| | | | | | . | Achebe, Chinua | Things Fall Apart | The tragic novel of pre-colonial Igbo society was a major literary and cultural event when it was published in 1958. Written during a period of nationalist assertion and an emerging modern culture in Africa, Things Fall Apart's influence quickly spread from Nigeria throughout Africa and beyond. In its fifty years, this unforgettable novel has been translated into fifty languages and has been read by millions. | no | | . | Amis, Kingsley | | | | | . | Austen, Jane | Pride and Prejudice | An astonishingly relevant 200-year-old romantic novel challenging the societal barriers of pride and prejudice and the veracity of love, | yes | | . | Austen, Jane | Emma | In Jane Austen's comic masterpiece, the inimitable Emma Woodhouse, a self-proclaimed matchmaker, just may find herself the victim of her own best intentions by the novel's conclusion. | yes | | . | Austen, Jane | Sense and Sensibility | Two sisters, one practical and conventional and the other emotional and sentimental, find that only through compromise of their mutual differences can they get along. | yes | | . | Austen, Jane | Northanger Abbey | Northanger Abbey is the story of Catherine Morland, an enthusiastic but naïve girl intent on becoming a heroine like the ones she has read about in popular novels. Searching for romance and adventures worthy of her favourite works of fiction, she becomes ever more entangled in an authentic world of manipulation, greed and disloyalty. This is one of Jane Austen's earliest and most varied works. It contains fascinating insights into her life as both a reader and a writer, and is as imaginative and entertaining as the Gothic novels it sets out to lampoon. | yes | | . | Beckett, Samuel | Waiting for Godot | Waiting for Godot. It opened the gates to the theatre of the absurd as four men appear on the stage, apparently with purpose but (perhaps) waiting for someone called Godot. It is stark, funny, bemusing and still deeply affecting. | yes | | . | Beckett, Samuel | Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable | The first novel of Samuel Beckett's mordant and exhilarating midcentury trilogy introduces us to Molloy, who has been mysteriously incarcerated, and who subsequently escapes to go discover the whereabouts of his mother. In the latter part of this curious masterwork, a certain Jacques Moran is deputized by anonymous authorities to search for the aforementioned Molloy. In the trilogy's second novel, Malone, who might or might not be Molloy himself, addresses us with his ruminations while in the act of dying. The third novel consists of the fragmented monologuedelivered, like the monologues of the previous novels, in a mournful rhetoric that possesses the utmost splendor and beautyof what might or might not be an armless and legless creature living in an urn outside an eating house. Taken together, these three novels represent the high-water mark of the literary movement we call Modernism. | yes | | . | Bely, Andrey | Petersburg | Taking place over a short, turbulent period in 1905, Petersburg is a colourful evocation of Russia's capital - a kaleidoscope of images and impressions, an eastern window on the west, a symbol of the ambiguities and paradoxes of the Russian character. History, culture and politics are blended and juxtaposed; weather reports, current news, fashions and psychology jostle together with people from Petersburg society in an exhilarating search for the identity of a city and, ultimately, Russia itself. | no | | . | Bronte, Anne | Agnes Gray | Agnes Grey was an 1847 novel based on Anne's experience as a governess. Bronte depicts the precarious position of a governess and how that can effect a young woman. Agnes was the daughter of a minister whose family was in financial difficulty. Agnes has only a few choices for employment. Agnes learns the difficulty of reining in spoiled children and how wealth can corrupt morals. She later opens up a school and finds happiness. | yes | | . | Bronte, Anne | Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The | When the mysterious and beautiful young widow Helen Graham becomes the new tenant at Wildfell Hall rumours immediately begin to swirl around her. As her neighbour Gilbert Markham comes to discover, Helen has painful secrets buried in her past that even his love for her cannot easily overcome. | yes | | . | Bronte, Charlotte | Villette | Charlotte Bront's final masterpiece powerfully portrays a woman struggling to reconcile love, jealousy, and a fierce desire for independence. Having fled a harrowing past in England, Lucy Snowe begins a new life teaching at a boarding school in the great capital of a foreign country. There, as she tries to achieve independence from both outer necessity and inward grief, she finds that her feelings for a worldly doctor and a dictatorial professor threaten her hard-won self-possession. Published in 1853, Charlotte Bronte's last novel was written in the wake of her grief at the death of her siblings. | yes | | . | Brontë, Charlotte | Jane Eyre | Set in nineteenth-century England is this story of Jane Eyre, the governess at Thornfield Manor, and Rochester, lord of the manor. They haven fallen in love, but Rochester harbors a tragic secret that threatens to keep them apart. | yes | | . | Brontë, Emily | Wuthering Heights | Wuthering Heights, first published in 1847, the year before the author's death at the age of thirty, endures today as perhaps the most powerful and intensely original novel in the English language. "Only Emily Bront," V. S. Pritchett said about the author and her contemporaries, "exposes her imagination to the dark spirit." And Virginia Woolf wrote, "It is as if she could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognisable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality. Hers, then, is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts, with a few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar." | yes | | . | Camus, Albert | The Stranger | (Required reading in senior classes) Through the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd." First published in 1946 | no | | . | Carroll, Lewis | Hunting of the Snark, The | This humorous poem tells the tale of an impossible voyage for an improbable crew hunting an imaginary creature. (COHS copies are annotated with many helpful notes.) | yes | | . | Carroll, Lewis | Alice's Adventures in Wonderland | Lewis Carroll's classic tale of a girl named Alice who pops down a rabbit hole to find a world full of nonsense and strange behavior. | yes | | . | Chaucer, Geoffrey | The Canterbury Tales | (Required reading in senior classes) | yes | | . | Chekhov, Anton | The Cherry Orchard | "The Cherry Orchard" was the last play written by Anton Chekhov and is widely regarded as one of his greatest dramatic accomplishments. It is the story of an aristocratic Russian woman and her family who return to their estate, a cherry orchard, to oversee the auction of the estate in order to pay the mortgage. The rise of the middle class and the decline of the aristocracy that was prevalent at the end of the 20th century in Russia, and ultimately led to the Socialistic Revolution, are excellently portrayed in Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard". | no | | . | Christie, Agatha | Various titles | We have over 100 books by Agatha Christie that include many different titles. Generally, they are mystery/detective fiction. | yes | |
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| | | | | | . | Collins, Wilkie | Woman in White, The | On a moonlit night in north London Walter Hartwritght encounters a solitary, terrified and beautiful woman dressed in white and resolves to help in this gothic psychological thriller of murder, intrigue, madness, and mistaken identity. | yes | | . | Collins, Wilkie | Moonstone, The | A priceless diamond has been stolen from an Indian temple and bequeathed to Rachel Verinder. On her birthday, her beau Franklin brings her the gift, only to have it stolen again. No one is above suspicion, as Franklin and Sergeant Cuff piece together the riveting puzzle... | yes | | . | Collins, Wilkie | Woman in White, The | The Woman in White is the first and greatest "Sensation Novel." Walter Hartright's mysterious midnight encounter with the woman in white draws him into a vortex of crime, poison, kidnapping, and international intrigue. A scheming nobleman, a beautiful heiress, and, of course, a mysterious woman in white confined to an asylum for the insane are just a few of the unforgettable characters in this marvelous tale of mistaken identities, locked rooms, and surprise revelations. | yes | | . | Collins, Wilkie | Evil Genius, The | The Evil Genius is the story of divorce and remarriage, unfaithfulness, and, above all, children battered helplessly on the storms of their parents' passions. | yes | | . | Collins, Willie | Hide and Seek | At the center of Hide and Seek (1854) a secret waits to be revealed. Why should the apparently respectable painter Valentine Blyth refuse to account for the presence in his household of the beautiful girl known only as Madonna? It is not until his young friend Zack Thorpe--rebelling against his repressive father--takes up with bad company and meets a mysterious stranger that the secret of Madonna can be unravelled. | yes | | . | Conrad, Joseph | Heart of Darkness | Heart of Darkness is considered one of the greatest novellas in the English language. On the surface it is a dreamlike tale of mystery and adventure set in central Africa; however, it is also the story of a man's symbolic journey into his own inner being. A profusion of vivid details that are significant on both literal and symbolic levels contributes to the ambiguity of Conrad's narrative and has led to conflicting interpretations of its meaning. | yes | | . | Conrad, Joseph | Nostromo | One of the greatest political novels in any language, Nostromo enacts the establishment of modern capitalism in a remote South American province locked between the Andes and the Pacific. | yes | | . | Conrad, Joseph | Under Western Eyes | Under Western Eyes traces the experiences of Razumov, a young Russian student caught up in the aftermath of a terrorist bombing. It deals with topical moral issues such as the defensibility of terrorist resistance to tyranny and the loss of individual privacy in a surveillance society. | yes | | . | Conrad, Joseph | Secret Agent, The | Conrad's novel The Secret Agent is a gripping espionage thriller revolving around the anarchists and secret agents of late 19th-century England. The protagonist, Mr. Verloc, is an employer of foreign embassy in London who gets involved in a terrorist plot that ultimately leads to disaster. T | yes | | . | Dante | Inferno | The Inferno opens on the evening of Good Friday in the year 1300. Traveling through a dark wood, Dante Alighieri has lost his path and now wanders fearfully through the forest. Here he encounters the ghost of Virgil, the great Roman poet, who has come to guide Dante back to his path. Virgil says that their path will take them through Hell and that they will eventually reach Heaven. Virgil leads Dante through the gates of Hell, marked by the haunting inscription “abandon all hope, you who enter here” (III.7). | no | | . | de Balzac, Honore | Le Pere Goriot | One of the most widely read novels written by Balzac. It is a story of a young and eager man, Rastignac, who is determined to succeed at any cost. The novel contains deep sense of family values where a father sacrifices his all for his two daughters. | no | | . | de Cervantes, Miguel | Don Quixote | Noble knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his squire, Sancho , travel throughout sixteenth-century Spain seeking glory and grand adventure. | no | | . | de Mapauassant, Guy | Alien Hearts | Alien Hearts is the story of lovers bound by bitterness as much as by passion. Maupassant's hero falls for a woman of the world, a glacially dazzling beauty whose past with an abusive husband leads her to hold him and everyone at arms length. He seeks solace with a servant girl, but remains racked by pointless infatuation. | no | | . | de Mapauassant, Guy | Life, A: The Humble Truth | An unflinching presentation of a woman's life of failure and disappointments, where fulfillment and happiness might have been expected, A Life recounts Jeanne de Lamare's gradual lapse into a state of disillusion. | no | | . | Defoe, Daniel | Moll Flanders | Moll, which she emphasizes is not her birth name, though she never does reveal what it was, is raised until she is teenager in America by a foster mother. She then gets a job as a household servant where she is loved by both of the families sons. The oldest convinces her to "act as if they where married" in bed, but then is unwilling to marry her, and pawns her off on his younger brother. She is then widowed, and leaves her children behind to begin a new life. She pretends to be a fortuned widow to attract a man that will marry her and provide her with security. | yes | | . | Defoe, Daniel | Robinson Crusoe | The acclaimed tale of a shipwrecked Englishman who finds himself stranded on an island off the coast of South America -- a story of survival, self-reliance, adventure, and faith. | yes | | . | Di Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi | Leopard, The | Set in the 1860s, "The Leopard" tells the spellbinding story of a decadent, dying Sicilian aristocracy threatened by the approaching forces of democracy and revolution. The dramatic sweep and richness of observation, the seamless intertwining of public and private worlds, and the grasp of human frailty imbue" The Leopard" with its particular melancholy beauty and power, and place it among the greatest historical novels of our time. | no | | . | Dickens, Charles | A Tale of Two Cities | (Note: This is the required novel for Academic Decathlon 2010.) Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton may look the same but their personalities are very different. One day, in the midst of the French Revolution, Charles flees to London to escape the trouble in France; but when he learns that his servant is facing death, he returns to Paris to save him. Charles's own life is endangered on the way and he is captured; Sydney may be able to help him, but will their strong resemblance be enough to save Charles's life? | yes | | . | Dickens, Charles | Pickwick Papers, The | Dickens first novel was a huge success when it was first published. It tells the tale of the irrepressible Mr. Pickwick and his fellow Pickwick Club members who travel around the English countryside getting into all kinds of scrapes and adventures. Funny, warm-hearted, and full of memorable and engaging characters, this is an enchanting novel that continues to delight readers today. | yes | | . | Dickens, Charles | Great Expectations | Dickens's epic literary masterpiece. From the agony of Charles Dickens's disenchantment with the Victorian middle class comes a novel of spellbinding mystery and a profound examination of moral values--his is the story of the orphan Pip's trials and tribulations among London's high society circles. | yes | |
