James Joyce was the founder of modern prose, that's all. When I was an editorial page editor in West Chester, every time his name appeared in print, we'd get a hostile letter from an old Knights of Columbus loyalist denouncing him as a pornographer and a defamer of Ireland. Nowadays, in some online literary salons I visit, some want to topple him from the pantheon and give the laurels for "founder of modern prose" to Virginia Woolf.

Joyce's worst enemies, though, are his pseudo-intellectual fleas, who, having penetrated his obscurity (usually guided by a college professor), then take that learning as a cudgel to beat on those who aren't as clever as they. For these Ren Faire smart-alecks, reading and discussing Joyce, and knowing a handful of trivia about him, are badges of intellectual superiority. If Joyce would ever have run into one of that smug set in a Paris bar, he'd pitch a drink at him. Then he'd call Hemingway over to pummel him.

But the obscurity is not so daunting after all. If you read him (and I omit "Finnegans Wake," which I can't yet understand), you might be surprised by the everydayness of his subjects and his people. Homer's wandering Odysseus becomes a decent-hearted Dublin everyman on an ordinary spring day. The Homer is not debased; rather, the modern man is elevated. And no writer I've discovered is better at making the humdrum blaze with archaic fire.

"Ulysses" is a secular Dante, an ordered view of a disorderly world In its final paragraphs it rises to spiritual ecstasy. Even the minor characters are tasty, and the funny bits are hilarious. Who wouldn't want to go get all liquored up with "stately, plump Buck Mulligan"? Reading it straight through in five days was more like an acid trip than some acid trips I've had.

Stendhal is the most amazing observer of human nature I've ever read. In his youth, Marie-Henri Beyle campaigned with Napoleon in Italy, Germany, Russia and Austria, and after the final defeat of the French he retired to Italy, took the name Stendhal, and began to write. He eventually returned to Paris and wrote novels -- first "Le Rouge et le Noir" and then "La Chartreuse de Parme," completed in an astonishing 52 days. Balzac appreciated his work, and Byron enjoyed his company, but for the most part Stendhal was ignored by his contemporaries -- a sure mark of genius.

Anyone who has ever been in love should spend some time with "De l'Amour," Stendhal's attempts to sort out his own feelings in the midst of a hopeless passion as he offers "a detailed account of all the phases of that disease of the soul called love." In a tribute to the book, the critic Michael Wood wrote, "De l'Amour is a notebook, a collection of thoughts, memories, anecdotes, epigrams, patches of analysis. It is almost always delicate, often brilliant, a book to keep quoting from. ... He knew that truth is often fragmentary, that De l'Amour ... may ultimately say more for being less composed, less like a well-rounded essay, for being drastically unfaithful to its stiff intentions." Modern readers may be delighted by the frank feminism of many of Stendhal's digressions. "On Love" and "The Red and the Black" are both available in many English editions, and there's a fine recent translation of "Charterhouse of Parma" by Richard Howard.

W.G. Sebald's "The Emigrants" consists of four long narrative lives of Europeans, living in exile to some degree, before or after the Second World War. It seems the most straightforward thing imaginable, but it isn't. Each section is like a lingering film camera shot of an innocent family photo. The lens slowly pulls back to reveal slight discoloration of the edges, then the charred page of a photo album, then only at the very end of the view the ruins of the house that held it, the rubble of the city around it.

Sebald blends fiction, memory and history. He weaves pictures and words. He researched his novels by visiting war archives and sifting through piles of postcards, maps, photos and magazine pictures. Some of them end up in his books, but infused with his artist's imagination. This is what Truman Capote might have written, if he had been a brilliant and sublime novelist instead of a journalistic raconteur.

I'm tempted to omit the fact that this is a book "about" the Holocaust, for fear that people who were assigned to read Eli Weisel in high school will politely click the page on me and think, "OK, well, I know what that's like." The Holocaust in this book is a negative space, a hole into which things go and never come out. If it is mentioned by name at all, it is only once or twice. It's like the silent, immense black hole that astronomers find in the middle of the Milky Way. The bright stars we watch at night pinwheel around it.

