Classics

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 Title: 100 Years of Solitude

Author:  Gabriel García Márquez

Summary: The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. It is a rich and brilliant chronicle of life and death, and the tragicomedy of humankind.

Title: 1984

Author:  George Orwell

Summary: In a grim city and a terrifying country, where Big Brother is always Watching You and the Thought Police can practically read your mind, Winston is a man in grave danger for the simple reason that his memory still functions. He knows the Party’s official image of the world is a fluid fiction. He knows the Party controls the people by feeding them lies and narrowing their imaginations through a process of bewilderment and brutalization that alienates each individual from his fellows and deprives him of every liberating human pursuit from reasoned inquiry to sexual passion. Drawn into a forbidden love affair, Winston finds the courage to join a secret revolutionary organization called The Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party. Together with his beloved Julia, he hazards his life in a deadly match against the powers that be.

Title: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

Author:  Jules Verne

Summary: Professor Pierre Aronnax and his two companions find themselves held prisoner by the peculiar Captain Nemo aboard the Nautilus, an unusual submarine.

Title: Across Five Aprils

Author: Irene Hunt

Summary: When the horrors of the Civil War and his father’s illness invade his childhood world, young Jethro Creighton must grow up fast and assume responsibility for his family’s Illinois farm.

Title: The Adventure of Peter Pan

Author:  James Matthew Barrie

Summary: This is the adventures of the three Darling children in Never-Never Land with Peter Pan, the boy who would not grow up.

Title: Aesop’s Fables

Author: Aesop

Summary: This collection presents nearly 300 of Aesop’s most entertaining and enduring stories-from “The Hare and the Tortoise” and “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse” to “The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs” and “The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing.”

Title: Age of Innocence

Author:  Edith Wharton

Summary: Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton‘s masterful portrait of desire and betrayal during the sumptuous Golden Age of Old New York, a time when society people “dreaded scandal more than disease.” This is Newland Archer’s world as he prepares to marry the beautiful but conventional May Welland. But when the mysterious Countess Ellen Olenska returns to New York after a disastrous marriage, Archer falls deeply in love with her. Torn between duty and passion, Archer struggles to make a decision that will either courageously define his life-or mercilessly destroy it.

Title: All Quiet on the Western Front

Author: Erich Maria Remarque

Summary: Paul Baumer enlisted with his classmates in the German army of World War I. Youthful, enthusiastic, they become soldiers. But despite what they have learned, they break into pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches. And as horrible war plods on year after year, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principles of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against each other-if only he can come out of the war alive.
Title: The Aeneid

Author: Virgil

Summary: Aeneas flees the ashes of Troy to found the city of Rome and change forever the course of the Western world.

Title: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass

Author: Lewis Carroll

Summary: When Alice tumbles down a rabbit-hole one hot summer’s afternoon in pursuit of a White Rabbit she finds herself in Wonderland. And there begin the fantastical adventures that will see her experiencing extraordinary changes in size, swimming in a pool of her own tears and attending the very maddest of tea parties. For Wonderland is no ordinary place and the characters that populate it are quite unlike anybody young Alice has ever met before. In this imaginary land she encounters the savagely violent Queen, the Lachrymose Mock Turtle, the laconic Cheshire Cat and the hookah-smoking Caterpillar, each as surprising and outlandish as the next.

Title: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Author: Mark Twain

Summary: Mark Twain’s tale of a boy’s picaresque journey down the Mississippi on a raft conveyed the voice and experience of the American frontier as no other work had done before. When Huck escapes from his drunken father and the ‘sivilizing’ Widow Douglas with the runaway slave Jim, he embarks on a series of adventures that draw him to feuding families and the trickery of the unscrupulous ‘Duke’ and ‘Dauphin’. Beneath the exploits, however, are more serious undercurrents – of slavery, adult control – which threaten his deep and enduring friendship with Jim

Title: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Author: Mark Twain

Summary: An unparalleled celebration of childhood, Tom Sawyer has delighted adults since its first publication. Tom is reckless, lazy, maddeningly inquisitive, a poor scholar and a menace to his Aunt Polly. His many schemes for avoiding work, school and punishment are quite sublime. This is a classic tale of boyhood adventure.

Title: Animal Farm

Author:  George Orwell

Summary: This remarkable allegory of a downtrodden society of overworked, mistreated animals, and their quest to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality is one of the most scathing satires ever published. As we witness the rise and bloody fall of the revolutionary animals, we begin to recognize the seeds of totalitarianism in the most idealistic organization; and in our most charismatic leaders, the souls of our cruelest oppressors.

Title: Anna Karenina

Author:  Leo Tolstoy

Summary: Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society.

Title: Anne of Green Gables

Author: L.M. Montgomery

Summary: As soon as Anne Shirley arrived at the snug, white farmhouse called Green Gables, she knew she wanted to stay forever. But would the Cuthberts send her back to the orphanage? Anne knows she’s not what they expected-a skinny girl with decidedly red hair and a temper to match. If only she could convince them to let her stay, she’d try very hard not to keep rushing headlong into scrapes or blurt out the very first thing she had to say. Anne was not like anybody else, everyone at Green Gables agreed; she was special-a girl with an enormous imagination. This orphan girl dreamed of the day when she could call herself Anne of Green Gables.

Title: Antony and Cleopatra

Author: William Shakespeare

Summary: This is William Shakespeare’s play about the love affair between the Roman soldier, Antony, and the Egyptian queen, Cleopatra.

Title: Around the World in 80 Days

Author:  Jules Verne

Summary:: On a wager with his chums at the Reform Club, Phileas Fogg attempts the trip described in the title of this classic adventure novel.

Title: The Art of War

Author: Sun Tsu

Summary: Complexities of meaning and historical interpretations illustrate the timelessness of Sun Tzu’s treatise on war.