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| | | | | | . | Dickens, Charles | Bleak House | A savage but often comic indictment of a society that is rotten to the core, Bleak House is one of Charles Dickens's most ambitious novels, with a range that extends from the drawing rooms of the aristocracy to the poorest of London slums. | yes | | . | Doblin, Alfred | Berlin Alexanderplatz | Alfred Doblin (1878-1957) studied medicine in Berlin and specialized in the treatment of nervous diseases. Along with his experiences as a psychiatrist in the workers' quarter of Berlin, his writing was inspired by the work of Holderlin, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and was first published in the literary magazine, Der Sturm. Associated with the Expressionist literary movement in Germany, he is now recognized as on of the most important modern European novelists. "Berlin Alexanderplatz" is one of the masterpieces of modern European literature and the first German novel to adopt the technique of James Joyce. It tells the story of Franz Biberkopf, who, on being released from prison, is confronted with the poverty, unemployment, crime and burgeoning Nazism of 1920s Germany. | no | | . | Dostoevsky, Feodor | Brothers Karamazov, The | Fyodor Dostoyevsky's final novel, considered to be the culmination of his life's work, "The Brothers Karamazov" is the story of the murder of Father Karamazov, whose four sons are all to some degree complicit in the crime. Within the context of this crime story evolves a brilliant philosophical debate of religion, reason, liberty, and the nature of guilt in society. | no | | . | Dostoyevsky, Fyodor | Crime and Punishment | Raskolnikov commits murder. He then must deal both with the police, and his own guilty conscience. Determined to overreach his humanity and assert his untrammelled individual will, Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the Tsars, commits an act of murder and theft and sets into motion a story which, for its excrutiating suspense, its atmospheric vividness, and its profundity of characterization and vision, is almost unequaled in the literatures of the world. The best known of Dostoevsky's masterpieces, Crime and Punishment can bear any amount of rereading without losing a drop of its power over our imagination. | no | | . | Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan | Hound of the Baskervilles, The | The Hound of the Baskervilles is the tale of an ancient curse suddenly given a terrifying modern application. The grey towers of Baskerville Hall and the wild open country of Dartmoor hold many secrets for Holmes and Watson to unravel. The detective is contemptuous of supernatural manifestations, but the reader will remain perpetually haunted by the hound from the moor. | yes | | . | Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan | Study in Scarlet, A | When Dr Watson ends up renting rooms in Baker Street with the eccentric Sherlock Holmes he finds that he has let himself in for a great deal more than he imagined. He is called upon to help the budding detective solve a perplexing mystery, involving a dead body found in a locked room. Although the body shows no signs of having been attacked Holmes is convinced that a murder has been committed. As Watson looks on, he uses his exceptional powers of deduction to unravel a case that involves both kidnapping and thwarted love. | yes | | . | Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan | Sign of Four, The | InThe Sign of Four, Holmes must solve a perplexing case involving a damsel in distress, intrigue in colonial India, stolen treasure, a baffling murder, and four despicable ex-convicts. | yes | | . | Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan | Valley of Fear, The | In The Valley of Fear, Holmes unravels the mystery of a dead man's mistaken identity and faces up to his old foe, Professor Moriarty. | yes | | . | Drabble, Margaret | Seven Sisters | When circumstances compel her to start over late in her life, Candida Wilton moves from a beautiful Georgian house in lovely Suffolk to a two-room, walk-up flat in a run-down building in central London--and begins to pour her soul into a diary. Candida is not exactly destitute. So, is the move perversity, she wonders, a survival test, or is she punishing herself? How will she adjust to this shabby, menacing, but curiously appealing city? What can happen, at her age, to change her life? | yes | | . | Drabble, Margaret | Sea Lady, The | This is the story of Humphrey Clark and Ailsa Kelman, who spent a summer together as children in Ornemouth, a town by the gray North Sea. As they journey back to Ornemouth to receive honorary degrees from a new university there-- Humphrey on the train, Ailsa flying-- they take stock of their lives over the past thirty years, their careers, and their shared personal entanglements. Humphrey is a successful marine biologist, happiest under water, but now retired; Ailsa, scholar and feminist, is celebrated for her pioneering studies of gender and for her gift for lucid and dramatic exposition. | yes | | . | Drabble, Margaret | Red Queen, The | Barbara Halliwell, on a grant at Oxford, receives an unexpected package-a centuries-old memoir by a Korean crown princess. An appropriate gift indeed for her impending trip to Seoul, but Barbara doesn't know who sent it. On the plane, she avidly reads the memoir, a story of great intrigue as well as tragedy. The Crown Princess Hyegyong recounts in extraordinary detail the ways of the Korean court and confesses the family dramas that left her childless and her husband dead by his own hand. When a Korean man Barbara meets at her hotel offers to guide her to some of the haunts of the crown princess, Barbara tours the royal courts and develops a strong affinity for everything related to the princess and her mysterious life. | yes | | . | Dumas, Alexander | Man in the Iron Mask | Deep inside the French prison known as the Bastille resides prisoner number 12, Philippe...who is none other than the twin brother of King Louis XIV. He was incarcerated to prevent him from setting off a civil war in his quest for the kingship itself. But there are forces who will work tirelessly to free this man in the iron mask-and put Philippe on the throne! | no | | . | Dumas, Alexandre | The Three Musketeers | One of the most famous historical novels ever written, The Three Musketeers (1844) is also revered as one of the world's greatest adventure stories--it's heroes Athos, Porthos and Aramis symbols for the spirit of youth, daring and comradeship. | no | | . | Dumas, Alexandre | Count of Monte Cristo, The | Imprisoned for a crime he didnt commit, Edmond Dants spends 14 bitter years in a dungeon. When his daring escape plan works he uses all he has learned during his incarceration to mastermind an elaborate plan of revenge that will bring punishment to those he holds responsible for his fate. No longer the naive sailor who disappeared into the dark fortress all those years ago, he reinvents himself as the charming, mysterious, and powerful Count of Monte Cristo. | no | | . | Eliot, George | Middlemarch | George Eliot fashions in Middlemarch (1871-2) the quintessential Victorian novel, a concept of life and society free from the dogma of the past yet able to confront the scepticism that was taking over the age. In a panoramic sweep of English life during the years leading up to the First Reform Bill of 1832, Eliot explores nearly every subject of concern to modern life: art, religion, science, politics, self, society, human relationships. Among her characters are some of the most remarkable portraits in English literature: Dorothea Brooke, the heroine, idealistic but näive; Rosamond Vincy, beautiful and egoistic: Edward Casaubon, the dry-as-dust scholar: Tertius Lydgate, the brilliant but morally-flawed physician: the passionate artist Will Ladislaw. | yes | | . | Eliot, George | The Mill on the Floss | As Maggie Tulliver approaches adulthood, her spirited temperament brings her into conflict with her family, her community, and her much-loved brother Tom. Still more painfully, she finds her own nature divided between the claims of moral responsibility and her passionate hunger for self-fulfillment. | yes | | . | Fielding, Henry | Tom Jones | Abandoned child Tom is raised by the rich and benevolent squire Mr. Allworthy, much to the chagrin of Allworthy's mean-natured nephew Blifil, and develops into a good-natured rake. But Tom's inability to resist a pretty face lands him in hot water when he impregnates Blifil's betrothed. When the lovely Sophia runs away to London, Tom pursues, embarking upon a series of riotous and amorous adventures. However, further trouble and the revelation of his true identity await him in London. | yes | | . | Flaubert, Gustave | Madame Bovary | In this novel of French bourgeois life in all its inglorious banality, Emma Bovary, a bored provincial housewife, abandons her husband to pursue the libertine Rodolphe in a desperate love affair. A succes de scandale in its day, Madame Bovary remains a powerful and arousing novel. | no | | . | Ford, Ford Madox | The Good Soldier | The Good Soldier relates the complex social and sexual relationships between two couples, one English, one American, and the growing awareness by the American narrator John Dowell of the intrigues and passions behind their orderly Edwardian facade. It is the attitude of Dowell, his puzzlement, uncertainty, and the seemingly haphazard manner of his narration that make the book so powerful and mysterious. Despite its catalogue of death, insanity, and despair, the novel has many comic moments, and has inspired the work of several distinguished writers, including Graham Greene. | yes | | . | Forster, E. M. | Passage to India, A | E.M. Forsters intense and moving story asks serious questions about preconceptions regarding race, sex, religion and truth. Adele Quested and Dr. Aziz enter the Indian Marabar caves together, emerging to allegations of rape directed at Dr. Aziz and a subsequent trial. Adela never actually accuses Dr. Aziz of raping her, and makes decisions which ostracise her from both her fellow British countrymen and many of the natives. A hard-hitting political/philosophical work, Forsters masterpiece is also exotic and descriptive. | yes | |
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| | | | | | . | Forster, E. M. | Howard''s End | The free-spirited, free-thinking Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, are swept into a relationship with the Wilcoxes, a wealthy conservative English family, and the Basts, a lower-class couple. In ever deepening layering of relationships and obligations, Margaret must reconcile her irrepressible, independent spirit with her desire for companionship, and Helen must come to terms with her sister's choices and her unexpected passion for a match that, seemingly, should never be. | yes | | . | Forster, E. M. | Room with a View, A | A Room with a View is a 1908 about a young woman, Lucy, in the repressed culture of Edwardian England. Set in Italy and England, the story is both a romance and a critique of English society at the beginning of the 20th century. | yes | | . | Fuentes, Carlos | Death of Artemio Cruz | As the novel opens, Artemio Cruz, the all-powerful newspaper magnate and land baron, lies confined to his bed and, in dreamlike flashes, recalls the pivotal episodes of his life--a kaleidoscope of images with dazzling inventiveness, layering memory upon memory, from Cruz's heroic campaigns during the Mexican Revolution, through his relentless climb from poverty to wealth, to his uneasy death. | no | | . | Gide, Andre | Counterfeiters, The | A young artist pursues a search for knowledge through the treatment of homosexuality and the collapse of morality in middle class France. | no | | . | Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von | Faust | A magnificent drama shaped by themes of redemption and salvation, "Faust" is the magnum opus of Goethe. Faust follows Mephistopheles through ancient Greek mythology. Deeply smitten by the incomparably beautiful Helen of Troy, Faust marries Helen, embodying for Goethe his imaginative longing to join poetically the Romantic medievalism of the Germanic West to the classical genius of the Greeks. | no | | . | Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von | Sorrows of Young Werther, The | These are the letters of Werther, a young artist of highly sensitive and passionate temperament, sent to his friend Wilhelm. In these letters Werther gives an intimate account of his stay in the village Wahlheim. He is enchanted by the peasants there and falls instantly in love with Charlotte. Charlotte is however already engaged. | no | | . | Gogol, Nikolai | Dead Souls | Although Dead Souls (1842) was largely composed by Gogol during self-imposed exile in Italy in the late 1830s, his last work remains to this day the most essentially Russian of all the great novels in Russian literature. As we follow its hero Chichikov, a dismissed civil servant turned