Michael Korda was the editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster for years,  and these are his favorites with his comments.  (from my friend Laura Miller’s SALON.COM GUIDE TO CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE)... Ok, so it's five picks... We're excited for him to write in with one more!

• THE LORD OF THE RINGS by J.R.R. Tolkien
  

  I can’t help it. I have read it upteen times.  Gandalf the Wizard, the hobbits, the journey into a wonderful imaginary world that somehow parallels our own, the sense of wonder and mystery – this is English fantasy at its richest and best, a far deeper road than THE SWORD AND THE STONE, and truly a book to be read slowly, patiently, savoring  every page.  In the 1960’s and 1970’s,  kids adopted Tolkien, but he’s better than that.  Hardly anybody has ever created such a rich world and made it so believable, and few writers have ever sustained  a cliff-hanger  adventure story for so many pages.  I cry every time I read the end.  What more can you ask from fiction?
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• BRIGHTON ROCK by Graham Greene
  

  Dark, spare, pessimistic, shocking, a novel that says everything about adolescent violence and angst, and about the limits of faith and love – still an overwhelming reading experience.
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• BRIDESHEAD REVISITED by Evelyn Waugh

  Forget the Masterpiece Theater version, however good it was.  The novel is the perfect distillation of English class- consciousness and story-telling; deeply romantic,  a love story anchored in the profligate 1930’s and highlighted by the experience of WWII; and filled with Waugh’s particular blend of wit, savagery, and pure English rage.  It is a major work of art, far beyond the fashionable gloss that has come to surround it.
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• AFTER MANY A SUMMER DIES THE SWAN by Aldous Huxley
  

  California, the quest for eternal youth and sex, William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies seeking nirvana via monkey gland shots:  this is a biting, witty, nasty book about LA and America that makes THE DAY OF THE LOCUSTS and THE LOVED ONE seem tame, and by a supremely intelligent writer.  In this age of glamour and celebrity worship, this book is necessary reading, an antidote to the belief that youth, sexual vitality, beauty, and happiness are all that matters, the supreme anti-Calvin Klein ad manifesto, and hilarious – albeit disturbing – reading.
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• THE LAST PICTURE SHOW by Larry McMurtry
  

  So you saw the movie, with Cybil Shepherd?  The book is much better. Everything there is to say about sexuality, class, and the pain of growing up in a small west Texas town in the 1950’s.  It’s told by a master storyteller, the Flaubert of the Plains when it comes to creating believable women characters, and still a book that you just can’t put down until you reach the last page.
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