Here is a list of my ten favorite books (I should add that this list shifts around a bit and some books I love because of my memory of reading them more than because of the book itself!)

1. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald This is such a sad book, but its beauty seeps into your bone marrow. Also, Fitzgerald never really got it the way he wanted it, which makes me love it all the more.


2. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett . . . . this is a perfect story on every level.


3. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. As a teenager, I hated Jane Austen. I thought all the people who told me to read Pride and Prejudice were off their heads. I picked the Wharton novel off of my parents’ shelves and it was full of parties and intrigue and broken hearts and I was sure it was heading toward Newland Archer and Countess Olenska running off together, but, um, not so much. I was fifteen and stayed up until two in the morning to finish.


4. Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The novel’s descriptions of food rival the best of M.F.K. Fisher.


5. These Happy Golden Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Don’t laugh. It’s a pretty good tale of romance and coming of age.


6. A Room With A View by E.M. Forster. This is hands down the best coming-of-age novel I have ever read and I thought it was Forster’s best, better even than Howard’s End, which is pretty amazing, but then I read number seven:


7. Maurice by E.M. Forster. The only novel Forster didn’t write in code, Maurice is a novel of two gay men who fall in love and part. They follow very different paths. . . . one is true to himself and one cannot be.


8. Madam Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. This was a novel I hated in college and my professor told me I needed to read it once I turned thirty. I was vaguely annoyed and offended. After all, if I had to be thirty, why had he made us read it? But, it turned out he was right. I held my breath the entire time I was reading, terrified that its cold, hard, brilliant diamond-like quality would waver. It never did.


9. Middlemarch by George Eliot. Reading this novel is like traveling to a land that no longer exists. People don’t even think this way anymore, but it is lovely to walk around in it and breathe the air.


10. Wings of the Dove by Henry James. When I grow up, I want to be Kate Croy.

Some runner ups: Enduring Love by Ian McEwan, The Master Bedroom by Tessa Hadley, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, Gilgamesh by Joan London, Still Life by A.S. Byatt, Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh and, most definitely, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (best example of voice and clarity and narrative and freshness.)

Most Favorite of all Time: Mary Poppins and Mary Poppins Comes Back by P.L. Travers. Not only are the books great – magical, sarcastic, dry, full of tragic yet gleeful characters, and precise – but my memories of reading them are among my best reading memories ever. Smarter people than I can go on at length about what it really meant when Alice stepped through the looking glass. All I can say is that opening Mary Poppins is what stepping into anywhere strange and wonderful should feel like.