unscrupulous confidence man, about the Russian countryside in pursuit of his shady enterprise, there unfolds before us a gallery of characters worthy in comic range of Chaucer, Rabelais, Fielding and Sterne. With its rich and ebullient language, ironic twists and startling juxtapositions, Dead Souls stands as one of the most dazzling and poetic masterpieces of the nineteenth century. | no | | . | Golding, William | Lord of the Flies | (Required reading in sophomore classes) | yes | | . | Golding, William | Double Tongue, The | "The Double Tongue is William Golding's last and perhaps most superbly imaginative novel. It is a fictional memoir of an aged prophetess at Delphi, the most sacred oracle of ancient Greece, just prior to Greece's domination by the Roman Empire. As a young girl, Arieka is ugly, unconventional, a source of great shame to her uppity parents, who fear they'll never marry her off. But she is saved by Ionides, the High Priest of the Delphic temple, who detects something of a seer (and a friend) in her and whisks her off to the shrine to become the Pythia - the earthly voice of the god Apollo. Arieka has now spent a lifetime at the mercy of a god, a priest, and her devotees, and has witnessed firsthand the decay of Delphi's fortunes and its influence in the world. Her reflections on the mysteries of the oracle, which her own weird gifts embody, are matched by her feminine insight into the human frailties of the High Priest himself, a true Athenian with a wicked sense of humor, whose intriguing against the Romans brings about humiliation and disaster." | yes | | . | Golding, William | Darkness Visible | It opens during the London blitz, when a naked child steps out of an all-consuming fire; that child, Matty, becomes a wanderer and a seeker. Two more lost children await him, twins as exquisite as they are loveless. In a final conflagration, William Golding' s book lights up both the inner and outer darknesses of our time. | yes | | . | Golding, William | Rites of Passage | (mature content) | yes | | . | Goldsmith, Oliver | Vicar of Wakefield, The | A fascinating novel which presents a vivid picture of village life. It is narrated by Dr. Charles Primrose who is the Vicar of Wakefield. Several misfortunes befall him and his family. All these trials and tribulations teach the reader great wisdom. Thoughtful and captivating ndash; a true classic | yes | | . | Goldsmith, Oliver | She Stoops to Conquer | Oliver Goldsmith's comedy She Stoops to Conquer was first performed in London in 1773. It is both a good-humored comedy and a satire on social manners. A country gentleman, Mr. Hardcastle, plans to have his daughter Kate marry to Charles Marlow, the son of a wealthy aristocrat. Marlow is nervous amongst women of his own class but feels easy amongst serving girls. When they meet, Kate realizes she will have to act as a common girl to marry Marlow and thus poses as a barmaid. (a drama) | yes | | . | Goncharov, Ivan | Oblomov | The classic nineteenth-century satire of quiet resistance to bourgeois life. Ilya Ilich Oblomov is a young, serf-owning nobleman largely incapable of overcoming his apathy. "Forced to choose between an unworthy life and sleeping," writes Mikhail Shishkin in the afterword "Oblomov chooses sleep. Suicide by sofa."" | no | | . | Gordimer, Nadine | House Gun, The | "The respected Executive Director of an insurance company, Harald, and his doctor wife, Claudia, are faced with something that could never happen to them: their son, Duncan, has committed murder." "What kind of loyalty do a mother and father owe a son who has committed the unimaginable horror? How could he have ignored the sanctity of human life? What have they done to influence his character; how have they failed him?" | | | . | Gordimer, Nadine | My Son's Story | Nobel Prize-winning author Gordimer's story of segregated South Africa focuses on Sonny, a black teacher whose revolutionary activities, imprisonment and extramarital affair with a white human rights activist profoundly affect his family. | | | . | Gordimer, Nadine | None to Accompany Me | In an extraordinary period immediately before the first non-racial election and the beginning of majority rule in South Africa, Vera Stark, the protagonist of Nadine Gordimer's passionate novel, weaves a ruthless interpretation of her own past into her participation in the present as a lawyer representing blacks in the struggle to reclaim the land. The return of exiles is transforming the city, and through the lives of Didymus Maqoma, his wife Sibongile, and their lovely daughter who cannot even speak her parents' African language, the reader experiences the strange passions, reversals, and dangers that accompany new-won access to power. | | | . | Grass, Gunter | Tin Drum, The | Oskar, a hunchback detained in a mental hospital and convicted of a murder he did not commit, tells the story of his life through the horrors of the Nazi era. Through the imaginative distortion and exaggeration of historical experience, a pathetically hilarious yet startlingly true portrayal of the human situation comes into view. | no | | . | Greene, Graham | Human Factor, The | A morally complex and mature work from a modern master. The author continues to explore moral and theological dilemmas through psychologically astute character studies and exciting drama on an international stage. In The Human Factor ,a high- level operative of the British Secret Service acts as a double agent to benefit his family. | yes | | . | Greene, Graham | Our Man in Havana | Graham Greene's classic Cuban spy story, first published in 1959, "Our Man in Havana" is an espionage thriller, a penetrating character study, and a political satire that still resonates today. It tells of MI6s man in Havana, Wormold, a former vacuum-cleaner salesman turned reluctant secret agent out of economic necessity. To keep his job, he files bogus reports based on Lambs "Tales from Shakespeare" and dreams up military installations from vacuum-cleaner designs. Then his stories start coming disturbingly true. (Note: If you like spy stories, both humorous and intellectually satisfying, Greene could be a great choose for an author when the project requires you to read more than one work by the same author. He has many more titles not mentioned here.) | yes | |
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| | | | | | . | Greene, Graham | Quiet American, The | The scene is Saigon in the violent years when the French were desperately trying to hold their footing in the Far East. The principal characters are a skeptical British journalist, his attractive Vietnamese mistress, and an eager young American sent out by Washington on a mysterious mission. | yes | | . | Greene, Graham | Power and the Glory, The | In a poor, barren Mexican state, the Red Shirts have gained control, outlawed God & murdered the priests. However, one still lives, along with his illegitimate daughter. Now on the run from his executioners, he tramps anonymously through the village streets & on the torturous mountain trails. It is a long time before he stops running & finds God. | yes | | . | Haggard, Henry | She | This adventure story, wildly popular when first published in England in 1887, follows Leo Vancey and Horace Holly on an expedition to Africa. They encounter many serious and dangerous trials, including shipwreck, sickness, and hostile natives, before discovering a legendary lost city in a system of underground caverns. It is here that they meet Ayesha, or She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, a white queen who is wise, beautiful, terrible in her love, and two thousand years old. Ayesha is a mythologically monstrous and all-powerful female, as mysterious and frightening as she is desirable, and absolutely lethal. She is both of the imagination and immediately real, for her magical walk through a pillar of fire has rendered her immortal, yet she lives on interminably to wait for the reincarnation of her love Kallikrates. When Ayesha becomes certain that Leo is her reincarnated love, he and his friend must decide if the goal of their quest is worth risking their lives with a woman who is deadlier than the male. | yes | | . | Haggard, Henry | King Solomon's Mines | H. Rider Haggard's "King Solomon's Mines" has entertained generations of readers since its first publication in 1885. Following a mysterious map of dubious reliability, a small group of men trek into southern Africa in search of a lost friend and a lost treasure, the fabled mines of King Solomon. Led by the English adventurer and fortune hunter Allan Quartermain, they discover a frozen corpse, survive untold dangers in remote mountains and deserts, and encounter the merciless King Twala en route to the legendary hoard of diamonds. (Ms. W's note--It's my opinion that if you pick Haggard for your project, you'll need to start with the two novels listed here. Other novels by Haggard will be difficult to research later.) | yes | | . | Hamsun, Knut | Hunger | A true classic of modern literature that has been described as "one of the most disturbing novels in existence" ("Time Out"), Hunger is the story of a Norwegian artist who wanders the streets, struggling on the edge of starvation. As hunger overtakes him, he slides inexorably into paranoia and despair. The descent into madness is recounted by the unnamed narrator in increasingly urgent and disjointed prose, as he loses his grip on reality. | no | | . | Hardy, Thomas | Jude the Obscure | Jude Fawley is a bright but impoverished stonemason who aspires to attend university and become a scholar. H is failure to fulfill the expectations of the two women he loves points to his final tragedy. Concerned with the destructive conventions of marriage and the English class system, Jude the Obscure is a raging indictment of Victorian society; the censure of this insightful book was almost without precedent in the history of English literature. | yes | | . | Hardy, Thomas | Life and Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge, The | The woman is no good to me. Who'll have her?'Michael Henchard is an out-of-work hay-trusser who gets drunk at a local fair and impulsively sells his wife Susan and baby daughter. Eighteen years later Susan and her daughter seek him out, only to discover that he has become the most prominent man in Casterbridge. Henchard attempts to make amends for his youthful misdeeds but his unchanged impulsiveness clouds his relationships in love as well as his fortunes in business. | yes | | . | Hardy, Thomas | Return of the Native | Eustacia Vye criss-crosses the wild Egdon Heath, eager to experience life to the full in her quest for 'music, poetry, passion, war'. She marries Clym Yeobright, native of the heath, but his idealism frustrates her romantic ambitions and her discontent draws others into a tangled web of deceit and unhappiness. For modern readers, the tension between the mythic setting of the heath and the modernity of the characters challenges our freedom to shape the world as we wish; like Eustacia, we may not always be able to live our dreams. | yes | | . | Hardy, Thomas | Far from the Madding Crowd | Gabriel Oak is only one of three suitors for the hand of the beautiful and spirited Bathsheba Everdene. He must compete with the dashing young soldier Sergeant Troy and the respectable, middle-aged Farmer Boldwood. And while their fates depend upon the choice Bathsheba makes, she discovers the terrible consequences of an inconstant heart. Far from the Madding Crowd was the first of Hardy's novels to give the name Wessex to the landscape of southwest England and the first to gain him widespread popularity as a novelist. Set against the backdrop of the unchanging natural cycle of the year, the story both upholds and questions rural values with a startlingly modern sensibility. | yes | | . | Hardy, Thomas | Tess of the d'Urbervilles | When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D'Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her 'cousin' Alec proves to be her downfall. A very different man, Angel Clare, seems to offer her love and salvation, but Tess must choose whether to reveal her past or remain silent in the hope of a peaceful future. With its sensitive depiction of the wronged Tess and powerful criticism of social convention, Tess of the D'Urbervilles is one of the most moving and poetic of Hardy's novels. | yes | | . | Hasek, Jaroslav | Good Soldier Svejk | Good - natured and garrulous, Svejk becomes the Austrian army's most loyal Czech soldier when he is called up on the outbreak of the First World War - although his bumbling attempts to get to the front serve only to prevent him from reaching it. Playing cards, getting drunk and becoming a general nuisance, the resourceful Svejk uses all his natural cunning and genial subterfuge to deal with the doctors, police, clergy and officers who chivvy him towards battle. The story of a 'little man' caught in a vast bureaucratic machine, The Good Soldier Svejk combines dazzling wordplay and piercing satire to create a hilariously subversive depiction of the futility of war. | no | | . | Homer | The Iliad | The Iliad can justly be called the world's greatest war epic. The terrible and long-drawn-out siege of Troy remains one of the classic campaigns, the heroism and treachery of its combatants unmatched in song and story. | no | | . | Homer | The Odyssey | This is one of humanity's oldest and most famous legends, an inspired epic relating man's adventures and the gods at play. It narrates the triumph of human genius when faced with the pitfalls of destiny. Odysseus is one of the most engaging heroes of Greek mythology, and his exploits are sung by the most ancient poets of Antiquity. | no | | . | Hsueh-Chin, Tsao | Dream of the Red Chamber | For more than a century and a half,Dream of the Red Chamberhas been recognized in China as the greatest of its novels, a Chinese Romeo-and-Juliet love story and a portrait of one of the world's great civilizations. | no | | . | Hugo, Victor | The Hunchback of Notre Dame | One of the first great novels of the Romantic era, Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame has thrilled generations of readers with its powerfully melodramatic story of Quasimodo, the deformed hunchback who lives in the bell tower of medieval Paris's most famous cathedral. | no | | . | Hugo, Victor | Les Miserables | Sensational, dramatic, packed with rich excitement and filled with the sweep and violence of human passions, LES MISERABLES is not only superb adventure but a powerful social document. The story of how the convict Jean-Valjean struggled to escape his past and reaffirm his humanity, in a world brutalized by poverty and ignorance, became the gospel of the poor and the oppressed. | no | | . | Huxley, Aldous | Jacob's Hands | acob is a shy ranch hand in the Mojave Desert during the 1920s. He learns suddenly that his touch can heal. The ranch owner's handicapped daughter, Sharon, whom Jacob loves, convinces him to heal her, but she betrays him, launching the chain of events in which his gift is soon exploited. | yes | | . | Huxley, Aldous | Brave New World | This outstanding work of literature is more crucial and relevant today than ever before. Cloning, feel-good drugs, anti-aging programs, and total social control through politics, programming and media--has Aldous Huxley accurately predicted our future? With a storyteller's genius, he weaves these ethical controversies in a compelling narrative that dawns in the year 632 A. F. (After Ford, the deity). When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity. | yes | | . | Huxley, Aldous | Island | For over a hundred years, the inhabitants of the Pacific island of Pala have been part of a social experiment whereby western science has been brought together with eastern philosophy and humanism to create a paradise on earth. InIsland,Huxley gives us his vision of Utopia. | yes | | . | Ibsen, Henrik | A Doll's House | A Doll's House (1879) is a masterpiece of theatrical craft that for the first time on stage portrayed the tragic hypocrisy of Victorian middle-class marriage . The play ushered in a new social era and exploded like a bomb into contemporary life. | no | |
