Have you ever read a book where your connection to it is so deeply personal, so emotional, that to recommend it to anyone feels like oversharing? Luckily, I have little compunction when it comes to TMI. When I say a book made me cry, what I mean is: tears silently fell down my cheeks for a moment or two. When I say Eleanor & Park made me cry, I mean that I had one of the most prolonged, sobbing, full-bodied, carthartic cries of the last decade. Eleanor is a perfect composite of me and my friends at that age. She's also a perfect portrayal of what it is to be young and poor, young and different, young and afraid—afraid to feel, to love, to deserve something good.

Also, Eleanor & Park is the sweetest, most adorable love story ever, set to the soundtrack of my youth—The Smiths, The Cure, Joy Divison, and all of the rest of the wonderful-awful 80s.

1. This is not the book that you think it is.

2. It is exactly the book you think it is.

3. You--yes you--should read it for exactly those reasons.

It's a teen novel written at a level adults will understand; it's a coming of age story about dying young; it's a laugh-out-loud funny book about cancer; it's a self-aware romance novel; it's a tragedy without voyeurism; it's quite possibly the most life-affirming book about dying ever written.

That's why you should read this book—why you should listen to this book (even if you already read it) is because of Kate Rudd's amazing performance. Her sentences turn on a dime from sarcasm to sadness with a heartbreaking ease. It is a stunning high-wire act of a performance of a stunning high-wire act of a book.

Part slave narrative, part Gulliver's Travels, this strange book is an important new addition to the literary contextualization of race in America, not to mention a funny page-turning adventure. The novel is largely structured in the slave narrative tradition, but add to that the fact that it is also partly a fictional academic study by a scholar (footnotes and all), and what you have is a an ingeniously self-aware book that performs a high-wire act between the bounds of fiction and literary criticism. A cerebral, fantastical, and thoroughly clever book that had me nodding my head, laughing, and gasping along the way.

Helen Oyeyemi is the jazz soloist of storytelling. Each chapter is a surprising, original new riff on the same motifs: men and women, love and violence, creativity and creation, all told through the somewhat distorted lens of the fairy tale. At turns funny, disturbing, and heartbreaking, Mr. Fox is so good that as I read it, I simultaneously wanted to race to the end, pause to savor every word, and flip back to reread from the beginning.

Though each chapter of this brilliant novel is written from a different point of view, it's impossible not to become instantly absorbed in each character's story. Indeed, this is a story about storytelling, and Reiken is clearly a master of it. Near the end of the novel, one of our narrators writes, "Perhaps the meaning of the story is that you must look deep rather than far if you want to unlock any of the secrets of the universe, that once unlocked a secret loses its power unless a part of it is withheld." So goes the storytelling in Day for Night, the secrets slowly being unveiled as each narrator contributes his or her small, inward-looking piece of it, some willfully withholding parts, others incapable of looking deep enough to see all of the parts. Eventually, most of the parts of this story about trauma, family, and rebirth do fall into place, though not without ambiguities. But according to another narrator, "You must learn to trust these ambiguities. This is perhaps the most important thing I know."

The sweetest, strangest, and saddest love story ever written. Quirky, funny, and filled with brilliant observations--the sort that make you elbow your nearest neighbor every five minutes to read out loud to them. It's one of the only books I've ever read that gave me the urge to turn back to the beginning and read it again as soon as I finished it.

Ishiguro is a rare magician of a writer, whose prose is so deceptively simple and yet haunting. This book broke me and made me sob at the end. In a good way.

So what are you going to do with your life now that Lost is over? Read this book. And then make all of your friends read it so you can have feverish discussions about it afterward. This book is a marvelous maze of plot twists that will leave you guessing until the end, and unlike Lost, I promise all of your questions will be answered This book is the best of all worlds, a page-turner that doesn't sacrifice good writing--in fact, this is some of the most exquisite writing you'll ever see.

To preface this review, I'll just say that I'm not good with the supernatural. I never read fantasy, sci-fi or horror novels, and I'm also an atheist. However, the fact that I still wanted to pick up this book after reading the description, and the fact that I can't stop thinking about it now that I've read it says a lot in my book. LaValle is doing a lot of different things here, from urban realism to allegory, from philosophical novel to mystical fantasy, and I would say that LaValle is about 95% successful. And those parts he's successful at?--he's 200% successful. I've mostly broken my college habit of marking up my books, but it was very hard to resist the urge with this one. There's so much to chew on here, and if I were a college English professor, I would go out of my way to build a course around this book. I particularly love the way the book looks at faith and doubt, not as opposites, but as a system of checks and balances to keep religious fanaticism at bay.

The narrator of this book is by turns funny, vulnerable, frustrating, charming, haughty, brilliant, and pathetic. In other words, he may be the most lovable, authentic character ever to appear in American literature. This book continues to jangle around in your head for weeks after reading it, much the way a particularly catchy metered stanza might.

Rarely is a book so entertaining and hilarious, and yet dense and sprawling enough that you could write your dissertation on it. This book is simply brilliant.