Title: As You Like It

Author: William Shakespeare

Summary: As You Like It is quintessential Shakespearean comedy, complete with a loquacious clown, lovers, disguises, rifts and reconciliation’s, and all within the atmospheric confines of the enchanted Forest of Arden. As the title suggests, As You Like It is a play in which everyone gets their way, where sinners are redeemed and where love holds sway over all

Title: Atlas Shrugged

Author:  Ayn Rand

Summary: Atlas Shrugged is the astounding story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world-and did. Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, Atlas Shrugged stretches the boundaries further than any book you have ever read. It is a mystery, not about the murder of a man’s body, but about the murder-and rebirth-of man’s spirit.

Title: Awakening

Author: Kate Chopin

Summary: The Awakening begins at a crisis point in twenty-eight year-old Edna Pontellier’s life. Edna is a passionate and artistic woman who finds few acceptable outlets for her desires in her role as wife and mother. During one summer while her husband is her frustrations find an outlet in an affair. “Every step she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual. She began to look with her own eyes; to see and apprehend the deeper undercurrents of life. No longer was she content to ‘feed upon the opinion’ when her own soul had invited her.” Her triumph is short-lived, however, destroyed by a society that has no place for a self-determined, unattached woman. Her story is a tragedy and one of many clarion calls in its day to examine the institution of marriage and woman’s opportunities in an oppressive world.

Title: The Bell Jar

Author: Sylvia Plath

Summary: Esther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under-maybe for the last time.

Title: Beowulf

Summary: Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel’s mother. He then returns to his own country and lives to old age before dying in a vivid fight against a dragon.

Title: Beyond Good and Evil

Author: Friedrich Nietzsche 

Summary: This work dramatically rejects the tradition of Western thought with its notions of truth and God, good and evil. Nietzsche demonstrates that the Christian world is steeped in a false piety and infected with a “slave morality.” With wit and energy, he turns from this critique to a philosophy that celebrates the present and demands that the individual imposes their own “will to power” upon the world.

Title: Bleak House

Author: Charles Dickens

Summary: Bleak House centers on the generations-long lawsuit Jarndyce and Jarndyce, through which “whole families have inherited legendary hatreds.” Focusing on Esther Summerson, a ward of John Jarndyce, the novel traces Esther’s romantic coming-of-age and, in classic Dickensian style, the gradual revelation of long-buried secrets, all set against the foggy backdrop of the Court of Chancery.

Title: The Brothers Karamazov

Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Summary: This turbulent story centers on the murder of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a corrupt, loutish landowner, and the aftermath for his sons: the passionate Dmitri, the coldly intellectual Ivan, the spiritual Alexey, and the bastard Smerdyakov.

Title: Call of the Wild

Author: Jack London

Summary: The classic story of the dog Buck and his adventures in the Klondike gold fields.

Title: Candide

Author: Francois Voltaire 

Summary: Candide– A classic, satiric novel, by the noted 18th century French author and philosopher chronicles the misadventures of the naïve Candide, who continues to manifest her belief that “all is for the best” despite the injustice, despair, and suffering she encounters in life.

Title: Cannery Row

Author: John Steinbeck

Summary: Steinbeck interweaves the stories of Doc, Henri, Mack, and his boys, in a world where only the fittest survive.

Title: Canterbury Tales

Author:  Geoffrey Chaucer

Summary: Translated here into modern English, these tales of a motley crowd of pilgrims drawn from all walks of life-from knight to nun, miller to monk-reveal a picture of English life in the fourteenth century that is as robust as it is representative.

Title: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Author: Tennessee Williams

Summary: One hot summer night in the house of the Mississippi Delta’s richest cotton planter, a family imprisoned by the past is torn apart by the revelations of feelings of lust, greed and envy.

Title: Catch 22

Author: Joseph Heller

Summary: At the heart of Joseph Heller’s bestselling novel is a satirical indictment of military madness and stupidity, and the desire of the ordinary man to survive it. It is the tale of the dangerously sane Captain Yossarian, who spends his time in Italy plotting to survive.

Title: Catcher in the Rye

Author: J.D. Salinger

Summary: A 16-year old American boy relates in his own words the experiences he goes through at school and after, and reveals with unusual candor the workings of his own mind.

Title: Communist Manifesto

Author: Karl Marx

Summary: The principles of Communism.

Title: The Confessions of Saint Augustine

Author: Augustine of Hippo

Summary: The classic autobiography of the man who journeyed from sin to sainthood, from heresy to the heights of theological insight, from the darkness of worldly ambition to the changeless light of grace. Acknowledged as one of mankind’s great literary treasures, The Confessions of St. Augustine examines all of humanity’s great concerns including the ethical conflict between good and evil.

Title: The Count of Monte Cristo

Author: Alexander Dumas

Summary: Set against the tumultuous years of the post-Napoleonic era, The Count of Monet Cristo recounts the swashbuckling adventures of Edmond Dantes, a dashing young sailor falsely accused of treason. Sent to prison, Dantes escapes many years later and finds a treasure which he uses to exact his revenge.

Title: Cousin Bette

Author: Honore de Balzac

Summary: Cousin Bette is the story of a peasant who rebels against her scornful upper-class relatives, skillfully turning their selfish obsessions against them.

Title: Crime and Punishment

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Summary: The poverty-stricken Raskolnikov, a talented student, devises a theory about extraordinary men being above the law, since in their brilliance they think “new thoughts” and so contribute to society. He then sets out to prove his theory by murdering a vile, cynical old pawnbroker and her sister. The act brings Raskolnikov into contact with his own buried conscience and with two characters – the deeply religious Sonia, who has endured great suffering, and Porfiry, the intelligent and discerning official who is charged with investigating the murder – both of whom compel Raskolnikov to feel the split in his nature. Dostoevsky provides readers with a suspenseful, penetrating psychological analysis that goes beyond the crime – which in the course of the novel demands drastic punishment – to reveal something about the human condition: The more we intellectualize, the more imprisoned we become.

Title: The Crucible

Author: Arthur Miller

Summary: The Crucible is a play based on the events surrounding the 1692 witch trials of Salem, Massachusetts. In the rigid theocracy of Salem, rumors that women are practicing witchcraft galvanize the town’s most basic fears and suspicions; and when a young girl accuses Elizabeth Proctor of being a witch, self-righteous church leaders and townspeople insist that Elizabeth be brought to trial. The ruthlessness of the prosecutors and the eagerness of neighbor to testify against neighbor brilliantly illuminate the destructive power of socially sanctioned violence.

