Ten Little Indians

Dr. Seuss teaches you your colors and how to count in his own whimsical way. Think of it as Sesame Street for people who like the feel of a book.

Yes, it suffers from a lot of setup for the third book, but where would the Lord of the Rings be without this dense, literate and fantastic second act?

"No, my friends, I am merely tipsy" is a line (spoken by Athos after having barricaded himself for days in a wine cellar) that I still recall, decades after I first read this rip-snorting action adventure masterpiece.

Forsythe gives us a cold war thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat. A masterwork for those who love the spy genre.

One of the truly great and disturbing war novels of modern time. Yes, it is sick, twisted, depraved and includes the Holocaust and a porn star named Montana Hilhack (a vision of Miley Cyrus' future?) — but that's what makes it so jarring.

Back when novels were innocent, married couple slept in separate beds or turned the lights out to kiss, you get this well-written and very successful (in its time) piece of fluff that was made into a movie starring — evidence of its wholesomeness! — Doris Day.

I've read this book a hundred times. Ghostwritten and co-written by the original seven Mercury astronauts, this puts you back in the early 1960s, when we were racing to the moon and there had to be men ready, willing and able to push back the frontier. Makes a great companion with The Right Stuff. The photos are fantastic, and the sections talking of their training rigors are funny now, but for the times... we weren't sure what these men would face.

Nicely paced thriller by Janet Evanovich, featuring her bounty hunter Stephanie Plum as the protagonist. It's not great literature, but it is compellingly written and could serve as a class to all aspiring writers of this genre, as to what works and how to make it work.

World War II action and romance novel that ends with a rip-snorting landing at Anzio (if you don't know where or what that is, you probably need to do some research to truly appreciate the full scale of this novel). Touching.

American writer John Reed's firsthand account of the Russian Revolution. Fascinating detail of the birth of a superpower and the forces that brought it into the world.