Before “Twilight” and “True Blood” — even before “Buffy” — Anne Rice wrote a book about a vulnerable vampire. Some 100 million copies in print later, she’s back with something new: a werewolf with a conscience. “The Wolf Gift” comes out this week, and Rice will sign copies Thursday at the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue and 46th Street.“When I wrote ‘Interview with the Vampire,’ people were outraged,” she recalls. “No one was pushing literature about vampires then, but it’s become a genre that will probably endure. It’s alive!” Turns out Rice loves Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse and “True Blood,” which she calls very clever. “It’s so satirical and so humorous, I roll on the floor watching it!” Here’s what’s in Rice’s library.

Great Expectations

by Charles Dickens

This was probably the first complete novel I ever read, and it swept me away. The story uses spectacle, atmosphere and drama in wonderful ways: that spooky old house, Miss Havisham in her wedding gown, and Pip, the young hero who wanted so badly to be someone, which is how I felt at 14. It imprinted on my mind what a novel should be.

Jane Eyre

by Charlotte Bronte

After my mother died, my father sent my sisters and me to a boarding school where we slept in metal beds in the attic, with a nun on each corner. There was one bathtub and we’d line up for baths every night . . . When I read this book in high school, I ate it up, especially Jane’s courage as she went into the world.

Madame Bovary

by Gustave Flaubert

Flaubert famously said he’d like to write about a book about nothing. What he did was take a mundane situation and wrote about it in a great way. “Madame Bovary” today would be a housewife in a tract house somewhere, wanting glitz and having tawdry affairs. Eleanor Marx, Karl Marx’s daughter, did a brilliant translation.

Lolita

by Vladimir Nabokov

Language has to be beautiful and sensuous to satisfy me. “Lolita” was just an object of love for a man who found her beautiful, and Humbert was the sensitive romantic who loved her. Nabokov had the courage to write about a nymphet and put that word into the language, but it was the style of his writing that got me.