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| | | | | | . | Ishiguro, Kazou | Never Let Me Go | Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it. Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it's only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is. | yes | | . | Ishiguro, Kazou | Unconsoled, The | "On the day that she awoke remembering nothing but her name, Kahlan Amnell became the most dangerous woman alive. For everyone else, that was the day when the world began to end." "As her husband, Richard, desperately searches for his beloved, whom only he remembers, he knows that if she doesn't soon discover who she really is, she will unwittingly become the instrument that will unleash annihilation. But Kahlan learns that if she ever were to unlock the truth of her lost identity, then evil itself would finally possess her, body and soul." " | | | . | Ishiguro, Kazou | Remains of the Day, The | During World War II in England, a butler to a Nazi sympathizer faces doubts about his life and his world. | | | . | Ishiguro, Kazou | When We Were Orphans | Born in early-twentieth-century Shanghai, Banks was orphaned at the age of nine after the separate disappearances of his parents. Now, more than twenty years later, he is a celebrated figure in London society; yet the investigative expertise that has garnered him fame has done little to illuminate the circumstances of his parents' alleged kidnappings. Banks travels to the seething, labyrinthine city of his memory in hopes of solving the mystery of his own, painful past, only to find that war is ravaging Shanghai beyond recognition-and that his own recollections are proving as difficult to trust as the people around him. | | | . | James, Henry | Europeans, The | Eugenia, a baroness divorced from a German prince, and her bohemian brother, Felix, return from Europe, destitute, to New England to seek out their rich and innocent cousins. A bungle of culture clash and love triangles ensues. | yes | | . | James, Henry | The Portrait of a Lady | Portrait of a Lady is arguably James's most popular work, and certainly the finest of his early novels. It focuses on Isabel Archer, a young, intelligent, and spirited American girl, determined to relish her first experience of Europe. She rejects two eligible suitors in her fervent commitment to liberty and independence, declaring that she will never marry. Thanks to the generosity of her devoted cousin Ralph, she is free to make her own choice about her destiny. Yet in the intoxicating worlds of Paris, Florence, and Rome, her fond illusions of self-reliance are twisted by the machinations of her friends and apparent allies. What had seemed to be a vista of infinite promise steadily closes around her and becomes instead a "house of suffocation." Portrait of a Lady is at once a dramatic Victorian tale of betrayal and a wholly modern psychological study of a woman caught in a web of relations she only comes to understand too late. | yes | | . | James, Henry | The Turn of the Screw | In this tale of suspected supernatural possession, a governess at a country house believes that the two children in her care are being controlled by spirits. Is the governess simply paranoid, or is something else going on? | yes | | . | James, Henry | Ambassadors, The | According to the Preface, the essence of the novel is expressed in the following speech: ""Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what HAVE you had?" | yes | | . | Joyce, James | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | Its originality shocked contemporary readers on its publication in 1916 who found its treating of the minutiae of daily life indecorous, and its central character unappealing. Was it art or was it filth?The novel charts the intellectual, moral, and sexual development of Stephen Dedalus, from his childhood listening to his father's stories through his schooldays and adolescence to the brink of adulthood and independence, and his awakening as an artist. Growing up in a Catholic family in Dublin in the final years of the nineteenth century, Stephen's consciousness is forged by Irish history and politics, by Catholicism and culture, language and art. Stephen's story mirrors that of Joycehimself, and the novel is both startlingly realistic and brilliantly crafted. | yes | | . | Joyce, James | Ulysses | Regarded today as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century,Ulysses entered the world in a firestorm of controversy. Denounced as obscure, unintelligible, nonsensical, and obscene, it was first published in Paris in 1922 and remained banned in the United States until 1933. Among the innovations that shocked and outraged critics were Joyce's revolutionary use of the interior monologue (better known as "stream of consciousness") and other experimental narrative techniques.Ulysses draws upon a complex network of symbolic parallels from mythology, history, and literature (including a framework and episodes that echo the Odyssey) to document an ordinary day in the lives of three Dubliners. | yes | | . | Joyce, James | Finnegan's Wake | 1939 publication of Joyce's final and most revolutionary masterpiece, Finnegans Wake--A story with no real beginning or end (it ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence), this "book of Doublends Jined" is as remarkable for its prose as for its circular structure. Written in a fantastic dream-language, forged from polyglot puns and portmanteau words, the Wake features some of Joyce's most hilarious characters: the Irish barkeep Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, Shem the Penman, Shaun the Postman, and Anna Livia Plurabelle. | yes | | . | Kafka, Franz | The Metamorphosis | Kafka's masterpiece about Gregor Samsa, a young man who, transformed overnight into a "monstrous verminous bug", becomes an essentially alienated man. | no | | . | Kafka, Franz | Trial, The | One of the great works of the twentieth century, Kafka's The Trial has been read as a study of political power, a pessimistic religious parable, or a crime novel where the accused man is himself the problem. In it, a man wakes up one morning to find himself under arrest for an offence which is never explained. Faced with this ambiguous but threatening situation, Josef K. gradually succumbs to its psychological pressure. One of the iconic figures of modern world literature, Kafka writes about universal problems of guilt, responsibility, and freedom. | no | | . | Kingsley, Henry | The recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn | | yes | | . | Kingsley, Henry | Ravenshoe | | yes | | . | Kingsley, Henry | Leighton Court : A Country-house Story | | yes | | . | Lafayette, Madam de | Princess of Cleves, The | Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne (Comtesse de Lafayette) (1634-1693) was born in Paris to a family of minor but rich nobility. In 1655, de La Vergne married Franois Motier, Comte de Lafayette. Her most famous novel was "La Princesse de Clves", France's first historical novel, first published anonymously in 1678. An immense success, the work is often taken to be a prototype of the early psychological novel. | no | | . | Lawrence, D. H. | Lady Chatterly's Lover | In Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence argues for individual regeneration, which can be found only through the relationship between man and woman (and, he asserts sometimes, man and man). Love and personal relationships are the threads that bind this novel together. Lawrence explores a wide range of different types of relationships. | yes | | . | Lawrence, D. H. | Women in Love | In Women in Love (1920), Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, who first appeared in Lawrence's earlier novel, The Rainbow, take centre stage as Lawrence explores their growth and development in their relationships with two powerful men, Rupert Birkin and his friend Gerald Crich. A novel of regeneration and dark, destructive human passion, Women in Love reflects the impact on Lawrence of the First World War in the potential both for annihilation and salvation of the self. | yes | | . | Lawrence, D. H. | Sons and Lovers | Sons and Lovers tells the story of Paul Morel, a young man and budding artist. The refined daughter of an old family Gertrude Coppard meets a rough-hewn miner at a Christmas dance and falls into a whirlwind romance. But soon after her marriage to Walter Morel, she realizes the difficulties of living off his meager salary in a rented house. The couple fight and drift apart and Walter retreats to the pub after work each day. Gradually, Mrs. Morel's affections shift to her sons. | yes | |
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| | | | | | . | Lawrence, D. H. | Trespasser, The | "The trespasser" is the work of a youthful mind. Revolving around the life of a musician, the tale relates the ups and downs in his life and the turmoil that are faced by him. | yes | | . | Le Carre, John | Constant Gardener, The | opens with the gruesome murder of the young and beautiful Tessa Quayle near northern Kenya's Lake Turkana, the birthplace of mankind. Her putative African lover and traveling companion, a doctor with one of the aid agencies, has vanished from the scene of the crime. Tessa's much older husband, Justin, a career diplomat at the British High Commission in Nairobi, sets out on a personal odyssey in pursuit of the killers and their motive. | yes | | . | Le Carre, John | Single & Single | A lawyer from the London finance house of Single & Single is shot dead on a Turkish hillside by people with whom he thought he was in business. A children's magician is asked by his bank to explain the unsolicited arrival of more than five million pounds sterling in his young daughter's modest trust. A freighter bound for Liverpool is boarded by Russian coast guards in the Black Sea. The celebrated London merchant venturer "Tiger" Single disappears into thin air.In Single & Single the writer who both epitomizes and transcends the novel of espionage opens with a haunting set piece, then establishes a sequence of events whose connections are mysterious, complex, and compelling. | yes | | . | Le Carre, John | Tailor of Panama, The | Le Carre's Panama is a Casablanca without heroes, a hotbed of drugs, laundered money and corruption. It is also the country which on December 31, 1999, will gain full control of the Panama Canal. Seldom has the weight of politics descended so heavily on such a tiny and unprepared nation.And seldom has the hidden eye of the British Intelligence selected such an unlikely champion as Harry Pendel - a charmer, a dreamer, an evader, a fabulist and presiding genius to the house of Pendel & Braithwaite Co. Limitada, Tailors to Royalty, formerly of London and presently of Panama City. Yet there is a logic to the spies' choice, for everybody who is anybody in Central America passes through Pendel's doors. | yes | | . | Le Carre, John | Our Game | With the Cold War over, British spymaster Tim Cranmer had hoped for a quiet new life with his alluring Emma. But when both Emma and Cranmer's star double agent and lifelong rival Larry Pettifer disappear, Cranmer is suddenly on the run, into the lawless, battered landscapes of Russia. | yes | | . | Leroux, Gaston | Mystery of the Yellow Room | This novel - the classic French detective story - was written in 1907 by Gaston Leroux, once a reporter who covered the famous trials of his time. For sheer originality and ingenuity this story may be reckoned as one of the best tales since Gaboriau. How could a crime take place in a locked room which shows no sign of being entered? For the many who delight in following the intricacies of crime and the avenging hand of Justice, this is a favorite of whodunit fans everywhere. | no | | . | Leroux, Gaston | Phantom of the Opera | Under the Paris Opera House lives a disfigured musical genius who uses music to win the love of a beautiful opera singer. | no | | . | Lessing, Doris | Golden Notebook, The | Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna