The book that sent me to grad school. The narration is unlike anything I'd ever read -- lovely, precisely detailed descriptions of scenes, objects are attributed to Emma in the most indirect ways. The plot has never been more secondary.

I'd second that! Mailer's The Naked and the Dead is also well worth your time.

tu as choisi un très beau morceau là ... : ) "les jouissances de l'existence factice"

I read about half of Manzoni's The Betrothed. It's on my bedside table; it puts me to sleep.

In Sartre's Huis clos (No Exit), there's a coupe-papier on the mantlepiece that's mentioned in the first scene (it's like a letter opener, for cutting the page edges of new books --since in France books were often sold with uncut pages so customers couldn't read the books in the store).

It's only a one-act play, but the coupe-papier does get used in the last scene.

Hugo never stopped grieving the death (at 19, by drowning) of his daughter Léopoldine. These emotions inform Valjean's love for Cosette.

I don't distinguish between education and enjoyment... unless "education" means learning something the hard way

Martin Amis, Time's Arrow. One of my favorite books.

Old Calogrenant was such a wanker!

Galehodin was even danker;

Gornemant was fat and farty,

Lac was pissed at every party.

Aglovale belched loud and rudely,

Erec stripped and swaggered nudely,

Cligès shat behind his chair

Morholt drooled and didn’t care.

Yvain wept to see such stuff

And Arthur said “I’ve had enough!”

Agreed! A perfectly good question. And "it's not a porn novel" says nothing; what exactly is a "porn novel" ? and who gets to apply that label?

Gabriel Fauré's incidental music to Pelléas et Mélisande, a Symbolist play by Maurice Maeterlinck about forbidden, doomed love.

Love Iris Murdoch! discovered her somewhat by accident and spent the next year reading pretty much all she wrote. I knew I had to read Oscar Wilde after seeing the quote "“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”