Absolutely ESSENTIAL reading.

The Alienist

By Caleb Carr

In 1896 New York, psychologist--or in period terminology, an alienist--Laszlo Kreizler joins forces with journalist John Schuyler Moore to track a vicious serial killer.

A Confederacy of Dunces

By John Kennedy Toole

Set in New Orleans, the protagonist is nearly arrested for being a suspicious character and encounters many unfortunate events.

The Complete Sherlock Holmes #2 Boxed Set

By Arthur Conan Doyle

Titles include "Sherlock Holmes, Volume 1" and "Sherlock Holmes, Volume 2".

Wasted

By Marya Hornbacher

The author shares her lifelong battle with bulimia and anorexia, chronicling her secret life of bingeing and purging and her obsession with food and body image, substance abuse, and sex.

A recent transplant to Paris, humorist David Sedaris, bestselling author of "Naked", presents a collection of his strongest work yet, including the title story about his hilarious attempt to learn French. A number one national bestseller now in paperback.

The Complete Works of Shakespeare

By William Shakespeare

David Bevington, the current president of the Shakespeare Association of America, is widely recognised for his contributions to the field of Shakespearean scholarship. Here he presents an annotated volume of all Shakespeare's works.

The Bell Jar

By Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under--maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experiece as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.

The Hobbit, Or, There and Back Again

By John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

Bilbo Baggins, a respectable, well-to-do hobbit, lives comfortably in his hobbit-hole until the day the wandering wizard Gandalf chooses him to take part in an adventure from which he may never return.

The Catcher in the Rye

By J.D. Salinger

The "brilliant, funny, meaningful novel" (The New Yorker) that established J. D. Salinger as a leading voice in American literature--and that has instilled in millions of readers around the world a lifelong love of books. "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth." The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caufield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days.

Absolutely ESSENTIAL reading.

The Alienist

A Confederacy of Dunces

The Complete Sherlock Holmes #2 Boxed Set

Wasted

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Me Talk Pretty One Day

The Complete Works of Shakespeare

The Bell Jar

The Hobbit, Or, There and Back Again

The Catcher in the Rye