George Packer's Reading List

"Giorgio Bassani's "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis," for book group."

"I just finished Eliot's "Daniel Deronda." It was a test of my digital-age attention span, and I kept having to reread her brilliant sentences."

"Hans Castorp, "The Magic Mountain.""

""Moby-Dick." I was 22, teaching in a West African village and pretty depressed; at "the palsied universe lies before us a leper" I had to put the novel down. But when I reread it a couple of years ago, I didn't feel like killing myself at all. Books change with us."