Title: Cyrano de Bergerac

Author: Edmond Rostad

Summary: Set in 17th-century Paris, the action revolves around the emotional problems of the noble, swashbuckling Cyrano, who, despite his many gifts, feels that no woman can ever love him because he has an enormous nose. Secretly in love with the lovely Roxane, Cyrano agrees to help his inarticulate rival, Christian, win her heart by allowing him to present Cyrano’s love poems, speeches, and letters as his own work.

Title: David Copperfield

Author: Charles Dickens

Summary: The story of the trials and triumphs of David Copperfield, growing to maturity in the affairs of the world and the affairs of the heart – his success as an artist arising out his sufferings and out of the lessons he derives from life.

Title: The Death of Ivan Iylch

Author: Leo Tolstoy

Summary: Ivan Ilych, a peaceful public official in the Russian provinces, has his life permanently changed by a serious illness which no doctor can accurately diagnose.

Title: Death of a Salesman

Author: Arthur Miller

Summary: Dark drama of a failed man, Willy Loman, whose life did not measure up to his expectations.

Title: The Diary of a Madman

Author: Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol

Summary: Diary of a Madman recounts one man’s struggle to be noticed by the woman he loved. His diary records his gradual slide into insanity, where he finally achieves the greatness that has eluded him in real life.

Title: Discourse on the Origin of Ingenuity

Author: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Summary: Rousseau’s sweeping account of humanity’s social and political development epitomizes the innovative boldness of the Enlightenment, and it is one of the most provocative and influential works of the eighteenth century.

Title: The Divine Comedy

Author: Dante

• Inferno
• Purgatorio
• Paradiso

Summary: The Divine Comedy is a moving human drama, an unforgettable visionary journey through the infinite torment of Hell, up the arduous slopes of Purgatory, and on to the glorious realm of Paradise-the sphere of universal harmony and eternal salvation.

Title: Don Quixote

Author: Miguel de Cervantes

Summary: Widely regarded as the world’s first modern novel, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote de la Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they wend their way across sixteenth-century Spain.

Title: Dracula

Author: Bram Stoker

Summary: A naive young Englishman travels to Transylvania to do business with a client, Count Dracula. After showing his true and terrifying colors, Dracula boards a ship for England in search of new, fresh blood. Unexplained disasters begin to occur in the streets of London before the mystery and the evil doer are finally put to rest.

Title: Emma

Author: Jane Austen

Summary: Charming, willful Emma Woodehouse amuses herself by planning other people’s lives. When her interfering backfires, she learns a bitter lesson: well-intentioned busybodies are as resented as those motivated by ill will, and everyone should learn to respect the individuality of others.

Title: Ethan Frome

Author: Eidith Wharton

Summary: Set in the harsh New England farmlands and told in flashback by a narrator, here is the story of the inexorable fall of a decent, rough-hewn man, ironically drawn by his most pure and beautiful feelings-his love for his wife’s cousin, the gentle and sweet young Mattie.

Title: The Fall of the House of Usher

Author: Edgar Allen Poe

Twelve stories tell of strange forces that lead men to their doom.

Title: A Farewell to Arms

Author: Ernest Hemmingway

Summary:  A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American World War I ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Hemingway’s frank portrayal of the love between Lieutenant Henry and Catherine Barkley, caught in the inexorable sweep of war, glows with an intensity unrivaled in modern literature.

Title: Faust

Author: Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Summary: Enduring legend of the old philosopher who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power.

Title: Fahrenheit 451

Author: Ray Bradbury

Summary: Fahrenheit 451 is set in a grim alternate-future setting ruled by a tyrannical government in which firemen as we understand them no longer exist: Here, firemen don’t douse fires, they ignite them. And they do this specifically in homes that house the most evil of evils: books.

Title: The First Third

Author: Neal Cassady

Summary: Before he died in Mexico in 1968, just four days shy of his forty-second birthday, Cassady had written the jacket blurb for this book: “Seldom has there been a story of a man so balled up. No doubt many readers will not believe the veracity of the author, but I assure these doubting Thomases that every incident, as such, is true.”

Title: For Whom the Bell Tolls

Author: Ernest Hemmingway

Summary: The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal.

Title: The Fountainhead

Author: Ayn Rand

Summary: Rand’s hero is Howard Roark, a brilliant young architect whose revolutionary building designs lead him to wage a desperate battle against his colleagues, society, and even the woman he loves. Roark refuses to compromise. In defense of his selfish choices, Roark stuns his critics by developing a radical moral philosophy every bit as revolutionary as his buildings.

Title: Frankenstein

Author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Summary: A monster assembled by a scientist from parts of dead bodies develops a mind of his own as he learns to loathe himself and hate his creator.

Title: Franny and Zooey

Author: J.D. Salinger

Summary: Containing two interrelated stories concern Franny and Zooey Glass. Franny is an intellectually precocious late adolescent who tries to attain spiritual purification by obsessively reiterating the “Jesus prayer” as an antidote to the perceived superficiality and corruptness of life. She subsequently suffers a nervous breakdown. In the second story, her next older brother, Zooey, attempts to heal Franny by pointing out that her constant repetition of the “Jesus prayer” is as self-involved and egotistical as the egotism against which she rails.

Title: The Glass Menagerie

Author: Tennessee Williams

Summary: Set in St. Louis during the Depression of the 1930s, this work is a personal account of the author’s family and its gradual disintegration as it succumbed to external and internal pressures.

Title: The Good Earth

Author: Pearl S. Buck

Summary: This story is about Wang Lung, rising from humble Chinese farmer to wealthy landowner, gloried in the soil he worked. He held it above his family, even above his gods. But soon, between Wang Lung and the kindly soil that sustained him, came flood and drought, pestilence and revolution.

Title: The Grapes of Wrath

Author: John Steinbeck

Summary: Forced from their home, the Joad family is lured to California to find work; instead they find disillusionment, exploitation, and hunger.

