Mary Norris is a senior copy editor at The New Yorker magazine, where she has worked for more than 30 years. In her first book, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen (Text Publishing), explains the rules of grammar and recalls working with writers such as Philip Roth.
East of Eden
John Steinbeck
There was something rhapsodic to me about Steinbeck when I was a teenager. East of Eden was assigned in my sophomore year in high school, and for years I read it every spring. I thought it was sexy, and it had real evil and also redemption, and characters whose eyes you could look into.
Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
J. D. Salinger
The voice of Buddy Glass as the narrator of Raise High the Roofbeam is so warm and authentic that it set a standard for me in fiction: no phonies. I read this as a teenager, while working as a foot checker at a public pool. In the story, Buddy Glass is on the way to his brother Seymour's wedding. The title, I later recognised, is a reference to an epithalamium, or wedding song, by Sappho: "The groom's as tall as Ares, far taller than a tall man." I was putty in Salinger's hands.
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville
Moby-Dick gave me my mantra when I first read it, on moving back to my parents' house after graduating from college: "Oh Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!" The motto did not quite last me through graduate school (the bastards wore me down), but I read the book again on a trip to Nantucket and was again caught up in the suspense. When I'm in the grip of it, I can never remember who wins, Ahab or the whale.
The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann
I had an epic cold my first winter in New York, during which I devoured a translation of The Magic Mountain, feeling feverish along with Hans Castorp. The hero, staying in a sanatorium in Switzerland, has an intense interior life, including a huge crush on the beautiful and sophisticated Mme Chauchat, but nothing ever happens. Somehow I thought that was funny.