East of Eden
John Steinbeck​  

There was something rhapsodic to me about Steinbeck​ when I was a teenager. East of Eden was assigned in my sophomore year in high school, and for years I read it every spring. I thought it was sexy, and it had real evil and also redemption, and characters whose eyes you could look into.

Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
J. D. Salinger

The voice of Buddy Glass as the narrator of Raise High the Roofbeam is so warm and authentic that it set a standard for me in fiction: no phonies. I read this as a teenager, while working as a foot checker at a public pool. In the story, Buddy Glass is on the way to his brother Seymour's wedding. The title, I later recognised, is a reference to an epithalamium, or wedding song, by Sappho: "The groom's as tall as Ares, far taller than a tall man." I was putty in Salinger's hands.

Moby-Dick
Herman Melville

Moby-Dick gave me my mantra when I first read it, on moving back to my parents' house after graduating from college: "Oh Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!" The motto did not quite last me through graduate school (the bastards wore me down), but I read the book again on a trip to Nantucket and was again caught up in the suspense. When I'm in the grip of it, I can never remember who wins, Ahab or the whale.

The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann  

I had an epic cold my first winter in New York, during which I devoured a translation of The Magic Mountain, feeling feverish along with Hans Castorp​. The hero, staying in a sanatorium in Switzerland, has an intense interior life, including a huge crush on the beautiful and sophisticated Mme Chauchat, but nothing ever happens. Somehow I thought that was funny.