tries to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook. | yes | | . | Lessing, Doris | Ben in the World | Ben Lovatt can never fit in. He seems awkward - too big, too strong, inhumanly made. Those who do not understand him want him locked up, including his own mother. Now he has come of age and finds himself alone in the south of France, in Brazil and in the mountains of the Andes, where at last he finds out where he has come from and who are his people. (Sequel to The Fifth Child) | | | . | Lessing, Doris | Fifth Child, The | Harriet & David favor fidelity, love, family life & a permanent home. However, from conception, their fifth child proves difficult. His birth sets in motion a series of events which eventually alter the lives of the whole family. Doris Lessing strikes at the heart in this gripping & horrific tale | | | . | Lessing, Doris | Dann and Mara | Thousands of years in the future, all the northern hemisphere is buried under the ice and snow of a new Ice Age. At the southern end of a large landmass called Ifrik, two children of the Mahondi people, seven-year old Mara and her younger brother, Dann, are abducted from their home in the middle of the night. Raised as outsiders in a poor rural village, Mara and Dann learn to survive the hardships and dangers of a life threatened as much by an unforgiving climate and menacing animals as by a hostile community of Rock People. Eventually they join the great human migration North, away from the drought that is turning the southern land to dust, and in search of a place with enough water and food to support human life. Traveling across the continent, the siblings enter cities rife with crime, power struggles, and corruption, learning as much about human nature as about how societies function. | | | . | Lessing, Doris | The story of General Dann and Mara's daughter, griot and the snow dog | Dann is grown up now, hunting for knowledge and despondent over the inadequacies of his civilization, traveling with his friend, a snow dog who brings him back from the depths of despair. And we meet Mara's daughter and Griot with the green eyes, an abandoned child-soldier who, in this strange and captivating adventure, discovers the meaning of love and the ability to sing stories. | | | . | Lewis, C. S. | Miracles | "The central miracle asserted by Christians is in the Incarnation. They say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares the way for this, or results from this." This is the key statement of Miracles, in which Lewis shows that a Christian must not only accept but rejoice in miracles as a testimony of the unique personal involvement of God in creation. | yes | | . | Lewis, C. S. | Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, The | Four English schoolchildren find their way through the back of a wardrobe into the magic land of Narnia and assist Aslan, the golden lion, to triumph over the White Witch, who has cursed the land with eternal winter. | yes | | . | Lewis, C. S. | Silver Chair, The | Two English children undergo hair-raising adventures as they go on a search and rescue mission for the missing Prince Rilian, who is held captive in the underground kingdom of the Emerald Witch. | yes | | . | Lewis, C. S. | Screwtape Letters, The | Screwtape is an experienced devil. His nephew Wormwood is just beginning his demonic career and has been assigned to secure the damnation of a young man who has just become a Christian. In this humorous exchange, C. S. Lewis delves into moral questions about good v. evil, temptation, repentance, and grace. | yes | | . | Lewis, C. S. | Out of the Silent Planet; Perelandra; That Hideous Strength | The final book in C. S. Lewis's acclaimed Space Trilogy, which includes Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, That Hideous Strength concludes the adventures of the matchless Dr. Ransom. The dark forces that were repulsed in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandraare massed for an assault on the planet Earth itself. Word is on the wind that the mighty wizard Merlin has come back to the land of the living after many centuries, holding the key to ultimate power for that force which can find him and bend him to its will. A sinister technocratic organization is gaining power throughout Europe with a plan to "recondition" society, and it is up to Ransom and his friends to squelch this threat by applying age-old wisdom to a new universe dominated by science. The two groups struggle to a climactic resolution that brings the Space Trilogy to a magnificent, crashing close. | yes | | . | Lowry, Malcolm | Under the Volcano | On a single, fateful day in Quauhnahuac, Mexico, 1938, a former British consul wrestles with his demons as his wife tries to rescue their marriage from his drinking problem. | yes | | . | Mann, Thomas | The Magic Mountain | A morbid description of decadence. The magic mountain was the book that got the Nobel Prize for the celebrated German writer Thomas Mann. In this story, located in a tubercular sanatorium at the top of a mountain, the author created an incredible microcosm, as a reflex of what he considered to be the decadence of his native land and of the whole European civilization. The protagonist Hans Castorp, an average person without any aspiration to turn into a hero, represents the ordinary man, isolated in an environment where things happen but without any of the characters doing anything to prevent or to advance the facts. | no | | . | Mann, Thomas | Buddenbrooks | Thomas Mann's first great novel, one of the two for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929. Buddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1900, when Mann was only twenty-five, has become a classic of modem literature -- the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany. With consummate skill, Mann draws a rounded picture of middle-class life: births and christenings; marriages, divorces, and deaths; successes and failures. These commonplace occurrences, intrinsically the same, vary slightly as they recur in each succeeding generation. Yet as the Buddenbrooks family eventually succumbs to the seductions of modernity -- seductions that are at variance with its own traditions -- its downfall becomes certain. | no | |
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| | | | | | . | Manzoni, Alessandro | Betrothed, The | Set in Lombardy during the Spanish occupation of the late 1620s, The Betrothed tells the story of two young lovers, Renzo and Lucia, prevented from marrying by the petty tyrant Don Rodrigo, who desires Lucia for himself. Forced to flee, they are then cruelly separated, and must face many dangers including plague, famine and imprisonment, and confront a variety of strange characters - the mysterious Nun of Monza, the fiery Father Cristoforo and the sinister 'Unnamed' - in their struggle to be reunited. A vigorous portrayal of enduring passion, The Betrothed's exploration of love, power and faith presents a whirling panorama of seventeenth-century Italian life and is one of the greatest European historical novels. | no | | . | Marquez, Gabriel García | One Hundred Years of Solitude | One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, and alive with unforgettable men and women -- brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul -- this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction. | no | | . | Maugham, William Somerset | Ashenden: The British Agent | Ashenden: The British Agent is founded on Maugham's experiences in the English Intelligence Department during World War I. For a period of time after it was first published the book became official required reading for persons entering the secret service.The plot follows the imaginary John Ashenden who during World War I is a spy for British Intelligence. He is sent first to Geneva and later to Russia. Instead of one story from start to finish, the chapters contain individual stories involving many different characters. All of the people whom Ashenden meet during his travels have their own reason for being involved in the spy game, and each is more complex than he first looks. | yes | | . | Maugham, William Somerset | Moon and Sixpence, The | The Moon and Sixpence, is a fictionalized biography of the artist Paul Gauguin. The stand-in character for Gauguin is Charles Strickland, who deserts his wife and children to become a painter. In Paris, he is indifferent to the friendship offered by a fellow artist, Dirk Stroeve. Strickland devastates those around him by running away with Blanche, Stoeve's wife, who has fallen in love with him. In reality, he has no use for Blanche, except as the model for a painting, and upon the painting's completion, abandons her as well. | yes | | . | Maugham, William Somerset | Of Human Bondage | From an orphan with a clubfoot, Philip Carey grows into an impressionable young man with a voracious appetite for adventure and knowledge. Then he falls obsessively in love, embarking on a disastrous relationship that will change his life forever. | yes | | . | Meredith, George | Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The | Pub;lished in June 1859, the first of Meredith's novels with a strongly personal psychological component. Sir Austin Feverel's wife elopes at the beginning of the novel, hurting Sir Austin's pride and leading him to become completely absorbed in the rearing of his son, Richard, much as Meredith himself was, for a time, absorbed in raising Arthur. | yes | | . | Meredith, George | Evan Harrington | | yes | | . | Meredith, George | Egoist, The | | yes | | . | Meredith, George | Diana of the Crossways | | yes | | . | Munif, 'Abd al-Rahman | Cities of Salt | Banned in Saudia Arabia, this is a blistering look at Arab and American hypocrisy following the discovery of oil in a poor oasis community. | no | | . | Murdoch, Iris | Under the Net | comic novel about work and love, wealth and fame. | yes | | . | Murdoch, Iris | Red and the Green, The | In this story of an Irish family during the tense days leading up to the doomed Easter Rising in Dublin, 1916, Iris Murdoch shaped her narrative with depth and relentless inevitability. Yet she did so without sacrificing the fun, the creative waywardness, that are her trademarks. | yes | | . | Murdoch, Iris | Jackson's Dilemma | The tale begins on the eve of a wedding. Edward of Hatting Hall is to marry the lovely Marian. Benet, his rather fussy & reclusive friend & neighbor, is in charge of the proceedings. He's also the one who finds Marian's hasty note calling the whole thing off. Everyone is thrown into a tizzy. As they all wait for further word & worry about suicide & abduction, we learn their painful secrets in scenes notable for their dramatic intensity | yes | | . | Murdoch, Iris | Sandcastle, The | | yes | | . | Musil, Robert | Man without Qualities, The | Set in Vienna on the eve of World War I, this great novel of ideas tells the story of Ulrich, ex-soldier and scientist, seducer and skeptic, who finds himself drafted into the grandiose plans for the 70th jubilee of the Emperor Franz Josef. | no | | . | Nabokov, Vladimir | Lolita | Awe and exhilaration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in this account of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America, but most of all, it is a meditation on love--love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation. | no | | . | Naipaul, V. S. | Bend in the River, A | This novel by a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature takes us deeply into the life of one man who comes to live in an isolated African town at the bend of a great river, a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own traditions. | yes (born in Trinidad, later lived in England) | | . | Naipaul, V. S. | Way in the World, A | Spans continents and centuries to create what is at once an autobiography and a fictional archaeology of colonialism. | yes (born in Trinidad, later lived in England) | | . | Naipaul, V. S. | Half a Life | The story of Willie Chandran, whose father, heeding the call of Mahatma Gandhi, turned his back on his brahmin heritage and married a woman of low caste -- a disastrous union he would live to regret, as he would the children that issued from it. When Willie reaches manhood, his flight from the travails of his mixed birth takes him from India to London, where, in the shabby haunts of immigrants and literary bohemians of the 1950s, he contrives a new identity. This is what happens as he tries to defeat self-doubt in sexual adventures and in the struggle to become a writer -- strivings that bring him to the brink of exhaustion, from which he is rescued, to his amazement, only by the love of a good woman. And this is what happens when he returns with her -- carried along, really -- to her home in Africa, to live, until the last doomed days of colonialism, yet another life not his own. | yes (born in Trinidad, later lived in England) | | . | Naipaul, V. S. | Magic Seeds | Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul's magnificent Magic Seeds continues the story of Willie Chandran, the perennially dissatisfied and self-destructively naive protagonist of his bestselling Half a Life." Having left a wife and a livelihood in Africa, Willie is persuaded to return to his native India to join an underground movement on behalf of its oppressed lower castes. Instead he finds himself in the company of dilettantes and psychopaths, relentlessly hunted by police and spurned by the people he means to liberate. But this is only one stop in a quest for authenticity that takes in all the fanaticism and folly of the postmodern era. Moving with dreamlike swiftness from guerrilla encampment to prison cell, from the squalor of rural India to the glut and moral desolation of 1980s London, Magic Seeds" is a novel of oracular power, dazzling in its economy and unblinking in its observations. | yes (born in Trinidad, later lived in England) | |
