All-time favorites.

Blonde

By Joyce Carol Oates

Sympathetic but not sentimental, this fictionalized portrayal of Marilyn Monroe is a sad story that characterizes just about everyone in her crowded life, including the Athlete and the Author, her two most famous husbands. She deserved so much more out of her short life.

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Means of Ascent

The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume II

By Robert Caro

The second volume in Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson focuses on his years in the House of Representatives. The first volume, The Path to Power, deals with his hardscrabble childhood and his emergence as a "wonder kid of politics." The two stories take place before his presidency, before Vietnam, before his Civil Rights Act--his story is totally enthralling.

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Washington Square

By Henry James

This little book hit me between the eyes. You want so badly for the overbearing father, a rigid martinet, to be wrong, wrong, wrong in his distrust of and antipathy toward his plain daughter's suitor. The tension runs high in this quiet book--no one raises his or her voice--but the emotions are almost unbearably strong.

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Any book of stories by Alice Munro

[See Runaway, The View from Castle Rock, Carried Away]

The lives of Alice Munro's characters may be drab or unlovely, and her style may be deceptively simple. But the dialogue is illuminating; the characters are drawn to perfection; and the choices and the destinies of everyone in every story are surprising yet inevitable.

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The Corrections

By Jonathan Franzen

I just loved this book. Such a dysfunctional family! All the characters are deeply flawed and mostly unadmirable; yet they are so understandable in their meanness, ignorance, dumb choices, and even illnesses, and they are so very middle-American in their thinking. (I never figured out the book's title.) (My understanding is that the title refers to the corrections we all attempt to make to improve our lives, often in direct opposition to our parent's lives--corrections which, of course, create all new problems--Jon.)

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David Copperfield

By Charles Dickens

I read this novel as a kid. Years later, I found that I had remembered every character: Mr. Murdstone, living up to his evil name; Uriah Heep and his handwringing; Dora and Agnes, David's two wives; Mr. Micawber, Peggotty, and Barkis (especially his proposal to Peggotty, "Barkis is willin'")--all outstanding and unforgettable.

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Moneyball

The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

By Michael Lewis

I was born in Brooklyn, where a love of baseball is innate. I thought I understood the game pretty well until I read this book about Billy Bean, the manager of the Oakland A's. Now there's a man who understands the intricacies of baseball. He stopped looking at traditional statistics and instead embraced factors both tangible on-base percentages, for example) and intangible. Bean's thought processes are intricate and clever.

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The Rabbit Series

By John Updike

The five Rabbit books (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest; Rabbit Remembered) follow Rabbit Angstrom through his years as a son, a husband, a father, a wage earner, and, unfortunately, a loser in most respects. The details in this series are staggering, and as anyone who has read anything by John Updike knows, he delves deeper into the American family and its hopes, fears, joys, and miseries better than almost anyone else.

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A Mass for the Dead

By William Gibson

This book, published in 1968, is probably out of print now but not out of mind. It's Gibson's autobiography (he's the William Gibson who wrote The Miracle Worker, about Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan) with a strong emphasis on his love for his mother and father, a working-class couple. Seldom have I read such a tribute to one's parents that didn't slide into sentiment or flinch from the truth. This is such a book.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

A Natural History of Four Meals

By Michael Pollan

I started reading this book a bit reluctantly, because I felt I was in for a preaching--maybe even a scolding--by a righteous individual on the boring subject of food. Michael Pollan's knowledge of the American food industry and its catering to our worst food instincts hits home and makes me squirm with shame.

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Harriet Walburn is from Evanston, Illinois.