Critics compared Sebald to Ingmar Bergman, Kafka and Proust. But "The Emigrants' " true antecedents are in works just beginning to emerge from the bargain bin of history -- works long obscure, but now with suddenly snowballing reputations, such as Stendhal's unfinished autobiographical "Life of Henri Brulard" or Ezra Pound's "Cantos," which pull history like taffy through poetry. The evocation of memory throughout the book recalls Stendhal's image, in trying to recall his own childhood, of ancient frescos in ruins. Here's an arm, precisely and vividly painted on plaster. And next to it is bare brick. Whatever it once attached to is gone beyond recall.

For Stendhal, a 19th century French writer, Napoleon and his career were a brilliant meteor that blazed, never forgotten, never fully understood. The Holocaust fills this space in Sebald. Pure light and pure darkness blind alike. They make you lose sight of things.

I like Thornton Wilder. My reading friends have mostly been post-modernists and new historicists, lovers of hard bop and William Burroughs. When I'd mention a weakness for Wilder, they'd get this sad look on their faces and change the subject. I learned to not mention it. Like I learned not to mention that I was moved by "Appalachian Spring" and the "Adagio For Strings." These pieces were modern, but backward-looking, like Wilder's novels and plays. And they were "romantic." The whole 20th century has swerved determinedly away from romanticism, and especially from any whiff of sentimentality.

So when I opened the New York Times book review section one weekend last year and saw the name "Wilder" on the Bookend page, my jaw dropped. Billy Wilder? Gene Wilder? No, they were writing about my Wilder. And real writer-types were coming out boldly and asserting their Wilder sides.

They could distinguish sentiment from sentimentality, and didn't have to flee from both for fear of not knowing the difference. Sentimentality is a shoddy imitation of a fine human feeling, but in the determined avoidance of mush, many writers have abandoned valid emotions and high human feelings. Wilder was one of the few authors in this century who attempted that dangerous ground, who walked toward sentiment with open eyes. And he did so with a craft as solid as Ezra Pound or James Joyce, the great writers who led the swerve away from Victorian pap.

In 8th grade, I didn't know any of this. I was a sullen, obnoxious kid who tended to ignore reading assignments. My English teacher, Mrs. Siler, a loud, proud daughter of Dixie, assigned us to read a play, and if we couldn't find a suitable play, she'd pick one for us. If I had been my teacher then, I probably would have assigned myself something by O'Neill. But she told me to read Wilder's "The Skin of Our Teeth." I read it and was amazed. I date my adult interest in reading (and in writing) from that year, which was when I also read "Lord of the Rings." Over the years, I've enjoyed Wilder's novels more than his plays: "The Bridge of San Luis Rey," and then "The Ides of March," which fixed in my mind the persons of Caesar, Catullus and Cleopatra so well that, though I've encountered them in a dozen other fictions and films, if they don't match the Wilder version, I don't quite buy it.

"Heaven's My Destination" is a brilliant comedy centered on the kind of earnest, polite young Christian fundamentalist that grows so thick in this corner of the world you can't toss a Bible without hitting one on the head. But it's all done with genuine affection, and fictional George Brush remains my favorite fundamentalist. "The Eighth Day" is his masterpiece, weaving beautiful symphonic music out of the vaudeville of "Skin of Our Teeth." It's as hard-headed as Ayn Rand and as hopeful as a first love.

Among the plays, only "Our Town" rivals it. You've probably seen it already. Every high school in America acts it around the clock, 365 days a year. But you haven't seen it. Because, ironically, the play that's written so simply that any random selection of 16-year-olds can stage it, is impossible to perform with a high school sensibility. It requires the very long view, the ability to swallow the tragedies and still love the fact of life, the texture of it. Wilder served in both World Wars; he suffered an ambivalent sexuality in an America that was intolerant of such things. And he wrote not with the grim "cold eye" of the mature Yeats (who never went to war), but with a warm, loving affirmation of the beauty in the big messy world. That's the concept Mrs. Siler, I suspect, was trying to whisper to the sullen big kid who sat in the back row of Ardmore Junior High School.

I don't read many novels, and seem to read fewer as the years go by. But among those I love are the great, sprawling 19th-century love-and-war epics like "War and Peace." I like Dickens, but if you want to get the rollicking feel of a Dickens novel without the Victorian veneer, I can't think of any better book than "The Quincunx," by Charles Palliser.

