The past 25 years in fiction according to the NYT's

Toni Morrison's Beloved was given the #1 spot with Don DeLillo's Underworld a close second.

I personally loved Beloved but have been told by many people that it was a hard book to get through and to understand. Being the English and Women's Studies major that I am (not to mention my enthusiasm and passion for hidden meanings), I caught on to the premise of the book almost immediately. The movie version Oprah did is a whole other story of course, and naturally, one I thought did a horrible job with such a wonderful book. If you are as avid a reader as I am, you'd know by now that books are almost always better than the movie. (LOTR is a perfect example of the movie being better than the books but that's mostly because I have a really hard time getting into Sci-Fi.)

So if you haven't read Beloved and decided the movie was the way to go, shame on you! Get thee to your local library or used bookstore now, then spend the rest of the day (or your weekend) indulging your literary senses.

(And yes, I did not like Oprah's interpretation of Their Eyes Were Watching God either. Zora Neale Hurston was hardly romantic in any of her writing and it was always woman-centered.)