Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

While I enjoyed this book from the start, as layers started to peel back and lies started to be exposed, I was drawn even more to the story. I loved the way this story revealed the lies the characters told each other, and the plotting and counter plotting of the protagonists, Nick and Amy Dunne. When Amy disappears on their fifth wedding anniversary, we see the facade they built start to crack, and gradually learn how this couple brings out both the best and the worst in each other. I'd highly recommend this book as a summer read.

Rites of Passage by William Golding

This book, presented as the journal of an aristocratic younger son, on his way to Australia, written for his patron, an English lord, tells the story of the death of the parson on board the ship--a death that's written off by the captain as a fever, but whose more sinister roots are preserved in this journal. I was particularly intrigued by the unreliability and the moral ambiguity of the narrator, who obviously thinks much better of himself than the reader will and who is initially unable to recognize his own role and culpability in the story. Winner of the 1980 Booker Prize.

Borges and the Eternal Orangutans by Luis Fernando Veríssimo

I really enjoyed this book, which plays on Poe and Borges as it creates a locked-room murder mystery at an international conference on Poe, attended by Borges. The narrator, our main source of information on the murder, gives plenty of clues--both to the red herrings that abound and to the real murder--but it's up to the reader (for the most part) to figure it out. Lots of fun with symbols and numbers, too. I suspect this book might not be as entertaining for those not so into this kind of academic guessing game, but I found it a really great and entertaining book.

The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor

This volume gathers all of Flannery O'Connor's published short stories. They are nothing short of brilliant. Every time I read "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," I see new details to admire and enhance my reading of the story. I think one of the reasons I admire these stories so much, is that O'Connor is so good at getting inside a person's head and exploding all his or her prejudices, bigotries, and limitations for the reader. It's not like she has a great deal of sympathy for these characters: she really doesn't hold back on her criticism, but on the other hand, she knows them so well that you have to think that she must like some part of them at least a little bit. Really magnificent: these stories are the work of a master of the form and the human condition.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

This book is about the Fall of the House of Compson, as told through the points of view of its last three sons--Benjy, who is mentally retarded, Quentin, who is suicidally insane, and Jason, who is morally bankrupt--and a third-person, omniscient narrator. Although the majority of the narration technically happens during Easter weekend 1928, the story is continually haunted by its past traumas, which keep slipping in and out, along with Faulkner's cruel golf jokes. This book is a hauntingly beautiful warning about the dangers of getting caught up in the past and about the dangers of settling for a flawed modernity.

What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller

While the narrator of this book, Barbara Covett, thinks she's explaining (or possibly exonerating) her friend Sheba Hart's affair with a student at the school where they both worked, she's actually revealing her own obsessions and ticks. It's a portrait of a lonely woman, at times quite moving, and at others frankly disturbing, and a demonstration of how someone who feels sure of herself and her actions comes off as clueless to others. I enjoyed this book, especially because of its unreliable narrator. A haunting read. Booker shortlisted, 2003.