Sid

I would like to agree with ‘The Independent', whose favorable review is written on the cover - ‘A masterpiece. One of the greatest works of our age.'
No review can do this book justice, as I am beginning to see. The ruminations of ‘Humbert Humbert', becoming more and more deranged as the pages fly by, is a chilling echo to the spiralling madness of the main character.
I couldn't put this book down, and it is shameful to realize how most people would not touch this book with a ten foot pole, due to them getting the wrong notion of this book encouraging paedophilia. Read and make up your own minds.
TL;DR - read it, if you haven't already. If you have, then you already know how haunting it is.

TL;DR - a true blue masterpiece, and one that is going to make me start a classics binge shortly.
Whether it is the characterisation, the heady Faustian themes, and a surprisingly great plot - my first foray into Wilde's literature was nothing short of spectacular. Lord Henry's cynicism was laugh-at-loud at parts, and somewhat deep at others, but where the novel truly shines is in depicting Dorian's corruption - first as a charming and uncorrupted seventeen-year old, but then whose countenance grows darker the more he revels in his senses. What I liked the most in this depiction is that we get to know about Dorian's behaviour second-hand, and that too in parts - thus the misuse of the omniscient PoV is kept to a minimum.
A slight addendum - there are slight socialist undertones I got from this (for example, the depiction of vacuousness of the people having inherited wealth is unsubtle), to the point where I began to wonder if Wilde was a socialist - which he was? Unsurprising, but it only added to my appreciation of the text.

“I thought of that phrase, “It's just business.” It's never just business. It never will be. If it ever does become just business, that will mean that business is very bad.”
This was a very engrossing memoir, made all the more say by the very likeable personality that is Philip Knight.
He takes you on the rollercoaster ride of Nike and himself, his ambitions, his fights with the government, with his former creditors, with Adidas and Puma, and much, much more.
You can absolutely taste the depths of Phil's despair and the heights of his joy, leaping at you from the pages, which is a marvellous quality for a writer to have, but even more so when you're writing your own autobiography.
TL;DR - must read if you're into memoirs. One of the best such pieces ever written, as is apt for such an unconventional life.

What does your soul look like?
This masterpiece novella can be interpreted in many ways – as a symbol of isolation and/or depression, as a literal example of speciesism and so on and so forth. When I started reading this literary piece, I was quickly drawn into Gregor's minuscule world which slowly turns upside-down and larger than he could have imagined.

The ending, while expected, left me with a sense of hollowness – because as the cover blurb states, ‘Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man.' The story of Gregor is heart-breaking beyond words – the shallow veneer of his ‘happy' existence is cruelly left exposed and Gregor is left gasping for air, as well as the fact that his sister Grete backstabs him – it can be argued that the deuteragonist of the story is so critical to rationalizing the story that she might as well be labelled as the co-protagonist. The subtextual metamorphosis that Grete undergoes, I would argue, is more important than Gregory's own – but that is the beauty of the novella – you can interpret it in many different ways and all of them would be equally valid.
A masterpiece of prose, visual imagery, allegorical storytelling and subtexts, The Metamorphosis truly lived up to its reputation as one of the best short works in modern literature. Another one of those ‘classics' that doesn't disappoint.

I am lost for words after finishing the final entry of this trilogy - it took every expectation I had of it, destroyed it to smithereens, and came up with something unprecedented.
With this concluding work, Cixin Liu has cemented his place among the greats - this is the best hard sci-fi work written since Asimov's ‘The Last Question'. The works of sci-fi landing in ‘unprecedented scope' was generally mutually exclusive with ‘actually mind-blowing for once', but Cixin Liu has demolished those barriers effortlessly.
It moves so much beyond its initial foundations of first contact that it is barely recognisable - but it is all the more better for it, as it is not chained to a particular niche. Exploring concepts as varied as dimensional flattening and time warping, and making sure that the plot stays on track, is an underappreciated talent that potential sci-fi writers would do good to take note of.
This series is the closest I've seen a sci-fi series come to the platonic ideal of ‘sci-fi' - the literature of ideas. The trilogy is a must read for anyone who has ever read sci-fi and would like a more serious take on it.