<p>Middlemarch–Eliot. She is so wise about people–how they should be, how they are, and what they owe each other. </p>
<p>The Secret Garden–Burnett. favorite book from childhood–about nature and healing and life.</p>
<p>Handling Sin–Michael Malone. Sidesplittingly funny, and then gets to you at a deeper level.</p>
<p>Pride and Prejudice/ Persuasion --it’s a tie.</p>
<p>Sorry, that’s 4 and sort of five.</p>
<p>And given more room, I would throw in Moby Dick and Our Mutual Friend.</p>
<p>Time and Again by Jack Finney (My favorite time travel book–I read it for the first time when I was in high school, and I have read it countless times since then.)
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon (Time travel. Romance. Scotland. A series, so you can bond with the characters over a long period of time.)
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. (A young adult novel that is touching, heart-breaking, and romantic.)
I find it very hard to choose three, and my choices would be different on a different day.</p>
<ol>
<li> Crossing to Safety - Stegner - There is not a better story of love and loyalty.</li>
</ol>
<p>I’m a sucker for academic comic novels and my next two are my favorites:
2. Straight Man - Richard Russo
3. Small World - David Lodge</p>
<p>…although as others have said, it could change daily given my mood.</p>
<p>100 Years of Solitude - few have the combined gift of storytelling, language and poetry as abundantly as Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It is the only book I read, then immediately started again.</p>
<p>East of Eden - John Steinbeck’s retelling of the story of Cain and Abel, set against his usual backdrop of the American West around the time of the Depression. </p>
<p>Gosh, so many vying for that third spot - Vonnegut, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, McCarthy - that I won’t fill this spot until a book resonates with me to the point it displaces one of the top two.</p>
<p>The Persian Boy
A Tree Grown in Brooklyn
Gone With the Wind</p>
<p>A Prayer for Owen Meany
Angle of Repose
100 Years of Solitude</p>
<p>Jane Eyre
Anna Karenina
huge sections from Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past
Speak, Memory (Vladimir Nabokov)
Great Gatsby
The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy
A Sea Wall, Duras
A Soldier of the Great War, Mark Helprin</p>
<p>… oh wait, you said, three…</p>
<p>The Picture of Dorian Gray
1984
Darkness at Noon</p>
<p>I love distopias, hence the the reason for the second and third books on the list, and I was always fascinated with the idea behind The Picture of Dorian Gray, so I read it this summer and absolutely loved it. It’s probably my favorite books of the year.</p>
<p>Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan (sp?) try to read it once a year</p>
<p>Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor</p>