Title: Great Expectations

Author: Charles Dickens

Summary: Great Expectations follows the life of the orphan, Pip. We first meet him as a tiny, terrified child in a village churchyard. Years later, through the help of an anonymous benefactor, Pip will travel to London, full of expectations to become a gentleman. But his life is already inextricably tangled in a mystery that surrounds a beautiful woman, an embittered recluse, and an ambitious lawyer

Title: The Great Gatsby

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Summary: Set in the post-Great War Long Island/New York world of the rich. The narrator, Nick Carraway, sympathetically records the pathos of Gatsby’s romantic dream which founders on the reality of corruption, the insulated selfishness of Tom and Daisy, and the cutting edge of violence.

Title: Gulliver’s Travels

Author: Jonathan Swift

Summary: This classic work of satire presents a world gone haywire, where humans, despite their pomposity and grandiose illusions, are no better than weak and helpless fools. Lemuel Gulliver’s journeys take him to Lilliput, a country whose inhabitants are no more than six inches tall; to Brobdingnag, a land of giants; to Laputa, a flying island inhabited by absent-minded people; and to the land of Houyhnhnms, where horse like creatures rule with intelligence and courtesy over repulsive humanlike Yahoos.

Title: Hamlet

Author: William Shakespeare

Summary: In this quintessential Shakespearean tragedy, a young prince’s halting pursuit of revenge for the murder of his father unfolds in a series of highly charged confrontations that have held audiences spellbound for nearly four centuries. Those fateful exchanges and the anguished soliloquies that precede and follow them, probe depths of human feeling rarely sounded in any art.

Title: The Heart of Darkness

Author: Joseph Conrad

Summary: The Heart of Darkness is a dark allegory which describes the narrator’s journey up the Congo River and his meeting with, and fascination by, Mr. Kurtz, a mysterious personage who dominates the unruly inhabitants of the region

Title: History of the Peloponnesian War

Author: Thucydides

Summary: Written four hundred years before the birth of Christ, this detailed contemporary account of the struggle between Athens and Sparta stands an excellent chance of fulfilling the author’s ambitious claim that the work “was done to last forever.” The conflicts between the two empires over shipping, trade, and colonial expansion came to a head in 431 b.c. in Northern Greece, and the entire Greek world was plunged into 27 years of war.

Title: The Hobbit

Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

Summary: Whisked away from his comfortable, unambitious life in his hobbit-hole by Gandalf the wizard and a company of dwarves, Bilbo Baggins finds himself caught up in a plot to raid the treasure hoard of Smaug the Magnificent, a large and very dangerous dragon.

Title: The Hound of Baskervilles

Author: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Summary: Could the sudden death of Sir Charles Baskerville have been caused by the gigantic ghostly hound which is said to have haunted his family for generations? Arch-rationalist Sherlock Holmes characteristically dismisses the theory as nonsense. Claiming to be immersed in another case, he sends Watson to Devon to protect the Baskerville heir and to observe the suspects at close hand.

Title: House of Spirits

Author: Isabelle Allende

Summary: The Trueba family’s passions, struggles, and secrets span three generations and a century of violent change, culminating in a crisis that brings the proud and tyrannical patriarch and his beloved granddaughter to opposite sides. Against a backdrop of revolution and counterrevolution, Allende brings to life a family whose private bonds of love and hatred are more complex and enduring than the political allegiances that set them at odds.

Title: House of the Seven Gables

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Summary: A story of the misfortunes that plague a prominent New England family because of greed and a two-hundred-year-old curse.

Title: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

Author: Victor Hugo

Summary: Set in medieval Paris, Victor Hugo’s powerful historical romance. It tells the story of the beautiful gypsy Esmeralda, condemned as a witch by the tormented archdeacon Claude Frollo, who lusts after her. Quasimodo, the deformed bell ringer of Notre Dame Cathedral, having fallen in love with the kindhearted Esmeralda, tries to save her by hiding her in the cathedral’s tower. Action ensues when a crowd of Parisian peasants, misunderstanding Quasimodo’s motives, attacks the church in an attempt to liberate her.

Title: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Author: Maya Angelou

Summary: Angelou’s autobiography of her childhood in Arkansas.

Title: The Iliad

Author: Homer

Summary: The Iliad recounts the war between the Trojans and Achaeans, it also is the tragic story of the fiery-tempered Achilles. Insulted by his king, the proud Achilles decides to stand by as his comrades are annihilated, but circumstances finally spur the warrior to wreak savage retribution upon Troy.

Title: The Importance of Being Ernest

Author: Oscar Wilde

Summary: When Cecily falls in love with Algy, who is pretending to be his friend Jack’s wicked brother Ernest (recently deceased) there are bound to be problems in store – not at least from the dreaded Aunt Augusta… Just who is the invalid friend Mr. Bunbury? And how will the contents of a large handbag affect everybody?

Title: Invisible Man

Author: Ralph Ellison

Summary: The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of “the Brotherhood”, and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.

Title: Jane Eyre

Author: Charlotte Brönte

Summary: Orphaned at an early age, Jane Eyre leads a lonely life until she finds work as a governess at Thornfield Hall, where she meets the mysterious Mr. Rochester and sees a ghostly woman who roams the halls by night. This is a story of passionate love, travail and final triumph.

Title: Jude the Obscure

Author: Thomas Hardy

It is a tale of doomed love and unfulfilled promise that revolves around Jude Fawley, an ambitious and intelligent young man, his cousin Sue Bridehead and his academic mentor Phillotson.

Title: Julius Caesar

Author: William Shakespeare

Summary: In this striking tragedy of political conflict, Shakespeare turns to the ancient Roman world and to the famous assassination of Julius Caesar by his republican opponents. The play is one of tumultuous rivalry, of prophetic warnings – “Beware the ides of March” – and of moving public oratory “Friends, Romans, countrymen!” Ironies abound and most of all for Brutus, whose fate it is to learn that his idealistic motives for joining the conspiracy against a would-be dictator are not enough to sustain the movement once Caesar is dead.

Title: The Jungle

Author: Upton Sinclair

Summary: This muckraking novel changed the course of history with its gruesomely detailed picture of the meat-packing industry. Historically accurate & humanistic, the book remains an invaluable mirror by which we may still examine ourselves & society today.

