The Wild Palms
By William Faulkner

This would have to be my favorite classic novel. It's such a beautiful, tragic love story—a book that will just destroy you. And Faulkner's language is so utterly descriptive. He can write an entire page that consists of only adjectives and two commas. Actually, he's the reason I ended up passing high school English, because my punctuation was always kind of...eccentric. I would say to my teacher, "Well, you know, William Faulkner—he doesn't use proper punctuation." And one of my teachers ended up devising a system with two grades, where you were graded on content and then on whether it was properly written.

Julia's next pick: An Imaginative Woman by Thomas Hardy