<p>Does no one read Virginia Woolf??? You guys are all missing out! To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Mrs. Dalloway are three of my favorites by Woolf. To the Lighthouse is absolutely brilliant; the last section (there are three) is easily the most beautiful piece of prose I have ever read.</p>
<p>I also highly recommend Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. They are pretty short and very good.
Other classics: East of Eden by Steinbeck, Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner. All are beautiful.</p>
<p>As for as contemporary literature, I recommend anything by Ken Follett. Pillars of the Earth and World Without End were very good, and I believe his new book Fall of Giants is the next book in that little series. A Place Called Freedom, also by Follett is excellent.
I’m surprised I only saw Khaled Hosseini’s works on here once… The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns are two novels that will stay with me forever. The Red Tent by Anita Diamant is a renowned women’s book and I found it very moving.</p>
<p>For anyone who is interested in the philosophies of the self (nihilism, solipsism, sophism, and so on), I HIGHLY recommend Grendel by John Gardner. If you’ve read Beowulf and enjoyed it you will probably like this; it is (very basically, there’s a lot more to it than this) the story of Beowulf told from Grendel’s point of view. The reader follows the developing mental torment of Grendel from his younger days through to the day that Beowulf kills him. It is an excellent book. The last lines gave me chills. I love it.</p>