Stoner is one of the best novels I've ever read. He dedicates almost his entire life toward studying literature because he had a passion for it in university, despite never achieving resounding success (not a spoiler, as this is revealed on the first page of the novel).

There are wonderful passages like: “In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”"

It changed my view on love and relationships.