The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman

This novel is perhaps the worst of the His Dark Materials trilogy, though of course one couldn't appreciate the trilogy without reading this book. Pullman has constructed a church so evil, it's impossible not to hate organized religion, which is all well and good--except that it makes the moral decisions in the book too easy. Also, the book is filled with easy ways out--between the knife, the alethiometer, and the spyglass. While Will and Lyra make a hard decision at the end, by the time they get there, these other flaws in the books make that decision far less significant than it could have been.

The Monk by Matthew Lewis

I really enjoyed this gothic novel. Although there are definitely campy moments (and Lewis was only 19, after all, when he wrote the book), the books is a lot of fun to read. I particularly enjoyed the story of the Bleeding Nun. There's an obvious vein of the Faust story running through the text. Even the supposedly "happy" bits of the ending are quite disturbing and the final image is no less than a reversal of the creation story in Genesis. Overall well worth the read.