Winner of the 2016 Prix Goncourt, Enard's deliriously compelling and deeply erudite novel recounts the life of a dying Austrian Orientalist musicologist, stream-of-consciousness style, throughout one feverish night. Like fan fiction for musicologists. You will be constantly googling Eastern-centric writers, historians, artists and books. Academic candy.

If you want an extremely fun, I'm-staying-in-all-weekend-because-nothing-beats-this SCI FI novel: BLINDSIGHT by Peter Watts. This is a first contact tale featuring both aliens and vampires but which is absolutely not campy, funny, or for young adults. A darker read, not for the weak of heart, and a Hugo Award finalist.

Mervyn Peake, who’s been called "better than Tolkein,” is bafflingly underread. His GORMENGHAST trilogy combines fantastic courtly antics with obsessively beautiful prose and original ink drawings by Peake himself, all set within the eves and battlements of a gothic castle. Pass if you fear a run-on sentence and/or fun names like Steerpike, Titus Groan and Prunesquallor.

An epic adventure tale featuring Olympian POV, extraordinary emotional exactitude, and some of the best dialogue this reader has ever encountered. Patrick White was the Australian novelist of high modernism, and the winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature.