All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque
Published in 1929 (I finished it on May 13, 2005)
The narrator's German, but could have been any man in any war. It's like a documentary of a cold depressing place where no one wins and everyone suffers whether they survive the war or not. I experienced the story through an audio book and would often just turn the stereo off and think in the silence. Sure, it’s depressing, but a depression that is necessary to undergo. Remarque does a masterful job of placing one in the trenches of World War I with no way out but in a wooden box.

So many books … (you know the rest)