Of Mice and Men
by John Steinbeck | 
Oliver Twist
by Charles Dickens | 
Room
by Emma Donoghue | 
Sophie's World
by Jostein Gaarder | 
The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner | 
Breakfast at Tiffany's
by Truman Capote | 
Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf | 
As I Lay Dying
by William Faulkner | 
Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates | 
The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton | 
Absalom, Absalom!
by William Faulkner | 
To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf | 
The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon | 
Light In August
by William Faulkner | 
Jude the Obscure
by Thomas Hardy | 
The Pearl
by John Steinbeck | 
Housekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson | 
Sometimes a Great Notion
by Ken Kesey | 
As I Lay Dying
by William Faulker | 
The Bone People
by Keri Hulme |
Well received in its own day and all but forgotten in the last century, Anton Reiser (1785) has regained in our century the popular attention it richly merits. Subtitled a "psychological novel" by its author, who also called it a biography, the work is actually a highly authentic autobiography. The work is singular for two reasons, the first being its perspective. Moritz was a neglected child of a loveless marriage living in a family near the bottom of the social ladder. It is small wonder that Moritz developed into the eternal outsider. With this background, his description of the struggles he endured in acquiring an education give us an unusually rich picture of that day. This autobiography is also quite singular in that it is not the usual summation by some elderly person of his road to success; rather, it is an examination by a thirty-year-old of how the various forces playing on him in his first twenty years joined to misdirect him into hopes for a theatrical career. With a gift for self-examination doubtless acquired from his Pietistic background, he is able to give a brilliant picture of how he acquired and struggled with his own neuroses, and it is this struggle that gives his book its timeless character.