1. The Sun Also Rises or For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway

This was too hard of a pick and both novels are terrific and I thought for a long time and then just chose them both. The Sun Also Rises catches the feel of the place like nothing else; you taste the dust from the tramping of the bull's feet and you feel the heat in the air. For Whom the Bell Tolls captures the spirit of the people and the mountains and the war and beautifully ties the three together.

2. The Border Trilogy
Cormac McCarthy

McCarthy's descriptions of things and his excellent prose could not be better. When he writes, for instance, of the wolves coming out in the night to run the antelope in the fresh snow, it feels as if you are there and crouching in that snow with it wet in your boots and watching them with the mist of the snow rising up around.

3. Slaughterhouse Five
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

A fictional chronicle of the time Vonnegut really spent in an underground slaughterhouse during the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, this book is an attack on war and shows the true horror and pointlessness that Vonnegut found in the destruction of the city.

4. The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
Daniel Mendelsohn

The account of a return to Poland so many years after the war tore the country apart, the book follows the author as he searches for his ancestors in the ruins of a time past. Part history and part memoir, the interviews with survivors and the stories that Mendelsohn uncovers are some of the most telling of all of Holocaust literature.

5. Catch-22
Joseph Heller

This book is both humorous and tragic in the way that the war was often a mix of emotions, a mix of chaos and order. The times of humor are wonderful and light and the contrast when the war turns both dark and deadly is that much more powerful for it.