Introduction / Roxanne J. Coady -- Dorothy Allison on Toni Morrisons's The Bluest Eye -- Kate Atkinson on Robert Coover's Pricksongs and Descants -- James Atlas on Gwendolyn Brooks's Selected Poems -- Robert Ballard on Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth -- Gina Barreca on Jean Kerr's The Snake Has All the Lines -- Nicholas A. Basbanes on the Works of Shakespeare -- Graeme Base on J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings -- Jeff Benedict on The Little Engine That Could -- Elizabeth Berg on J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye -- Amy Bloom on The Most of P. G. Wodehouse -- Harold Bloom on John Crowley's Little, Big -- Lary Bloom on John Hersey's Hiroshima -- Chris Bohjalian on Joyce Carol Oates's Expensive People and More -- Steven Brill on Theodore H. White's The Making of the President, 1960 -- Benjamin Cheever on Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death -- Da Chen on Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo -- Harriet Scott Chessman on Gertrude Stein's Ida -- Brother Christopher on Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain -- Carol Higgins Clark on Mary Higgins Clark's A Stranger Is Watching -- Billy Collins on Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' The Yearling and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita -- Claire Cook on the Nancy Drew Mysteries -- Caroline B. Cooney on Caesar's Gallic Wars -- Patricia Cornwell on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin -- Maureen Corrigan on Charles Dickens' David Copperfield -- Nelson DeMille on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and More -- Tomie dePaola on Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter -- Anita Diamant on Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own -- Dominick Dunne on Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now -- Carlos Eire on Thomas á Kempis's The Imitation of Christ -- Linda Fairstein on Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes -- Doris Kearns Goodwin on Barbara W. Tuchman's The Guns of August -- Linda Greenlaw on Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm -- David Halberstam on Cecil Woodham-Smith's The Reason Why -- Alice Hoffman on J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye -- Sebastian Junger on Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee -- Paul Kennedy on Geoffrey Barraclough's An Introduction to Contemporary History -- Tracy Kidder on Ernest Hemingways Collected Stories -- Robert Kurson on Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death -- Wally Lamb on Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird -- Anne Lamott on Ram Dass's The Only Dance There Is and More -- Barbara Leaming on Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams -- Senator Joe Lieberman on the Bible -- Margot Livesey on Charolotte Brontës Jane Eyre -- Senator John McCain on Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls -- Frank McCourt on Shakespeare's Henry VIII -- Faith Middleton on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby -- Jacquelyn Mitchard on Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn -- Leigh Montville on Ed McBain's 87th Precinct Series -- Sara Nelson on Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar and Susan Isaacs' Compromising Positions -- Sherwin B. Nuland on William Lewis Nida's Ab the Cave Man -- Laura Numeroff on Kay Thompson's Eloise -- Stewart O'Nan on William Maxwells So Long, See You Tomorrow -- Jacques Pépin on Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus -- Anne Perry on G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday -- Jack Prelutsky on Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses and More -- Ian Rankin on Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange -- Richard Rhodes on Albert Schweitzer's Out of My Life and Thought and Hugh Lofting's Doctor Dolittle Series -- Frank Rich on Moss Hart's Act One -- SARK on Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings -- Lisa Scottoline on Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes -- Bernie S. Siegel on William Saroyan's The Human Comedy -- Liz Smith on Christopher Morley's Kitty Foyle and Guy Endore's Voltaire! Voltaire! -- Edward Sorel on Stendhal's The Red and the Black -- Jane Stern on John Barth's The End of the Road -- Michael Stern on the Sears Catalogue -- Alexandra Stoddard on Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet -- Paco Underhill o