Title: King Lear

Author: William Shakespeare

Summary: King Lear banishes his favorite daughter when she speaks out against him. Little does he know that the two other daughters who praise him are actually plotting against him.

Title: Le Morte D’Arthur

Author: Sir Thomas Mallory

Summary: The stories of King Arthur, Lancelot, Queen Guenièvre, and Tristram and Isolde seem astonishingly moving and modern. Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur endures and inspires because it embodies mankind’s deepest yearnings for brotherhood and community, a love worth dying for, and valor, honor, and chivalry.

Title: The Labyrinth of Solitude

Author: Octavio Paz

Summary: “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” a beautifully written and deeply felt discourse on Mexico’s quest for identity that gives us an unequaled look at the country hidden behind “the mask.”

Title: Last of the Mohicans

Author: James Fenimore Cooper

Summary: It is 1757. The English and French are engaged in a savage, bloody war for control of the North American continent Caught in the middle is Hawkeye, a white scout who was raised among the Indians. Hawkeye must finally struggle to save his own life and those of a small band of colonists. Fighting by his side are Hawkeye’s Mohican friends, Chingachgook and the young Uncas. The three risk their lives to save a British commander’s daughters – the dark-haired, courageous Cora and the fair, fragile Alice. Their chief adversary is the renegade Huron warrior Magua, whose attraction to Cora and hatred for whites make him a vengeful, insidious enemy.

Title: Les Misérables

Author: Victor Hugo

Summary: Trying to forget his past and live an honest life, escaped convict Jean Valjean risks his freedom to take care of a motherless young girl during a period of political unrest in Paris.

Title: Little Women

Author: Louisa May Alcott

Summary: Meet the March sisters: the talented and tomboyish Jo, the beautiful Meg, the frail Beth, and the spoiled Amy, as they pass through the years between girlhood and womanhood. This story chronicles the joys and sorrows of the four March sisters as they grow into young ladies in nineteenth-century New England.

Title: Lolita

Author: Vladimir Nabokov

Summary: The story of Humbert Humbert, and his obsession with 12-year-old Dolores Haze. Humbert embarks on a disastrous courtship that can only end in tragedy.

Title: Lord of the Flies

Author: William Golding

Summary: The classic tale of a group of English school boys who are left stranded on an unpopulated island, and who must confront not only the defects of their society but the defects of their own natures.

Title: Lord of the Rings

Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

• The Fellowship of the Ring
• The Two Towers
• Return of the King

Summary: Through the urgings of the enigmatic wizard Gandalf, young hobbit Frodo Baggins embarks on an urgent, incredibly treacherous journey to destroy the One Ring. This ring – created and then lost by the Dark Lord, Sauron, centuries earlier – is a weapon of evil, one that Sauron desperately wants returned to him. With the power of the ring once again his own, the Dark Lord will unleash his wrath upon all of Middle-earth. The only way to prevent this horrible fate from becoming reality is to return the Ring to Mordor, the only place it can be destroyed. Unfortunately for our heroes, Mordor is also Sauron’s lair.

Title: The Lost World

Author: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Summary: In the sketch book are Maple White’s drawings of the prehistoric beasts, birds and ape men which he has seen on his travels. Professor challenger is excited when he sees the drawings and decides to find out if there is a Lost World in the Amazon forest where dinosaurs, Pterodactyls and ape men still exist.

Title: Love in the Time of Cholera

Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Summary: A novel about the attempts of an old man and woman to rekindle their childhood love affair, set on the Columbian coast.

Title: Love’s Labor’s Lost

Author: William Shakespeare

Summary: This is one of the bard’s earliest comedies, in which four bachelors who have dedicated themselves to chastity and scholarly pursuits soon encounter the women of their dreams.

Title: Macbeth

Author: William Shakespeare

Summary: Macbeth is a dark and bloody drama of ambition, murder, guilt and revenge. Prompted by the prophecies of three mysterious witches and goaded by his ambitious wife, the Scottish thane Macbeth murders Duncan, King of Scotland, in order to succeed him on the throne. This foul deed soon entangles the conscience-stricken nobleman in a web of treachery, deceit and more murders that ultimately spells his doom.

Title: Mansfield Park

Author: Jane Austen

Summary: When the gorgeous Henry Crawford and his pretty sister, Mary, come to Mansfield, they have no idea of the commotion they will cause. There they find the Bertram family, with their beautiful daughters and handsome sons-and our heroine, shy and sweet Fanny Price. As the inhabitants of Mansfield Park become ever more involved with the Crawford’s, a scandal of devastating proportions begins to unfold.

Title: The Merchant of Venice

Author: William Shakespeare

Summary: In The Merchant of Venice, the penniless but attractive Bassanio seeks, and finally wins, the hand of the fabulously wealthy Portia. But even as the play provokes laughter, it also provokes something disturbing, as Bassanio’s courtship is actually financed by the magnificent villain Shylock the moneylender – the focus of anti-Semitic sentiment, and one of the most controversial yet strangely sympathetic of Shakespeare’s characters, whose actions and whose treatment in the play are still debated to this day

Title: The Metamorphosis

Author: Franz Kafka

Summary: “When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from  unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his  bed into a monstrous vermin.” With this  startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first  sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The  Metamorphosis. It is the story of a  young man who, transformed overnight into a giant  beetle-like insect, becomes an object of disgrace to  his family, an outsider in his own home, a  quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing – though  absurdly comic -meditation on human feelings of  inadequacy, guilt, and isolation.

Title: Midsummer Night’s Dream

Author: William Shakespeare

Summary: Shakespeare’s intertwined love polygons begin to get complicated from the start-Demetrius and Lysander both want Hermia but she only has eyes for Lysander. Bad news is, Hermia’s father wants Demetrius for a son-in-law. On the outside is Helena, whose unreturned love burns hot for Demetrius. Hermia and Lysander plan to flee from the city under cover of darkness but are pursued by an enraged Demetrius (who is himself pursued by an enraptured Helena). In the forest, unbeknownst to the mortals, Oberon and Titania (King and Queen of the faeries) are having a spat over a servant boy. The plot twists up when Oberon’s head mischief-maker, Puck, runs loose with a flower which causes people to fall in love with the first thing they see upon waking. Throw in a group of laborers preparing a play for the Duke’s wedding (one of whom is given a donkey’s head and Titania for a lover by Puck) and the complications become fantastically funny.