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| | | | | | . | Orwell, George | Clergyman's Daughter, The | Dorothy, the heroine of this novel, performs good works, cultivates good thoughts, and pricks her arm with a pin when a bad thought arises. She then has a series of unexpected and degrading adventures after becoming a victim of amnesia. Though she regains her life as a clergyman' s daughter, she has lost her faith. | | | . | Orwell, George | Animal Farm | (Required reading for some freshman classes.) Animal Farm is the most famous by far of all twentieth-century political allegories. Its account of a group of barnyard animals who revolt against their vicious human master, only to submit to a tyranny erected by their own kind, can fairly be said to have become a universal drama. | yes | | . | Orwell, George | Nineteen Eighty-Four | Nineteen Eighty-Four revealed George Orwell as one of the twentieth centurys greatest mythmakers. While the totalitarian system that provoked him into writing it has since passed into oblivion, his harrowing cautionary tale of a man trapped in a political nightmare has had the opposite fate: its relevance and power to disturb our complacency seem to grow decade by decade. In Winston Smith's desperate struggle to free himself from an all-encompassing, malevolent state, Orwell zeroed in on tendencies apparent in every modern society, and made vivid the universal predicament of the individual. | yes | | . | Pasternak, Boris | Doctor Zhivago | First published in Italy in 1957 amidst international controversy, Doctor Zhivago is the story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Here is a masterful chronicle of its outbreak and the consequences: army revolts, irrational killings, starvation, epidemics, Communist Party inquisitions. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago's love for the tender and beautiful Lara: pursued, found, and lost again, Lara is the very embodiment of the pain and chaos of those cataclysmic times. | no | | . | Powell, Anthony | Fisher King, The | Aboard the Alecto, prolific romance author Valentine Beals ruminates on the ship's most seemingly incongruous couple: a graceful, ethereal, virginal dancer named Barberina Rookwood and her lover, Saul Henchman, a crippled, emasculated war hero and photographer. Fancifully, Beals imagines Henchman to be the re-embodiment of one of the most mysterious Arthurian legends, the Fisher King, the maimed and impotent ruler of a barren country of whom Perceval failed to ask the right questions. Ostensibly a novel about gossip on a cruise ship,The Fisher King is much more: a highly stylized narrative infused with Greek mythology, legend, and satire. | yes | | . | Powell, Anthony | Afternoon Men | "First published in 1931, Afternoon Men tracks the trivial encounters and empty pastimes of the social set through William Atwater. With a glee in demolishing pretenses that rivals the works of Max Beerbohm and Evelyn Waugh, Powell exposes artistic pretension, aristocratic jadedness, and the dark side of the "glamorous" life. But as Atwater finds his love for Susan Nunnery dissipate in this atmosphere, Powell moves beyond satire into darker territory." | yes | | . | Powell, Anthony | Question of Upbringing, A | Who is Widmerpool? The question that is to dog Nicholas Jenkins crystallizes as he sees the gawky figure of his schoolmate huffing through the mists on a solitary cross-country run. So unexceptional, unsmart -- even unpopular -- Widmerpool continues to drop in and out of Jenkins life through school, university and London in the 1920's. | yes | | . | Proust, Marcel | Swann's Way | Swann's Way is the first of seven volumes that make up In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. This volume tells the stories of Marcel, who is based on the author, and Charles Swann, a friend of Marcel's grandparents. It is considered one of the major works of literature of the period and incorporates themes such as the power of memory and the nature of time. | no | | . | Radcliffe, Ann | Romance of the Forest, The | The Romance of the Forest (1791) heralded an enormous surge in the popularity of Gothic novels, in a decade that included Ann Radcliffe's later works, The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian. Set in Roman Catholic Europe of violent passions and extreme oppression, the novel follows the fate of its heroine Adeline, who is mysteriously placed under the protection of a family fleeing Paris for debt. They take refuge in a ruined abbey in south-eastern France, where sinister relics of the past - a skeleton, a manuscript, and a rusty dagger - are discovered in concealed rooms. Adeline finds herself at the mercy of the abbey's proprietor, a libidinous Marquis whose attentions finallyforce her to contemplate escape to distant regions. | yes | | . | Radcliffe, Ann | Mysteries of Udolpho, The | Emily St. Aubuert - the orphaned heroine of Ann Radcliffe's 1794 gothic Classic--is imprisoned by Count Montoni, her evil guardian, in his gloomy medieval fortress in the Appenines. Terror is the order of the day inside the walls of Udolpho, as Emily struggles against Montoni's rapacious schemes and the threat of her own psychological disintegration. A best-seller in its day and a potent influence on Walpole, Poe, and other writers of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Gothic horror, | yes | | . | Radcliffe, Ann | Italian, The | Among the most sophisticated examples of Gothic romance, "The Italian" was written in 1797 at the height of Radcliffe's power as an author. The dark, shadowed Italy of this novel immediately encapsulates the fast-paced plot concerning Vincentio di Vivaldi and his beautiful love Ellena Rosalba. While they wish to marry, Vincentio's mother is against their marriage. Her scheming to separate them soon involves Schedoni, a mysterious monk, and arguably Radcliffe's most exceptional invention, whose sinister machinations cause the couple much strife. Radcliffe explores the ways in which concealment and disguise can threaten love and devotion, particularly during the Holy Inquisition, where crime and religion blend dangerously. | yes | | . | Remarque, Erich Maria | All Quiet on the Western Front | A young German soldier of World War I tells of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war. | no | | . | Richardson, Samuel | Clarissa | One of the greatest novels of European literature, "Clarissa" is an indisputable masterpiece. Set in 18th-century England. A rich, complex and unique novel written in the form of letters. Richardson delves into the hearts and minds of his characters, their motives and intentions, consequently giving a glimpse of the complex human psyche. A true classic | yes | | . | Richardson, Samuel | Clarissa | Set in 18th-century England. A rich, complex and unique novel written in the form of letters. Richardson delves into the hearts and minds of his characters, their motives and intentions, consequently giving a glimpse of the complex human psyche | yes | | . | Richardson, Samuel | Pamela | Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, the sub-title gives a clue to the plot of the first and most successful of Richardson's novels. It sold four editions in six months, and is the first English novel to be written by a tradesman (the author was a printer) about a middle-class heroine for a middle-class public. | yes | | . | Rostand, Edmond | Cyrano de Bergerac | Rostand rejected the social realism which dominated late nineteenth-century theatre. He wrote his `heroic comedy', unfashionably, in verse, and set it in the reign of Louis XIII and the Three Musketeers. Based on the life of a little known writer, Rostand's hero has become a figure of theatrical legend: Cyrano, with the nose of a clown and the soul of a poet, is by turns comic and sad, as reckless in love as in war, and never at a loss for words. | no | | . | Roth, Henry | Call It Sleep | When Henry Roth published his debut novel Call It Sleep in 1934, it was greeted with considerable critical acclaim though, in those troubled times, lackluster sales. Only with its paperback publication thirty years later did this novel receive the recognition it deserves --and still enjoys. Having sold-to-date millions of copies worldwide," Call It Sleep" is the magnificent story of David Schearl, the " dangerously imaginative" child coming of age in the slums of New York. | yes | | . | Rushdie, Salman | Moor's Last Sigh, The | From the paradise of Aurora's legendary salon to his omnipotent father's sky-garden atop a towering glass high-rise, the Moor's story evokes his family's often grotesque but compulsively moving fortunes in a world of possibilities embodied by India in this century. | yes (British Indian) | | . | Rushdie, Salman | Satanic Verses, The | Just before dawn one winter's morning, a hijacked jetliner explodes above the English Channel. Through the falling debris, two figures, Gibreel Farishta, the biggest star in India, and Saladin Chamcha, an expatriate returning from his first visit to Bombay in fifteen years, plummet from the sky, washing up on the snow-covered sands of an English beach, and proceed through a series of metamorphoses, dreams, and revelations. | yes (British Indian) | | . | Rushdie, Salman | Fury | Malik Solanka, historian of ideas and dollmaker extraordinaire, walks out on his life one day, abandoning his family without a word of explanation, and flees London for New York. Theres a fury within him, and he fears he has become dangerous to those he loves. He arrives in New York at a time of unprecedented plenty, in the highest hour of Americas wealth and power, seeking to erase himself. Eat me, America, he prays, and give me peace. A work of explosive energy, at once a pitiless and pitch-black comedy and a love story of mesmerizing force,Furyis a profoundly disturbing chronicle of the human condition. | yes (British Indian) | |
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| | | | | | . | Rushdie, Salman | Ground Beneath Her Feet, The | Modern retelling of the myth of Orpheus. An imaginative maze of ancient mythology & pop culture | yes (British Indian) | | . | Rushdie, Salman | Midnight's Children | Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India's independence. Greeted by fireworks displays, cheering crowds, and Prime Minister Nehru himself, Saleem grows up to learn the ominous consequences of this coincidence. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of national affairs; his health and well-being are inextricably bound to those of his nation; his life is inseparable, at times indistinguishable, from the history of his country. Perhaps most remarkable are the telepathic powers linking him with India's 1,000 other " midnight's children, " all born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts. | yes (British Indian) | | . | Scott, Sir Walter | Waverley | First published with great success in 1814, Scott's first novel is set in the Scotland of 1745, amidst the Jacobite uprising. Widely considered the first English historical novel, this story of self-discovery follows the young Edward Waverley, an English soldier in the Hanoverian army. He is sent to Scotland, and there he visits both the Lowlands and the Highlands. Waverley meets both lairds and chieftains, and he is soon caught up in both the Jacobite cause and in romantic feelings for the lovely daughter of Baron Bradwardine, Rose, and the passionately political Flora Mac-Ivor, sister to Chieftain Fergus. | yes | | . | Scott. Walter | Ivanhoe | Richard the Lionheart is the main protagonist in this tale of dueling, cavalry, and rivalry in which chivalry and loyalty guide a beautiful love story. | yes | | . | Scott. Walter | Antiquary, The | In "The Antiquary" (1816), written by Sir Walter Scott, the character of the title, a collector of antiques, is not the hero, instead he provides the narration and commentaries on the story of a man known as Major Neville, who seeks knowledge of his birth and the love of Isabella Wardour. Like all of Scott's historical fiction, this novel is an accurate and fascinating portrayal of the time in which it was set. | yes | | . | Scott. Walter | Rob Roy | For the most popular of his Scottish romances, published at the end of 1817, Scott drew on the legends and historical anecdotes about Rob Roy MacGregor he had collected in his youth. The famous outlaw is only one of a series of vivid characters who cast their spell of the novel's hero, Frank Osbaldistone, on his journey through the wild northern territories of the new United Kingdom. Banished from his father's house, falling hopelessly in love with the spirited Diana Vernon, Frank becomes involved in he conspiracy surrounding the disastrous Jacobite rising of 1715. His adventures take him to `MacGregor's country', across the Highland Line, where he finds cruelty, heartbreak, and some unlikely friends. | yes | | . | Scott. Walter | Bride of Lammermoor, The | "The Bride of Lammermoor" is a tale of star-crossed lovers, Scottish political machinations, and the evil whiles of the conniving Lady Ashton; of Scottish politics and fateful consequences. Like many such tales, it ends tragically - but not before giving us the grace and breadth of the land. | yes | | . | Shakespeare, William | Hamlet | Considered to be the world's most popular tragedy, Hamlet combines the emotional power of a family in crisis with the political intrigue surrounding the corruption of the Danish court. Hamlet finds himself at the center of this drama following the death of his father, the King of Denmark, whom Hamlet believes has been murdered by the king's own brother, Claudius. To make matters worse, Claudius has married Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, and has become the new king. | yes | | . | Shakespeare, William | Macbeth | (Required reading for seniors classes.) | yes | | . | Shakespeare, William | A Midsummer Night's Dream | The title places the action of the play on the eve of the summer solstice, which folklore marks as the time of fairies--a time ripe for magic and adventure. The play traces the romantic escapades of four young Athenian lovers lost on a midsummer night in a forest ruled by fairies. The dreamlike events that occur in the enchanted wood are framed by court scenes