Siri Hustvedt's Ten favorite books - great literary masterpieces

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë because it is a brilliantly written book about the mysteries of human passion.
Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, a writer who articulates subtle truths about human psychology that I recognized only once I had read him.
Crime and Punishment is probably Fodor Dostoevsky’s most perfect book in terms of structure, and its portrait of the lonely, perverse, and impoverished student, Raskolnikov, continues to make my heart ache.
I love George Eliot’s Middlemarch for its expansive intelligence and delicate depictions of relations among people.
Henry James’s ghost story, The Turn of the Screw, is diabolical, clever, and terrifying because its phantoms conjure hidden human appetites and formless desires.
Charles Dickens’s Bleak House is the best of Dickens — funny, deep, complex, and written in a prose as vigorous and original as anything in English.
Cervantes’ Don Quixote is the whole novel and all its possibilities in a single volume.
I read The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson over and over because nobody ever used the English language as she did, and every time I read her, I feel very alive to the world.
Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams made a lasting impression on me as a great work of art and a glimpse into a rigorous and skeptical mind.
Finally, I have read The Great Gatsby four times, and every time I read it, it gets better. To my mind, it is one of the best books about American banality, a banality made grand by the sympathetic voice of its narrator who penetrates the beauty of all human longing.