Title: The Bad Girl

Author: Mario Vargas Llosa

Summary: Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as “Lily” in Lima in 1950, when she arrives one summer out of the blue, claiming to be from Chile but vanishing the moment her claim is exposed as fiction. He loves her next in Paris, where she appears as the enchanting “Comrade Arlette,” an activist en route to Cuba. Whoever the bad girl turns up Ricardo is doomed to worship her.

Title: Mill on the Floss

Author: George Eliot

Summary: The author recreates her own childhood through the story of the gifted Maggie Tulliver and her spoilt, selfish brother. Though tragic in its outcome, this comic novel combines vivid images of family life with a portrait of the heroine.

Title: Moby Dick

Author: Herman Melville

Summary: A rich, complex, highly symbolic narrative that explores the deepest reaches of our moral and metaphysical dilemma through the extraordinary tale of Captain Ahab’s insane quest for the great white whale.

Title: A Moveable Feast

Author: Ernest Hemmingway

Summary: Hemingway records his five years in Paris, describing his own creative struggles and providing portraits of such fellow expatriates as Fitzgerald, Pound, and Stein.

Title: My Antonia

Author: Willa Cather

Summary: My Antonia is the wistful tale of an immigrant girl from Bohemia, who has settled in Nebraska. The novel depicts the violent yet inspiring existence of the foreign and native-born settlers to Nebraska in the early years of this century

Title: Nine Stories

Author: J.D. Salinger

Summary: “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” “Teddy,” and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” are among the nine works in a collection of Salinger’s perceptive and realistic short stories.

Title: The Odyssey

Author: Homer

Summary: This epic work chronicles Odysseus’s return from the Trojan War and the trials he endures on his journey home. A story filled with magic, mystery, and an assortment of gods & goddesses who meddle freely in the affairs of men.

Title: Of Mice and Men

Author: John Steinbeck

Summary: The tragic story of the complex bond between two migrant laborers in Central California. They are George Milton and Lennie Small, itinerant ranch hands who dream of one day owning a small farm. George acts as a father figure to Lennie, who is a very large, simpleminded man, calming him and helping to reign in his immense physical strength.

Title: The Old Man and the Sea

Author: Ernest Hemmingway

Summary: A novella, The Old Man and Sea tells the story of an old fisherman, Santiago, and his long lusty struggle isn’t so much over one fish, but the act of living-living fully, actively, robustly.

Title: Oliver Twist

Charles Dickens

Summary: One of the first English novels to feature a child as its protagonist, Oliver Twist, moves through the Victorian underworld to tell a suspenseful tale of innocence threatened-yet ultimately triumphant.

Title: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Author: Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Summary: The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression.

Title: On the Road

Author: Jack Kerouac

Summary: On the Road chronicles Jack Kerouac’s years traveling the North American continent with his friend Neal Cassady, “a sideburned hero of the snowy West.” As “Sal Paradise” and “Dean Moriarty,” the two roam the country in a quest for self-knowledge and experience. Kerouac’s love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz combine to make On the Road an inspirational work of lasting importance.

Title: The Oresteia

Author: Aeschylus

• Agamemnon
• The Libation Bearers & the Furies
• The Eumenides

Summary: The most famous series of ancient Greek plays, and the only surviving trilogy, is the Oresteia of Aeschylus, consisting of Agamemnon, Choephoroe, and Eumenides. These three plays recount the murder of Agamemnon by his queen Clytemnestra on his return from Troy with the captive Trojan princess Cassandra; the murder in turn of Clytemnestra by their son Orestes; and Orestes’ subsequent pursuit by the Avenging Furies (Eumenides) and eventual absolution.

Title: The Origin of Species

Author: Charles Darwin

Summary: The famous classic on evolution that revolutionized the course of science. Darwin’s theory that species derive from other species by a gradual evolutionary process and that the average age level of each species is heightened by the “survival of the fittest”.

Title: Othello

Author: William Shakespeare

Summary: Othello tells the story of a Moorish general in command of the armed forces of Venice, who earns the enmity of his ensign Iago by passing him over for a promotion. Partly for revenge and partly out of pure evil, Iago plots to convince Othello that Desdemona, his wife, has been unfaithful to him.

Title: Our Town

Author: Thornton Wilder

Summary: This Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of life in the small village of Grover’s Corners, an allegorical representation of all life, has become a classic.

Title: The Overcoat

Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol

Summary: Gogol’s memorable Saint Petersburg stories, is a tale of the absurd and misplaced obsessions.

Title: The Pearl

Author: John Steinbeck

Summary: For the diver Kino, finding a magnificent pearl means the promise of a better life for his impoverished family. His dreams blind him to the greed that the pearl arouses in him and his neighbors.

Title: Paradise Lost

Author: John Milton

Summary: Paradise Lost is considered to be the greatest epic poem in English literature. Its roots lie in the Genesis account of the world’s creation and Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden; it also references tales from the Metamorphoses, the Iliad and Odyssey, and the Aeneid.

Title: Persuasion

Author: Jane Austen

Summary: Twenty-seven-year old Anne Elliot is Austen’s most adult heroine. Eight years before the story proper begins, she is happily betrothed to a naval officer, Frederick Wentworth, but she precipitously breaks off the engagement when persuaded by her friend Lady Russell that such a match is unworthy. The breakup produces in Anne a deep and long-lasting regret. When later Wentworth returns from sea a rich and successful captain, he finds Anne’s family on the brink of financial ruin and his own sister a tenant in Kellynch Hall, the Elliot estate. Al the tension of the novel revolves around one question: Will Anne and Wentworth be reunited in their love?

Title: The Picture of Dorian Grey

Author: Oscar Wilde

Summary: An incredibly handsome young man in Victorian England retains his youthful appearance over the years while his portrait reflects both his age and evil soul as he pursues a life of decadence and corruption.