dominated by Theseus, ruler of Athens. Another group of characters, designated as rustics, artisans, or mechanicals, led by Bottom the weaver, also inhabit the play and enhance its comedic effects. | yes | | . | Shakespeare, William | Romeo and Juliet | (Required reading for freshman classes.) | yes | | . | Shaw, George Bernard | Pygmalion | Pygmalion is a comedy about a phonetics expert who, as a kind of social experiment, attempts to make a lady out of an uneducated Cockney flower-girl. Although not as intellectually complex as some of the other plays in Shaw's "theatre of ideas," Pygmalion nevertheless probes important questions about social class, human behavior, and relations between the sexes. | yes | | . | Shelley, Mary | Frankenstein | Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus was published in March, 1818. Mary Shelley, who once said, "My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings," imagined the "hideous phantasm of man" who became the confused yet deeply sensitive creature in Frankenstein. While many stage, television, and film adaptations of Frankenstein have simplified the complexity of the intellectual and emotional responses of Victor Frankenstein and his creature to their world, the novel still endures, as seen in the range of reactions explored by various literary critics and over ninety dramatizations. | yes | | . | Shikibu, Murasaki | Tale of Genji, The | Written by Murasaki Shikibu shortly after 1000 AD and considered by most scholars to be the first novel ever written, The Tale of Genji is the story of the romantic adventures of Genji, the amazingly handsome prince and his many romantic conquests. | no | | . | Sienkiewicz, Henryk | Quo Vadis | A Roman officer in Nero's army risks his career and his life when he falls in love with a Christian woman. To win her love, he must learn the true meaning of her religion. | no | | . | Sienkiewicz, Henryk | Teutonic Knights, The | "The Teutonic Knights is an epic of medieval times and national destiny, ranking as one of the highest achievements from the pen of Henryk Sienkiewicz, the Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 1905." "The novel follows the adventures of Macko, a resourceful and wise veteran of war, and his young nephew, Zbyszko, the symbol of a maturing nation, as they struggle, along with the unified peoples of Poland and Lithuania, against the oppressive religious military order, the Teutonic Knights. | no | | . | Smollett, Tobias | Roderick Random | Roderick Random (1748) is Smollett's first novel. Roderick is the boisterous and unprincipled hero who answers life's many misfortunes with a sledgehammer. Left penniless, he leaves his native Scotland for London and on the way meets Strap, and old schoolfellow. Together they undergo many adventures at the hands of scoundrels and rogues. Roderick qualifies as a surgeon's mate and is pressed as a common soldier on board the man-of-war Thunder. In a tale of romance as well as adventure, Roderick also finds time to fall in love... Smollett drew on his own experiences as a surgeon's mate in the navy for the memorable scenes on board ship, and the novel combines documentary realism with great humour and panache. (Smollett may be harder to find in local libraries than other British authors--but if this type of tale sounds like fun, his novels are easy to order/locate at book stores and on Amazon, etc.) | yes | | . | Solzhenitsyn, Alexander | One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich | A novel set in a Soviet prison camp populated by men who live exceedingly close to the bone and which has the power to force us to reassess our own values as well as shudder at the horror of the lives before us, | no | | . | Sophocles | Antigone | (Required reading for sophomore classes.) | no | | . | Sophocles | Oedipus Rex | Oedipus, King of Thebes, upon hearing that his city is being ravaged by fire and plague, sends his brother-in-law Creon to find a remedy from the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi. When Creon returns Oedipus begins investigating the death of his predecessor, Laius, and discovers through various means that he himself was the one who had unknowingly killed Laius and then married his own mother, Jocasta. Oedipus Rex is arguably the most important tragedy in all of classical literature. Ever since Aristotle used it in his Poetics in order to define the qualities of a successful tragedy, its strengths have been emphasized again and again by countless notable authors. | no | |
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| | | | | | . | Stendhal | Red and the Black, The | The Red and the Black, Stendhals masterpiece, is the story of Julien Sorel, a young dreamer from the provinces, fueled by Napoleonic ideals, whose desire to make his fortune sets in motion events both mesmerizing and tragic. Sorels quest to find himself, and the doomed love he encounters along the way, are delineated with an unprecedented psychological depth and realism. At the same time, Stendhal weaves together the social life and fraught political intrigues of postNapoleonic France, bringing that world to unforgettable, full-color life. His portrait of Julien and early-nineteenth-century France remains an unsurpassed creation, one that brilliantly anticipates modern literature. | no | | . | Sterne, Laurence | Tristram Shandy | Beginning with Tristram's conception, the novel recounts his progress in 'this scurvy and disastrous world of ours', including his misnaming during baptism and his accidental circumcision by a falling sash-window at the age of five; unsurprisingly, Tristram declares that he has been 'the continual sport of what the world calls Fortune'. Tristram Shandy also offers the narrator's 'opinions', at once facetious and highly serious, on books and learning in an age of rapidly expanding print culture, and on the changing understanding of the roles of writers and readers alike. | yes | | . | Sterne, Laurence | Sentimental Journey, A | Best known for his novel Tristram Shandy, author Laurence Sterne drew upon his experiences in the 1760s, when he traveled extensively through France and Italy, to create this fictional travelogue. Generations have delighted in the narrative of Mr. Yorick, the Sentimental Traveler, who seeks tender moments but chiefly finds misadventures. | yes | | . | Stevenson, Robert Lewis | Kidnapped | A sixteen-year-old orphan is kidnapped by his villainous uncle, but later escapes and becomes involved in the struggle of the Scottish highlanders against English rule. | yes | | . | Stevenson, Robert Lewis | Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde | Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, first published in 1886, became an instant classic, a Gothic horror originating in a feverish nightmare whose hallucinatory setting in the back streets of London gripped a nation mesmerized by crime and violence. The reasons for the book's popularity include "the double," and psychoanalytic interpretations, as well as crime, sex, class, and urbanism in the 1880s. | yes | | . | Stevenson, Robert Louis | Treasure Island | Treasure Island: A Story for Boys; in Stevenson's words, "it is about Buccaneers, ... begins in the ``Admiral Benbow'' public-house on the Devon coast, ... is all about a map, and a treasure, and a mutiny, and a derelict ship, and a current, and a fine old Squire Trelawney ... , and a doctor, ... and a sea-cook with one leg, and a sea song ..." | yes | | . | Stevenson, Robert Louis | Black Arrow, The | Caught in the midst of England's War of the Roses, young Dick Shelton's loyalties are torn between a guardian who betrays him and the leader of the secret fellowship, "The Black Arrow". | yes | | . | Stoker, Bram | Dracula | Since its publication in 1897, "Dracula" has continued to terrify readers with its depiction of a vampire possessing an insatiable thirst for blood, and the group of hunters determined to end his existence before he destroys a young womans soul. | yes | | . | Stoker, Bram | Jewel of the Seven Stars, The | The fabled Jewel of the Seven Stars has been stolen and the ancient Egyptian queen Tera has risen from her tomb to take it back at any cost! The author of Dracula wrote this enthralling novel of a mummy's curse, a spellbinding blend of Eastern lore and classic horror fiction. | yes | | . | Stoker, Bram | Lair of the White Worm, The | Adam Salter is newly returned from Australia to inherit his uncle's estate in the Peak District of Derbyshire. He marries Mimi, the dauther of a neighbouring farmer, who has to face alone the evil Edgar Caswall. And then there is the Lady Arabella March, of reptilian beauty and viprous nature... A novel of horror from the author of Dracula | yes | | . | Swift, Jonathan | Benefit of Farting, The | What is the nature, essence, and definition of a fart? What are the consequences and disadvantages of suppressing one? Why is farting considered to be a taboo?Swift's treatise argues eloquently, in a forceful fashion, that most of the distempers thought to affect the fairer sex are due to flatulences not adequately vented. To complete the excursus into this venerable and age-old human activity, Charles James Fox's "Essay upon Wind" provides a detailed analysis, classification, and history of farting, peppered with wit and curious anecdotes about particularly eminent and historic farters. (Swift wrote many wacky essays and noxious poems. You might have a hard time finding them, but they'd make your project quite an interesting endeavor.) | yes | | . | Swift, Jonathan | Gulliver's Travels | Jonathan Swift spent many years in England working closely with the British government. During this time, he witnessed corruption, waste, and fierce power struggles between rival political parties and religious factions. When he returned to Ireland in 1714, Swift saw firsthand the ill effects of Britain's social and economic policies on the Irish people and became a leading advocate for Irish independence. Gulliver's Travels was published after Swift returned to Ireland. Drawing on his experience of the times, he created a series of outrageous adventures that exposed aspects of government, war, and human nature. | yes | | . | Thackeray, William | Vanity Fair | Vanity Fair is set in the period of the Battle of Waterloo and later. The novel takes its title from the place designated as the center of human corruption in John Bunyan's 17th-century allegory Pilgrim's Progress. The book is a densely populated, multi-layered panorama of manners and human frailties; subtitled A Novel Without a Hero, Vanity Fair metaphorically represents the human condition. | yes | | . | Thackeray, William | Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. | Thackeray's first substantial work, concerns the life and times of the title character and narrator, a roguish Irishman. Born Redmond Barry, he leaves his homeland after shooting a man in a duel. He becomes a soldier of fortune and later works as a professional gambler. Remade as a man of fashion, he courts a wealthy widow, marries her, and assumes her aristocratic name of Lyndon. He mistreats both her and her son and spends and gambles away her money, but eventually she extricates herself from the alliance. | yes | | . | Tolkien, J. R. R. | Children of Hurin, The | Set in the early days of Middle-Earth, humans and elves, dwarves and dragons, orcs and dark sorcerers clash in an epic battle between good and evil. | yes | | . | Tolkien, J. R. R. | Hobbitt, The | Bilbo Baggins, a respectable, well-to-do hobbit, lives comfortably in his hobbit-hole until the day the wandering wizard Gandalf chooses him to take part in an adventure from which he may never return. | yes | | . | Tolkien, J. R. R. | Return of the King, The | The little hobbit and his trusty companion make a terrible journey to the heart of the land of the Shadow in a final reckoning with the power of Sauron. | yes | | . | Tolkien, J. R. R. | Roverandom | A dog who has been turned into a toy dog encounters rival wizards and experiences various adventures on the moon with giant spiders, dragon moths, and the Great White Dragon. (children's book) | yes | | . | Tolkien, J. R. R. | Fellowship of the Rings, The | The first volume in the trilogy, tells of the fateful power of the One ring. All the members of the fellowship, hobbits, elves and wizards, are plunged into a clash between good and evil. | yes | | . | Tolkien, J. R. R. | Two Towers, The | In the second volume of the trilogy, the fellowship has been forced to split up in order to destroy the ring and fight the first battle of the War of the ring. | yes | |