Among American-born authors, a stunning and disturbing piece of work is "Birdy" by William Wharton. Don't bother with the movie, though the Peter Gabriel soundtrack is about as dark as the writing. I grew up within a few miles of where this is set, so it's fun to pick out the landmarks, most of which are true to the geography. Other than that, I have a weakness for Southern novels: Faulkner, especially "The Sound and the Fury," which I read about once a year, and Eudora Welty's joyous, hilarious "Losing Battles."

For short stories, a collection I could read any time is "Like Life" by the astonishing Lorrie Moore. She's word-smart, and her radar is so fine-tuned it can pick up the agony that echoes faintly in the emptiest of small-talk. She lays her wit and humor directly onto the most grisly cannibalisms of modern life. It's painful, and painfully good. Raymond Carver's are among the best, and some by John Updike. I like Hemingway's short stories better than his novels.

Most people who are serious readers seem to stake a claim to one or another of the great unread classics of literature, the books everyone knows the titles of, but which, like Everest, few have scaled. I had a girlfriend in college who was a wonder to me, in part because she had actually read "The Faerie Queen." Mine was "Moby Dick," which I've read three times so far and which really is the Great American Novel. Can you think of anything else out of this nation that you can set beside Homer without embarrassment?

It's so tempting for young writers to show how hip they are by being shocking and blasé all at once, but I never read a more sadistic, sexual and disturbed novel than "Wuthering Heights," and Juliet Barker's excellent biography of the Bronte sisters confirms my notion that Emily was the weirdest, most fascinating woman in literature. On the other hand, "Slowness," by Milan Kundera, is a quirky modern mirror held up to Choderlos de Laclos' pioneering psychological novel, "Les Liaisons Dangereuses". It accomplishes the goal of showing how much more shocking the present is than the past -- shocking in its ugly banality.

I was laid up with a double hernia the summer I turned 22, and couldn't do my usual summer break job on the assembly line. I used the time to read "Two Years Before the Mast" and everything written by Joseph Conrad. What glorious, exciting stuff! "Lord Jim" and "Heart of Darkness," but what I really loved were his pure sea stories. The clash of wind and waves is among the oldest are in English -- "The Seafarer" and "The Wanderer" are our first masterpieces, and there are sea-journeys in "Beowulf." But I don't believe anyone does them better in our tongue than Jozef Korzeniowski, as he was known before he jumped ship and shortened his name and spoke his first words of English -- at age 19.

I don't care for much of D.H. Lawrence. Some of his poetry sings, but whole pages of it seem to have the kind of shambling banality that people who hate Whitman claim to see when they look at Walt's verse. In his novels, Lawrence often seems to lack sufficient detachment from his characters to be writing literature, not vendetta letters. Sometimes it seems like he's angling for a seat on the couch with Barbara Walters so he can get weepy about his bad old dad and mean girlfriends. But an exception always is "Women in Love," which seems to me to show powerful insights into men and women and their ways of relating.

"Catch-22" made me laugh out loud harder than any book I've ever read, though "The Commitments" was a close second, followed by parts of "Huck Finn" and Faulkner's "Go Down, Moses."

Most science fiction and fantasy doesn't impress me as terribly well-written or plotted. Sometimes the stories told or the worlds invoked are so compelling that it doesn't matter. I loved the boyish glee of Ray Bradbury, though he tells just a little too much and the writing tends to get over-the-top. A co-worker recently lent me "Snow Crash," which was a rip-roaring good read. But most of what people get out of science fiction I find expressed with a breathtaking mathematical tightness of form in Borges' short stories. As for time-travel, I doubt I'll ever read a better treatment of it than Jack Finney's "Time and Again." And, though it's not technically a time-travel novel, Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle" was another book that left me with a sense of unreality that lingered for days, like the feeling you sometimes have a few moments after awaking from an intense dream, so that you have to stop and sort out what you dreamed, what is true.

And it may be my Cold War upbringing that accounts for my fondness of the best thrillers from that age: "Fail Safe" and "On the Beach." But it's a love of pure over-the-top prose that makes me read and re-read Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler.