Books to give anyone

Bel Canto

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

Motherless Brooklyn

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

The Kite Runner

Why Canada fucking rocks

Barbara Gowdy

Joan Barfoot

Michael Ondaatje

Anne Michaels

Margaret Atwood

Books that get me off

Anything by Anais Nin

Written on the Body

Pages For You

A Sport and a Pastime

Vox

Short attention span?
Short stories

Birds of America

How to Breathe Underwater

Interpreter of Maladies

A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

You Are Not a Stranger Here

Sharp Shooters

Amy Hempel

Dorothy Parker

Grace Paley

Dawn Powell

Flannery O'Connor

Books with great crazy people

What I Loved

Seahorse Year

Halfway House

One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest

Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness

Books about books

Ex Libris

Living By Fiction

Reading In Bed: Personal Essays on the Glories of Reading

Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering

Book Lust

Books you’ve (probably) never heard of

Cassandra at the Wedding

To the Wedding

Dancer

Varieties of Exile

The Street of Crocodiles

Books you should have read in high school if you weren’t such a slacker

Catch-22

Catcher in the Rye

My Antonia

The Things They Carry

A Separate Peace

Books you read in high school but probably shouldn’t have

Jitterbug Perfume

Atlas Shrugged

Naked Lunch

On the Road

Clan of the Cave Bear

Stranger (and a whole host of other things) than fiction

The Year of Magical Thinking

True Notebooks

Paula

A Million Little Pieces

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

Books with screwy space-time continuums

Time Traveler’s Wife

Confessions of Max Tivoli

Cloud Atlas

Hopscotch

If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler

Birds of all different feathers: Books with “bird” in the title

Birds In Fall

Bird by Bird

Birds of America

The Bedside Book of Birds

The Ardent Birder

Come one, come all, to the greatest show on earth: circuses and magicians

Madeleine is Sleeping

Final Confessions of Mabel Stark

Wonder When You’ll Miss Me

Magician’s Assistant

Geek Love

Tell it like it is—sort of: Historical Fiction

In the Time of the Butterflies

Women of the Silk

Power of One

The Quiet American

Palace Walk

Books you may have missed the first time around

Feast of Love

This Side of Brightness

Housekeeping

Fugitive Pieces

A Ship Made of Paper

Contemporary classics that hold up

Beloved

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

A Death in the Family

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Anna Karenina

Hit the ground running: great first books

White Teeth

Native Speaker

To Kill a Mockingbird

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

Read Your Russians

Tatiana Tolstaya

Yuri Olesha

Nikolai Gogol

Ivan Bunin (Grammar of Love)

Andrey Platonov (Foundation Pit)

Bloc Party: Central/Eastern European Goodness

Ivan Klima

Witold Gombrowicz (Bacacay, Memoirs of a Time of Immaturity, Ferydurke)

Imre Kertesz  (Fateless)

Ivo Andric (Bridge on the Drina)

Gunter Grass

Indispensable Italians

Luigi Pirandello

Alberto Moravia

Natalia Ginzburg

Cesare Pavese

Italo Svevo

Postmodern Masters

Kazuo Ishiguro

Haruki Murakami

Toni Morrison

Italo Calvino

Jeanette Winterson

Dog’s Eye View

King

Flush

Timbuktu

Unleashed

(Give me a break; you try coming up with 5 good books, all written from a dog's perspective.)

Books I say I’ve read but haven’t

War and Peace

The Brothers Karamazov

Hard Times

Ulysses

Absalom , Absalom!