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| | | | | | . | Tolkien, J. R. R. | Silmarillion, The | THE SILMARILLION is the core of J.R.R. Tolkien's imaginative writing, a work whose origins stretch back to a time long before THE HOBBIT. Tolkien considered THE SILMARILLION his most important work, and, though it was published last and posthumously, this great collection of tales and legends clearly sets the stage for all his other writing. The story of the creation of the world and of the the First Age, this is the ancient drama to which the characters in THE LORD OF THE RINGS look back and in whose events some of them, such as Elrond and Galadriel, took part. | yes | | . | Tolstoy, Leo | War and Peace | Often called the greatest novel ever written,War and Peaceis at once an epic of the Napoleonic Wars, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the Russian spirit. Tolstoys genius is seen clearly in the multitude of characters in this massive chronicleall of them fully realized and equally memorable. Out of this complex narrative emerges a profound examination of the individuals place in the historical process. | no | | . | Tolstoy, Leo | Anna Karenina | A magnificent story, that amalgamates classical sensuality and rebelliousness against the prevailing customs, is presented here. This novel is a unique example of social realism that portrays the inevitable tragedy of a wilful woman, Anna Karenina, who transgresses the conventions of society and follows her own lead. | no | | . | Trollope, Anthony | Last Chronicle of Barset, The | This last novel in the Chronicles of Barsetshire series involves Mr. Crawley, an impoverished curate who is accused of theft. The scandal fiercely divides the citizens of Barsetshire and threatens to tear apart Mr. Crawley's family. | yes | | . | Trollope, Anthony | Phineas Finn | The novel is set against the background of the Reform Bill of 1867, and focuses on an Irish Member of the British House of Commons; in it Trollope explores the relations between the distinct elements of 'the United Kingdom'. Phineas has a personal chronicle which largely dominates the political calendar and it is noteworthy that Trollope wrote Phineas Finn at the same time as Gladstone's accession to power and the momentous consequences for Ireland that followed. Phineas Finn (1869) is the second of the Palliser novels, published between 1864 and 1880. As a group they provide us with the most extensive and telling expose of British life during the period of its greatest prestige. | yes | | . | Trollope, Anthony | Phineas Redux | When the Whigs are determined to overturn the Tory majority in the Parliament of the United Kingdom, they ask Phineas Finn to run for office again. But when his opponent wins the election, is it a true win or is something nefarious in the works? Phineas Redux was originally published as a serial in "Graphic," It is the fourth novel in the "Palliser" series. | yes | | . | Trollope, Anthony | BarchesterTowers | Written as a sequel to "The Warden," this is the second book of the Barsetshire novels. Described as humorous, this wonderful novel that interweaves power, love, greed, and deceit in Barchester. | yes | | . | Trollope, Anthony | Warden, The | The book centers on the character of Mr. Harding, a clergyman of great personal integrity, whose charitable income far exceeds the purpose for which it was intended. Young John Bold turns his reforming zeal to exposing what he considers to be an abuse of privilege, despite being in love with Mr. Harding's daughter Eleanor. The novel was highly topical as a case regarding the misapplication of church funds was the scandalous subject of contemporary debate. But Trollope uses this specific case to explore and illuminate the universal complexities of human motivation and social morality. | yes | | . | Turgenev, Ivan | Fathers and Sons | When Arkady Petrovich comes home from college, his father finds his eager, naive son changed almost beyond recognition, for the impressionable Arkady has fallen under the powerful influence of the friend he has brought with him. A self-proclaimed nihilist, the ardent young Bazarov shocks Arkady's father by criticizing the landowning way of life and by his outspoken determination to sweep away traditional values of contemporary Russian society. First published in 1862. | no | | . | Verne, Jules | Around the World in Eighty Days | In 1872, English gentleman Phileas Fogg has many adventures as he tries to win a bet that he can travel around the world in eighty days. | yes | | . | Verne, Jules | 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea | the adventures of a French professor and his two companions as they sail above and below the world's oceans as prisoners on the fabulous electric submarine of the deranged Captain Nemo. | yes | | . | Verne, Jules | Journey to the Center of the Earth | When Professor Lidenbrock and his nephew Axel decode a mysterious message in a runic manuscript, they start off on one of the most thrilling adventures in science fiction--a journey to the earth's core. | yes | | . | Voltaire | Candide | In this witty political satire about a gentle man plagued by misfortune who clings to the belief that "all is for the best," Voltaire mocks the "eternal optimist" philosophy of his day that proclaimed human and natural disasters are a part of a larger cosmic plan. | no | | . | Waugh, Evelyn | Brideshead Revisited | Charles Ryder's friendship with Sebastian Flyte begins at Oxford in 1923. Carefree days of drinking champagne and driving in the country soon end, however, as Sebastian's health deteriorates. Questions about morality and religion are raised as the radiant tone gives way to a bleak atmosphere of shattered illusion. | yes | | . | Waugh, Evelyn | Officers and Gentlemen | Guy Crouchback is now attached to a Commando unit on the Hebridean island of Mugg, where the whisky flows freely. But the comedy of Mugg is countered with the bitterness of Crete, and all the chaos and indignity of a total surrender | yes | | . | Waugh, Evelyn | Loved One, The | What goes on at a mortuary for Hollywood's departed stars. Waugh's funniest & most broadly popular success | yes | | . | Waugh, Evelyn | Decline and Fall | Decline and Fall (1928) was Evelyn Waugh's immensely successful first novel, and it displays not only all of its author's customary satiric genius and flair for unearthing the ridiculous in human nature, but also a youthful willingness to train those weapons on any and every thing in his path. In this fractured picaresque comedy of the hapless Paul Pennyfeather stumbling from one disaster to another, Waugh manages the delicious task of skewering every aspect of the society in which he lived. | yes | | . | Waugh, Evelyn | Handful of Dust, A | Evelyn Waughs 1934 novel is a bitingly funny vision of aristocratic decadence in England between the wars. It tells the story of Tony Last, who, to the irritation of his wife, is inordinately obsessed with his Victorian Gothic country house and life. When Lady Brenda Last embarks on an affair with the worthless John Beaver out of boredom with her husband, she sets in motion a sequence of tragicomic disasters that reveal Waugh at his most scathing. | yes | | . | Wells, H. G. | Time Machine, The | With a speculative leap that still fires the imagination, H. G. Wells sends his explorer to face a future burdened with our greatest hopes...and our darkest fears. Propelled to the age of a slowly dying Earth, he discovers two bizarre races-- the ethereal Eloi and the subterranean Morlocks-- who not only symbolize the duality of human nature but offer a terrifying portrait of the men of tomorrow as well."- | yes | | . | Wells, H. G. | War of the Worlds, The | As life on Mars becomes impossible, Martians and their terrifying machines invade the earth. | yes | |
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| | | | | | . | Wells, H. G. | Invisible Man, The | When a stranger appears in a small town wearing a thick mask of bandages that obscures his face, the local villagers become suspicious. What they discover is a man trapped in a terror of his own creation. | yes | | . | Wells, H. G. | Island of Dr.Moreau, The | Dr. Moreau, a scientist expelled from his homeland for cruel experiments, finds a deserted island where he can create hideous creatures with manlike intelligence. But as the rigid order on Moreau's island dissolves, the consequences of his experiments emerge-and his creations revert to beasts more shocking than nature could devise. | yes | | . | White, T. H. | Once and Future King, The | Merlyn instructs Arthur and his brother Sir Kay in the ways of the world. One of them will need it-- the king has died leaving no heir, and a rightful one must be found by pulling a sword from an anvil resting on a stone. In the second and third parts of the novel, Arthur has become king and the kingdom is threatened from the north. In the final two books, the aging king faces his greatest challenge, when his own son threatens to overthrow him. In The Book of Merlyn, Arthur's tutor Merlyn reappears, and teaches him that even in the fact of apparent ruin, there is hope. | yes | | . | White, T. H. | Witch in the Wood,and the Ill-Made Knight, The | King Arthur is on the throne, and trying to establish the rules of chivalry and noble questing that will come to mark his reign. Meanwhile, in one of the great love stories in English literature, Lancelot and Guinevere fall for each other at the glorious court of Camelot. But in the north, a family that has been wronged are vowing revenge. And the king is closer to them than he knows. With humour, compassion and vivid description, T. H. White continues his retelling of the Arthurian legend in this second part of The Once and Future King. | yes | | . | White, T. H. | Mistress Masham's Repose | Open this book and you step into a magic place. Maria is an orphan living in a vast, dilapidated mansion with no one but a kindly cook, a distracted professor and a spiteful governess for company. That is, until she discovers the Lilliputians - each no more than six inches high - who are descendants of those described in Gulliver's Travels . Determined to keep their whereabouts hidden from the human world, the tiny people are at first reluctant to accept Maria as their friend. But when they are accidentally discovered by her interfering governess and the scheming local vicar, they must all join forces to save themselves from a terrible fate. (children's book) | yes | | . | Wilde, Oscar | The Picture of Dorian Gray | Dorian is a good-natured young man until he falls in with the immoral Sir Henry and discovers the power of his exceptional beauty. As he gradually sinks deep into a frivolous, glamorous world of selfish luxury, he apparently remains physically unchanged by the stresses of his corrupt and decadent lifestyle and untouched by age. | yes | | . | Wodehouse, P. G. | Jeeves in the Morning | Bertie Wooster, the dimwitted aristocrat with a heart of gold, pays a visit to Bumpleigh Hall and soon is embroiled in a host of calamitous mishaps. Fortunately, his imperturbable butler, Jeeves, is nearby to rescue him. | yes | | . | Wodehouse, P. G. | Thank you, Jeeves | "Bertie Wooster's newfound enthusiasm for the banjolele results in his eviction from his apartment and having to take notice from his hitherto devoted manservant, Jeeves. Repairing to the country with his banjolele and new valet, Brinkley, Bertie soon finds himself in no shortage of trouble. A visit to an American yacht ends with him locked in a stateroom by a prospective father-in-law. Bertie escapes to his cottage only to find an intoxicated Brinkley who chases Bertie with a carving knife into his bedroom, then sets the cottage ablaze. Only Jeeves - brilliant Jeeves - can set Bertie's world aright" | yes | | . | Wodehouse, P. G. | | There are many other "Jeeves" books--lots of fun! | yes | | . | Woolf, Virginia | To the Lighthouse | From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Virginia Woolf constructs a remarkable and moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life, and the conflict between male and female principles, in what is probably her most popular novel. | yes | | . | Woolf, Virginia | Orlando | Orlando, an English nobleman, defies the laws of nature with surprising results. Immortal and highly imaginative, he undergoes a series of extraordinary transformations that humorously, hauntingly illustrate the eternal war between the sexes. | yes | | . | Woolf, Virginia | Jacob's Room | Jacob's Room is Virginia Woolf's first truly experimental novel. It is a portrait of a young man, who is both representative and victim of the social values which led Edwardian society into war. Jacob's life is traced from the time he is a small boy playing on the beach, through his years in Cambridge, then in artistic London, and finally making a trip to Greece, b | yes | | . | Woolf, Virginia | Mrs. Dalloway | In this vivid portrait of one day in a womans life, Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of a party she is to give that evening, while in her mind she is much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house she is flooded with memories and, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa re-examines the choices she has made, hesitantly looking ahead to growing old. | yes | | . | Yasunari, Kawabata | Snow Country | To this haunting novel of wasted love, Kawabata brings the brushstroke suggestiveness and astonishing grasp of motive that earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature. As he chronicles the affair between a wealthy dilettante and the mountain geisha who gives herself to him without illusions or regrets, one of Japan's greatest writers creates a work that is dense in implication and exalting in its sadness. | no | | . | Zola, Emile | Germinal | Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolize the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted "Germinal! Germinal!" While it is a dramatic novel of working life and everyday relationships, Germinal is also a complex novel of ideas. | no | | . | Zola, Emile | Germinal | Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolize the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted "Germinal! Germinal!" | no | | . | Zola, Emile | Two Princesses, The | "It is not people that kill, but ungovernable passions."""" The eponymous princesses are both spinsters, but there any similarity ends. Zizi, thwarted in love, takes her lot meekly until she comes face to face with her erstwhile lover's perfidy, and her sense of justice and familial devotion rise to claim a bittersweet revenge. Mimi meanwhile, whose own romantic failures have left her bitter and resentful, takes her revenge groundlessly, leading all around her to a tragic end. | no | | . | Zola, Emile | Nana | Nana opens in 1867, the year of the World Fair, when Paris, thronged by a cosmopolitan elite, was a perfect target for Zola's scathing denunciation of hypocrisy and fin-de-siecle moral corruption. | no | | . | | | | | | . | | | | | |
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| | | | | | . | | | | | | . | | | | | | . | | Beowulf | Dating from between the 8th and 11th century Beowulf is the oldest known English epic poem. Beowulf is a narrative poem about the kings and heroes of Denmark and Geatland. It is a story of mythic creatures and medieval battles between men and monsters. Follow the adventures of Beowulf, the story's title character, as he battles the Grendel, the Grendel's mother, and a dragon. | yes | |
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