Haruki Murakami 400 pages Kodansha International (1985)

Read this if you like: Unicorns, cross-genre experiments, simulated worlds

Tl;dr summary: Part surreal fantasy, part sci-fi detective story, all wonderfully bizarre—and masterfully constructed.

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Though I saw The Princess Bride for the first time when I was a kid, I only got around to reading the book in the last few years. The film is one of the rare movies from my childhood that stands up to repeated viewings on the basis of more than just nostalgia; I was curious how the experience of reading the book would compare.

The Princess Bride is a magical, wonderfully quirky novel, and the movie adaptation stays very true to the text in terms of plot, character, and tone. The differences between the two are subtle, but each version has its own unique strengths.