The Hours (SparkNotes Literature Guide Series) by Michael Cunningham

A few of my favorites are novellas, or story collections:

Favorite films?

• The Wizard of Oz
• The Mother and the Whore
• Diary of a Country Priest
• All About Eve
• Vertigo
• Rear Window
• Picnic
• McCabe and Mrs. Miller
• Chinatown
• The Terminator
• Talk To Her

• Mozart Requiem
• Schubert Lieder
• Beethoven Sonatas
• Laurie Anderson
• Philip Glass
• Joni Mitchell
• The Rolling Stones
• Neil Young
• Bob Dylan
• Leonard Cohen
• Dusty Springfield
• Radiohead
• Beck

As any student of literature knows, the books that last are often not the books that are most popular when they are written. Both Moby Dick and The Great Gatsby were complete failures, critically and commercially, when they first appeared. So I find myself wondering which authors, and which books, of today will not only be read a century from now, but about which future readers will say, "I can't believe he or she wasn't famous in his or her lifetime."

My picks would be as follows:

Who are your favorite writers, and what makes their writing special?
Looking back over the list, I'd say I'm particularly interested in writers who focus on the ostensibly small and discover the enormous in it. For instance, I seem to prefer Flaubert, and his insistence on the importance of Emma Bovary and her provincial French life, to Tolstoy with his huge canvases; I prefer Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, with its focus on a single day in the life of an outwardly unexceptional woman, to Joyce's Ulysses, which is also set in a single day but ties it to Homer, to myth. I don't dislike Tolstoy or Joyce, I don't dispute their greatness, I just seem to be more immediately drawn to writers who honor the ordinary, and tell the world through their work that there is no such thing as the ordinary.

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In the summer of 2004, we asked authors featured in Meet the Writers to give us a list of their all-time favorite summer reads, and tell us what makes them just right for the season. Here's what Michael Cunningham had to say:

Rather than come up with a "Ten Best" list of summer books, I've come up with five categories of summer books, each of which contains more suggestions than any reasonable person could possibly want. I can never answer a question like this succinctly.

This summer, I urge us all to read some of the following:

1. A classic you've been meaning to read for years.

One night many years ago, when I was in graduate school, a few of my friends and I fell into an impromptu session of literary truth or dare: great books we had never read. We started hesitantly, fueled by wine and cigarettes, and accelerated into what I can only describe as an ecstasy of confession. "Okay, you ready?" someone would say. "I've never read ,Pride and Prejudice. I'm not even sure what it's about."

"That's nothing," another would offer. "I've never read any Dickens. None at all." We started trying to outdo each other, to be the most ill-read person present, though no one, as far as I know, went so far as to pretend ignorance of a book he or she had actually read.

Although we all felt a little dirty and ashamed the next morning, we all seemed to feel varying degrees of comfort as well. I learned that night, and have never forgotten, that almost everybody, no matter how well educated, is walking around with at least a few secret lapses in his or her literary underpinnings. Few of us have acquitted ourselves with unimpeachable heroism in the realm of important literature, which, by definition, grows larger and more daunting for each new generation.

Summer, with its long, luscious stretches of relatively unfettered time, is without question the best season for trying to fill a few of those gaps. Besides, there's nothing sexier (to me, at least) than seeing someone sitting on a beach, absorbed in a hefty tome.

A few prominent possibilities: Dickens's Bleak House, Eliot's Middlemarch, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, James's Portrait of a Lady, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, or Woolf's To the Lighthouse. These are all books that turn out to be much less forbidding, and much more fun, than one might expect them to be.

For the truly ambitious, I should also mention Mann's The Magic Mountain, which is many things, although the word "fun" is not the adjective that springs most immediately to mind. I read it for the first time a few years ago (it had been one of my own, numerous confessions that night in graduate school), and have felt inspired by it ever since. I read it on an island in the Caribbean, where there was nothing to do but swim, eat, and read; I frankly can't quite imagine reading it under circumstances any less generous than that. It's dense, enormous, brilliant, and I admit that I threw it across the room twice: once when I understood that a climactic confrontation between two characters was about to be conducted entirely in French, and again when it was apparent that a significant new character was being introduced somewhere around page 500. I always picked it up again, though. It repays the reader's investment many times over.

2. A first or second novel by a significant young talent.

As a counterpoint to the summer's Big Intimidating Classic, I think we should all read something by one of the young Turks, to get a sense not only of where literature has been but of where it's going. Among my recent favorites are Susan Choi's American Woman, Marcelle Clement's Summertime, Stacey D'Erasmo's A Seahorse Year, Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated, Andrew Sean Greer's The Confessions of Max Tivoli, Victor LaValle's The Ecstatic, Ernesto Mestre's The Second Death of Unica Aveynao, and Manil Suri's The Death of Vishnu.

3. A novel of a sort you'd ordinarily never read.

Until this year I hadn't read any fantasy, science fiction, or horror novels since I was an adolescent, when I read so many of them I gave myself a hangover that lasted well into my forties. Lately, however, I've been reading genre fiction as research for the novel I'm working on. Some of these books have been revelatory. I've learned that if we select all our books from any particular section of the bookstore or library, we miss a lot of the most compelling stuff.

I think that every summer we should all read at least one novel of a sort we'd ordinarily never go near; something we believe a person like us simply would not read. Selections from this category are naturally private and personal, based on your own reading history. Some of my own forays into previously uncharted territory include the following:

Patrick McGrath's Gothic novels are wonderful, most prominently Spider and Asylum. Philip Pullman's fantasy trilogy, The Golden Compass (which is the American title -- it was published originally in England as His Dark Materials), is miraculous. Even if you think you hate fantasy. Really.

I've also read a body of stunning science fiction books lately, and have come to understand that science fiction writers -- the best of them, anyway -- are producing books that are beautiful, original, and unapologetically concerned with fundamental ideas about life and death. Science fiction is not for everybody, but I think it behooves everyone to give it a shot. It is probably the area in which novelists are struggling most valiantly with the attempt to chronicle our lives as they mutant, whether we want them to or not, into their future forms. My particular favorites include William Gibson's Udoru, Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, and Stanislaw Lem's Solaris.

4. Some contemporary poetry.

I, who worry about such things more than many do, am squeamish about the fact that few of us could name five living American poets. On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.

The most accessible way to look for poets who move you is the annual Best American Poetry series, which is compiled each year by a different American poet. The 2003 collection was edited by Yusef Komunakaa. A few of my own favorite books of poetry are: The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck, Field Guide by Robert Hass, What the Living Do by Marie Howe, The River Sound by W. S. Merwin, The Want Bone by Robert Pinsky, and Repair by C. K. Williams. The grandest oddity of recent time, a truly marvelous book, is Phoebe 2000: An Essay in Verse, by David Trinidad, Jeffrey Conway, and Lynn Crosby, which is an extended meditation on All About Eve.

5. The purely fascinating.

Finally, I think every summer should include one or more books that increase our storehouse of information but do not do us any practical good whatsoever. Among my own books slated for this summer are Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality; David Hajdu's Positively Fourth Street, a biography of Bob Dylan; and Mark Kurlansky's Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, which according to several friends is without question one of the best books ever written about a fish (Moby-Dick doesn't count, whales being mammals). I've already started dipping into Ben Schott's Schott's Original Miscellany, and think it should be in every summer cottage. How else would any of us know how to identify different cloud types, the provisions carried by the Titanic, and the entire list of officially recognized phobias?