Currently halfway through Leon Uris' saga of turn-of-the-20th-Century Ireland,
Trinity. Read it in high school, but now I actually understand it. Uris is more famous for
Exodus, but this is a deeper and maybe better book...really spellbinding.
Before that I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Nobel-prize opus,
One Hundred Years of Solitude for the second time.
The first time I read this book, when I turned the last page, I truly and literally sat down and wept at the sweet, powerful beauty of what I had just witnessed. I didn't cry this time, but I came close...the book was even better the second time through. I agree wholeheartedly with one of the reviews on the book's cover: "...the first book since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race..."
It's been referred to as "the entire South American civilization presented in one book", but I'd go further. It's LIFE presented in one book...sometimes miraculous and sometimes mundane, sometimes tragic and sometimes hilarious, but always mysterious and compelling.
If you ever have the chance to read this luminous masterpiece, by all means grab it.