Title: Pride and Prejudice

Author: Jane Austen

Summary: Spirited, intelligent Elizabeth Bennet is alternately enchanted and affronted by Mr. Darcy. She is quick to suspend her usual, more rational judgment when it comes to him. She also is quick to believe the worst gossip about this haughty, opinionated man, who soon manages to alienate Elizabeth and her family. But is the condescending air that Mr. Darcy wars an indication of his real character? Or has Elizabeth’s pride gotten in the way of her chance for true romance?

Title: The Prince

Author: Niccolo Machiavelli

Summary: Based upon Machiavelli’s firsthand experience as an emissary of the Florentine Republic to the courts of Europe, The Prince analyzes the often-violent means by which political power is seized and retained, and the circumstances in which it is lost. Above all, it provides a remarkably uncompromising picture of the true nature of power, no matter in what era or by whom it is exercised.

Title: The Prophet

Author: Kahlil Gibran

Summary: A brilliant man’s philosophy on love, marriage, joy and sorrow, time, friendship and much more.

Title: Rebecca

Author: Daphne du Maurier

Summary: With a husband she barely knew, the young bride arrived at this immense estate, only to be inexorably drawn into the life of the first Mrs. de Winter, the beautiful Rebecca, dead but never forgotten…her suite of rooms never touched, her clothes ready to be worn, her servant – the sinister Mrs. Danvers – still loyal. And as an eerie presentiment of evil tightened around her heart, the second Mrs. de Winter began her search for the real fate of Rebecca…for the secrets of Manderley.

Title: The Red Badge of Courage

Author: Stephen Crane

Summary: One of the greatest war novels of all time, this is the story of the Civil War through the eyes of Henry Fleming, an ordinary farm boy turned soldier. This story marks a departure from the traditional treatment of war in fiction as it captures the sights and sounds of war while creating the intricate inner world of Henry. It also probes the personal reactions of unknown foot soldiers fighting unknown enemies. Henry Fleming is motivated not by courage or patriotism but by cowardice, fear, and finally egoism, and events are filtered through his consciousness.

Title: The Republic

Author: Plato

Summary: The Republic is concerned with the construction of an ideal commonwealth and thus is the earliest of utopias.

Title: Robinson Crusoe

Author: Daniel Defoe

Summary: Based on a real-life incident, Robinson Crusoe tells the story of a young man who yearns to escape the mundane world and set sail for a life of adventure in faraway places. Defying his father’s wishes he leaves on board a ship, then finds himself marooned on a tropical island where he wrestles with his fate and ponders the nature of God and man.

Title: Romeo and Juliet

Author: William Shakespeare

Summary: The magnificent, timeless drama is the world’s most famous tale of “star-crossed lovers.” The young, unshakable love of Juliet and Romeo defies the feud that divides their families-the Capulets and Montagues-as their desperate need to be together, their secret meetings, and finally their concealed marriage drive them toward tragedy. A masterwork that has long captured the hearts of audiences, this romantic tragedy has become part of the literary heritage of all peoples in all nations.

Title: The Scarlet Letter

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Summary: In early colonial Massachusetts, a young woman endures the consequences of her sin of adultery and spends the rest of her life in atonement.

Title: The Scarlet Pimpernel

Author: Baroness Emmuska Orczy

Summary: In 1792, during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, an English aristocrat known to be an ineffectual fop is actually a master of disguises who, with a small band of dedicated friends, undertakes dangerous missions to save members of the French nobility from the guillotine.

Title: The Secret Garden

Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett

Summary: The spoiled orphan Mary Lennox leaves India to live with her cold uncle in his dreary mansion in England. When Mary hears of a secret garden kept locked for ten years, she is determined to find it and tend it back to life. With the help of her uncle’s sickly son and a boy who knows all about nature, Mary secretly transforms the garden – and all of their lives.

Title: Sense and Sensibility

Author: Jane Austen

Summary: Jane Austen’s first published novel, Sense and Sensibility is a wonderfully entertaining tale of flirtation and folly that revolves around two starkly different sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. While Elinor is thoughtful, considerate, and calm, her younger sister is emotional and wildly romantic. Both are looking for a husband, but neither Elinor’s reason nor Marianne’s passion can lead them to perfect happiness-as Marianne falls for an unscrupulous rascal and Elinor becomes attached to a man who’s already engaged. Startling secrets, unexpected twists, and heartless betrayals interrupt the marriage games that follow.

Title: A Separate Peace

Author: John Knowles

Summary: The turbulent friendship between two very different teens, Gene and Phineas, leads to disaster at an New England boarding school just before World War II. 

Title: The Shooting Party

Author: Anton Chekhov

Summary: The Shooting Party wraps a story of concealed love and fatal jealousy into a classic murder mystery. When a young woman dies during a shooting party at the country estate of a dissolute count, a magistrate is called to investigate. But suspicion descends upon virtually everyone, for, as we soon learn, the victim was at the center of a tangled web of relationships-with her elderly husband, with the lecherous count, and with the magistrate himself.

Title: Silas Marner

Author: George Eliot

Summary: In this story of a reclusive weaver in a small English town who learns to trade his love of money for the love of those around him, the author explores such philosophical issues as the value of human relations and the connection between souls.

Title: Slaughterhouse-Five

Author: Kurt Vonnegut

Summary: Unstuck in time, Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut’s shattered survivor of the Dresden bombing, relives his life over and over again under the gaze of aliens; he comes at last to some understanding of the human comedy.

Title: The Sound and the Fury

Author: William Faulkner

Summary: The Sound and the Fury is made up of undifferentiated streams of consciousness that ultimately turn out to be the inner voices of a family’s siblings. The beautiful and tragic Caddy Compson, whose story Faulkner told through separate monologues by her three brothers-the idiot Benjy, the neurotic suicidal Quentin and the monstrous Jason.

Title: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Author: Robert Louise Stevenson

Summary: The story of Dr Jekyll, a good man who dedicates his life to helping others, but who also uses a powerful potion to create another version of himself, Mr. Hyde, to do his wicked deeds for him.

