Dune (Dune, #1)
Frank Herbert
Politics, religion, ecology, and giant sandworms on a desert planet. A sci-fi cornerstone, and it earns it.
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★ 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.