There are so many, many books I have loved, but here is a short list of the books that I have had to read many times, books that remind me what great writing is and urge me forward. I have tried to list them in the order that I first read them.

Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
The Centaur by John Updike
Dubliners by James Joyce
Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
The Stories of John Cheever
Herzog by Saul Bellow
Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August by William Faulkner
Tender is the Night by F.Scott Fitzgerald
Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
Love in the Time of Cholera by Grabriel Garcia Marquez
The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Dusk and Other Stories by James Salter
In the Garden of the North American Martyrs by Tobias Wolff
Friend of My Youth Alice Munro
Stones for Ibarra by Harriet Doerr
To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf;
A Room with a View and Howards End by E. M. Forster;
The Evening of the Holiday by Shirley Hazzard
Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Independent People by Halldor Laxness
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
At Weddings and Wakes and Child of My Heart by Alice McDermott
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson;
Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin
The Lucky Ones and The Country Life by Rachel Cusk
Sunstroke by Tessa Hadley
The Gathering by Anne Enright
Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri