been

shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted "stand-in mother," insults 3 of the town's fiercest racists, Lily decides they should both escape to Tiburon, South Carolina--a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. There they are taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters who introduce Lily to a mesmerizing world of bees, honey, and the Black Madonna who presides over their household. This is a remarkable story about divine female power and the transforming power of love--

Cold Mountain

• Charles Frazier• 464 pages• 1997• Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned

in the fighting at Petersburg, a Confederate soldier named Inman decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains to Ada, the woman he loves. His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. At the same time, the intrepid Ada is trying to revive her father’s derelict farm and learning to survive in a world where the old certainties have been swept away.

Going After Cacciato• Tim O’brien• 352• 1979• In a blend of reality and fantasy, this novel

tells the story of a young soldier who one day lays down his rifle and sets off on a quixotic journey from the jungles of Indochina to the streets of Paris. In its memorable evocation of men both fleeing from and meeting the demands of battle, Going After Cacciato stands as much more than just a great war novel. Ultimately it's about the forces of fear and heroism that do battle in the hearts of us all.

A Farewell to Arms

• Ernest Hemingway

• 336 pages

• 1954 (Nobel Prize)

• The best American novel to emerge from World War I, A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse.

Beloved

• Toni Morrison• 352 pages• 234• Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery,

this spellbinding audio transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but 18 years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

Slaughterhouse-Five: Or, the Children's Crusade, A Duty-Dance

with Death

• Kurt Vonnegut• Unstuck in time, Billy Pilgrim,

Vonnegut's shattered survivor of the Dresden bombing, relives his life over and over again under the gaze of aliens; he comes at last to some understanding of the human comedy. The basis of George Roy's great 1972 film and perhaps the signature student's novel in the 1960's embracing protest and the absurdity of war.

Brave New World

• Aldous Huxley

• 288 pages

• 1931

• Huxley´s vision of the future in his astonishing 1931 novel Brave New World -- a world of tomorrow in which capitalist civilization has been reconstituted through the most efficient scientific and psychological engineering.

Crime and Punishment

• Fyodor Dostoevsky• 576 pages• The first of Dostoevsky's masterworks,

Crime and Punishment presents the powerful story of Raskolnikov, who reasons that intellectually "superior" men like himself can and must transcend conventional moral law. To test his theory, he devises the perfect murder. What follows is a nightmare world of bitterness and torment, and one of the most gripping crime stories of all time.

A Room with a View

• E.M. Forster• 240 pages 1908• A young girl, Lucy Honeychurch, and her

chaperon visit a tempestuous, passionate Italy. Their “room with a view” allows them to look into a world far different from their own, a world unconcerned with convention, unfettered by social rituals, and unafraid of emotion. Soon Lucy finds herself bound to an obviously “unsuitable” man, the melancholic George Emerson, whose improper advances she dare not publicize. Back home, her friend Charlotte Bartlett and her mother, try to manipulate her into marriage with the more “appropriate” but smotheringly dull Cecil Vyse, whose surname suggests the imprisoning effect he would have on Lucy’s spirit.

Great Expectations

• Charles Dickens• 483 pages• A grizzled convict springs upon an orphan

named Pip. The convict terrifies the boy and threatens to kill him unless Pip helps his escape. Later, Pip finds himself in the ruined garden where he meets the bitter and crazy Miss Havisham and her foster child Estella, with whom he falls in love. After a secret benefactor gives him a fortune, Pip moves to London, where he cultivates great expectations for a life which would allow him to discard his impoverished beginnings and socialize with the idle upper class. As Pip struggles to become a gentleman and is tormented endlessly by the beautiful Estella, he slowly learns the truth about himself and his illusions.

Ordinary People

• Judith Guest• 272 pages• 1976• The Jarrets are a typical American family.

Calvin is a determined, successful provider and Beth an organized, efficient wife. They had two sons, Conrad and Buck, but now they have one. In this memorable, moving novel, Judith Guest takes the reader into their lives to share their misunderstandings, pain...and ultimate healing

Memory Keeper’s Daughter

• Kim Edwards