Charlotte Brontë's Villette 

I'm assuming you've already read Jane Eyre, which is, in my opinion, one of the most important novels in nineteenth-century British literature and in the study of women's literature.  No English major should graduate from college without having read Jane Eyre.  So if you haven't yet read Jane Eyre, go away, read it, and then come back and read the rest of this recommendation. [time passes . . . ]  OK.  Now some people, despite their love of Jane Eyre, find themselves dissatisfied with aspects of the novel.  They may find the way Brontë resolves some of the plot to be too conventional, or they may find Jane's character inconsistent.  I believe in many ways Villette is the more interesting novel.  The heroine, Lucy Snowe, is a very complex, mercurial character, and a narrator who likes to withhold certain facts from the readers until it suits her to reveal them.  Villette is a thoroughgoing study of depression, but Brontë has also honed her talent for dry wit; the careful reader will be rewarded with nuggets of understated but pointed sarcasm.  Brontë has also dealt with the plot issues in a much more ambiguous (and some would say satisfying) manner than in Jane Eyre.  There is also an amazingly surreal scene of Lucy walking around the city while on drugs, and there is the merest hint of a lesbian attraction between her and the splendidly-named Ginevra Fanshawe.  In an ideal world, you'd have time to read this novel twice--it's really worth it.

***

Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex: A Novel 

Middlesex is a really fabulous book, and the voice of the protagonist/1st person omniscient (yes, I meant both) narrator is captivating throughout. Much of the story occurs before the narrator is even born, a la Tristram Shandy (one of my favorite novels). But Middlesex covers a whole spectrum of twentieth-century life from intersexuality to the immigrant experience (specifically Greek immigrants) to the founding of the Nation of Islam to incredibly complex extended family relationships to love/lust/desire to self-delusion and deliberate lies to the arrogance of certain members of the medical profession to self-discovery from many different angles.  It's not always a comfortable read for those who tend to see gender as a social construct more than a biologically essentialist reality (like yours truly), but it is an excellent reminder of the complexity of both sex and gender and that no one explanation for the causes of gender identity or sexual orientation can be generalized to apply to all individuals.  As a narrator, Cal is both wryly merciless and wryly sympathetic with his(?) earlier self and with the members of his family and the other characters, and even the most apparently stereotypical characters keep surprising us. A wonderful twentieth-century, multigenerational, Greek-American epic novel.

* * *

C.S. Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy

Black Sun Rising   When True Night Falls   Crown of Shadows

The Coldfire Trilogy is a dynamic fantasy/science fiction series.  On the planet Erna, a force called the fae is omnipresent and has the power to embody thoughts and emotions in ways that can be both terrifying and life-threatening.  One of the principal characters is a highly intriguing Byronic (of course!) and Faustian villain/hero who is as sexy as he is creepy.  The plot is intense and gripping with adventures and suspense galore, Erna is realized in fascinating detail, and the protagonist, Damien  Vryce, is heroic, conflicted, torn, and determined in his struggle against evil, learning that the lines between evil and good are not nearly so neatly drawn as he would have liked.

***

  Neil Gaiman's The Sandman

 

Gaiman's Sandman series of graphic novels (also known as comics) are, in my opinion, one of the great works of literature written in the twentieth-century.  They have epic sweep, mythical themes, a Byronic hero for a protagonist, a dysfunctional family known as the Endless (the siblings Destiny, Death, Dream, Desire, Destruction, Despair, Delirium), and a stunning story about responsibility for one's actions and to one's family, redemption, acceptance, and the question of what gives meaning to life.  Dream (aka the Sandman and Lord Morpheus and many other names) is arrogant, clueless, solipsistic, autocratic, and rigid, and at the same time, filled with human needs and vulnerabilities.  He is the very epitome of the Byronic hero.  In contrast to him, is his sister Death, who celebrates life and has little patience for her brother's angst and self-absorption.  In addition, Gaiman includes one of the most imaginative, intelligent, and thought-provoking portrayals of Shakespeare and of the "true story" behind A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest.  And you'll finally learn what your kitty cat is really dreaming about.  This is a long series and an expensive investment, but completely worth it.  In order, the books are Preludes and Nocturnes, A Doll's House, Dream Country, Season of Mists, A Game of You, Fables and Reflections, Brief Lives, World's End, The Kindly Ones, and The Wake.  There is a separate book, Sandman:  The Dream Hunters, and two books devoted to Death, The High Cost of Living and The Time of Your Life, as well as a more recent collection, Endless Nights, with stories about each of the siblings.  The Sandman engages in an exploration of dreams and the imagination that belongs on the same shelf as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Defence of Poetry, Manfred, The Eve of St Agnes, The Songs of Innocence and Experience, and more.  As Dream remarks, "Things need not have happened to be true.  Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgot."

