Forget the movie. Ellroy is a Dostoyevsky of our times writing about a past we still haven't escaped from.

Camus most readable novel. Allegorical perhaps, great novel, certainly.

Pynchon is difficult but V and Crying of Lot 49 are his most readable works. What's it all about? God knows.

Obvious, I know but it's one of the few genuinely funny novels that explicitly discusses the human condition. And it is very funny.

A literary equivalent of Edvard Munch's paintings. Equal measures of despair and more despair wrapped up in a thriller-like plot.

This book kills me everytime...

She's feisty and he's the Byronic man. Gothic novel, love story, chronicle of its age, feminist text, yada yada.

Sometimes the catholic guilt thing is too much but if you can get past that then Greene conjures a world of utter despair.

To many, the weakest of the Roads to Freedom trilogy but my first taste of existential thought which holds a tender place somewhere in my psyche.

Why has no one in this country even heard of Richard Dooling?

Again, perhaps not a great novel and characterization is shakey but it's another wonderful read.

Read it, reread it and again and again. Humbert is a moral destitute but the novel portrays our love/hate relationship with that spoilt child, America.