***

Marge Piercy's He, She and It  

Someone once described this book to me as a Jewish version of Terminator 2.  It's more accurate to say that it's a Jewish version of Frankenstein and Terminator 2 all rolled up together.  Piercy gives us a cyborg version of Frankenstein's Creature, and she intersperses his story with the Jewish legend of the golem, consistently raising the issue of the rights of an artificial being and the responsibilities of its creator.  Her vision of life in the near-future is scarily convincing and a very plausible projection of where we are heading if we keep on our current course.  Her novel also has cyberpunk elements, and she includes a very creative, descriptive, and just plain cool portrayal of cyberspace.  Her characterization is excellent throughout; each significant character is thoroughly three-dimensional and human, from Yod the cyborg to my personal favorite, Nili, a superstrong and superfast technologically enhanced woman warrior.  If they ever make a movie, I want them to cast Sigourney Weaver!  This is one of my all-time favorite books, and I literally couldn't put it down.  Every time I finished a chapter, I'd say to myself, "Well, just one more chapter," because I was so involved with the individual characters and the engrossing and suspenseful plot.

***

Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates 

Take a Cal State Fullerton professor named Brendan Doyle, an obscure nineteenth-century poet named William Ashbless, a trip back in time to meet Coleridge, and not one, but two Byrons!  Powers (a CSUF alum) ingeniously weaves a complex mindf*ck of a plot, all the while remaining consistent with the known facts of Coleridge and Byron's lives.  The novel was inspired by an incident recounted by Byron in a letter, in which several people purportedly saw him in London on a particular day in which he was actually lying ill in Egypt. 

***

Tim Powers' The Stress of Her Regard

This book is an absolute must-read for fans of Byron, the Shelleys, and Keats.  Alas, it is out-of-print, but an enterprising searcher of used books should be able to find a copy.  This book is, in my humble opinion, brilliant.  The protagonist, Dr. Michael Crawford, has extensive encounters with the three poets and learns that they are all linked with a type of vampire.  These aren't Anne Ricean or Buffyan vampires; they're extremely original in conception and form.  Tim interweaves his fictional supernatural context with the poets' lives and quotations from their poetry in a way that is absolutely plausible and consistent.  The novel seemingly explains incidents in the poets' lives in a way that causes the reader to suspend her/his disbelief altogether.  And the plot is suspenseful, and Tim's characterization of the poets seems right-on.  They seem like real people who happen to be living extraordinary lives, and the novel ingeniously gives us a reason for their idiosyncrasies and behavior.  I can't recommend this book too much. 

Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos

Hyperion       The Fall of Hyperion 
Endymion      The Rise of Endymion 

The Hyperion Cantos are a very-far-future tetralogy that examines the relationship and conflict between humans and the AI's (artificial intelligences) they have created.  Simmons' characterization is thoroughly developed; each character draws the reader's interest.  Simmons is also a brilliant world-creator; his vision of the future 700 years from now is fascinating, detailed, elaborate, and all-encompassing.  Of particular interest to English majors are Simmons' references to John Keats throughout.  Both places and characters derive their names from Keats' poetry and life, but a "cybrid" recreation of John Keats plays a large part in the first two books, and Simmons very movingly and creatively evokes Keats's life and poetry.  The first book is also a kind of version of The Canterbury Tales, with seven characters on a pilgrimage, each telling the story of how they came to be there.  Finally, the Shrike is an unforgettable and extremely imaginative creation.

***