Title: The Stranger

Author: Albert Camus

Summary: The story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach.

Title: Streetcar named desire

Author: Tennessee Williams

Summary: The story of the fading and desperate Blanche DuBois and how her sensuous and brutal brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski, pushes her over the edge.

Title: Sun Also Rises

Author: Ernest Hemmingway

Summary: This is the story of a group of ‘Lost Generation’ Americans and Brits in the 1920s on a sojourn from Paris to Pamploma, Spain. The novel poignantly details their life as expatriates on Paris’ Left Bank, and conveys the brutality of bullfighting in Spain.

Title: A Tale of Two Cities

Author: Charles Dickens

Summary: When the starving French masses rise in hate to overthrow a corrupt and decadent government, both the guilty and innocent become victims of their frenzied anger. Soon nothing stands in the way of the chilling figure they enlist for their cause-La Guillotine-the new invention for efficiently chopping off heads. It is the human story behind the French Revolution is embodied in four of Dickens’s greatest characters: Madame Défargue, Lucie Manette and her husband Charles Darnay, and the misanthrope Sydney Carton whose final sacrifice gives meaning to his life.

Title: Taming of the Shrew

Author: William Shakespeare

Summary: This play describes the volatile courtship between the shrewish Katharina and the canny Petruchio, who is determined to subdue Katharina’s legendary temper and win her dowry.

Title: Tao Te Ching

Author: Lao Tzu

Summary: Epigrammatic, enigmatic, intensely poetic, the Tao Te Ching is the mystical, spiritual soul of Taoism, one of the three great religions (along with Confucianism and Buddhism) of ancient China.

Title: Tartuffe

Author: Jean-Baptiste Moliere

Summary: Teeming with lively humor and satirical plot devices, this timeless comedy by one of France’s greatest playwrights follows the outrageous activities of a penniless scoundrel and religious pretender. Invited to live in his benefactor’s house, he wreaks havoc among family members by breaking off the daughter’s engagement, attempting to seduce his hostess, and resorting to blackmail and extortion

Title: Tarzan of the Apes

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Summary: The tale of an aristocratic English infant, abandoned on the death of his parents in the African jungle, who is reared by apes. Story includes riveting encounters with man-eating beasts, Tarzan’s love affair with the beautiful Jane Porter, buried treasure, much more.

Title: The Tempest

Author: William Shakespeare

Summary: Prospero, exiled Duke of Milan, living on an enchanted island, has the opportunity to punish and forgive his enemies when he raises a tempest that drives them ashore-as well as to forestall a rebellion, to arrange the meeting of his daughter, Miranda, with an eminently suitable young prince, and, more important, to relinquish his magic powers in recognition of his advancing age.

Title: Ten Plays

Author: Euripides

Summary: The Greek playwright Euripedes was misunderstood in his own time, but the topics he chose to write about-women’s role in society, war, religion, and the human condition-are still relevant today. This collection contains ten of his greatest works: “Alcestis,” “Hippolytus,” “Ion,” “Electra,” “Iphigenia at Aulis,” “Iphigenia Among the Taurians,” “Medea,” “The Bachhae,” “The Trojan Woman,” and “The Cyclops.”

Title: Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Author: Thomas Hardy

Summary: Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D’Urbevilles, and meeting her “cousin” Alec proves to be her downfall. When Angel Clare offers her love and salvation, she must choose whether to reveal her past or remain silent in the hope of a peaceful future.

Title: Their Eyes Were Watching God

Author: Zora Neale Hurston

Summary: Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of Janie Crawford-fair-skinned, long-haired, dreamy woman-who comes of age expecting better treatment than what she gets from her three husbands and community. Then she meets Tea Cake, a younger man who captivates Janie’s heart and spirit, and offers her the chance to relish life without being one man’s mule or another man’s adornment.

Title: Meditations

Author: Marcus Aurelius Antonius

Summary: Written by an intellectual Roman emperor, the Meditations offer a wide range of spiritual reflections developed as the leader struggled to understand Himself and the universe. Marcus Aurelius covers topics as diverse as the question of virtue, human rationality, the nature of the gods, and his own emotions, spanning from doubt and despair to conviction and exaltation.

Title: Three Theban Plays 

Author: Sophocles

•  Antigone
•  Oedipus Rex
•  Electra

Summary: The Oedipus cycle is a Greek tragedy, with elements of love, death, and it has comic relief. It is probably the most entertaining Greek play, and it addresses many themes, and motifs.

Title: The Three Musketeers

Author: Alexander Dumas

Summary: Dramatic, stirring, and romantic, the story of D’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, and their famous code of “one for all and all for one,” remains an unsurpassed tale of adventure and heroism.

Title: The Time Machine

Author: H.G. Wells

Summary: This is the tale of a Victorian time traveler who creates a machine which takes him 800,000 years into the future, to a divided world of innocence and knowledge.

Title: To Have and Have Not

Author: Ernest Hemmingway

Summary: To Have and Have Not is the dramatic, brutal story of Harry Morgan, an honest boat owner who is forced into running contraband between Cuba and Key West as a means of keeping his crumbling family financially afloat. His adventures lead him into the world of the wealthy and dissipated yachtsmen who swarm the region, and involve him in a strange and unlikely love affair.

Title: To Kill a Mockingbird

Author: Harper Lee

Summary: “Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird”. This is a lawyer’s advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of this story – a black man charged with raping a white girl in the Deep South of the 1930s.

Title: Treasure Island

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

Summary: Treasure Island began, a brave boy who finds himself among pirates, and of the sinister pirate-cook Long John Silver.

Title: The Trial

Author: Franz Kafka

Summary: A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis-an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life-including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door-becomes increasingly unpredictable. As K. tries to gain control, he succeeds only in accelerating his own excruciating downward spiral.

Title: Twelfth Night

Author: William Shakespeare

Summary: Delightfully comic tale of mistaken identities revolves around the physical likeness between Sebastian and his twin sister Viola, each of whom, when separated after a shipwreck, believes the other to be dead. Filled with superb comedy, this entertaining masterpiece remains one of Shakespeare’s most popular and performed comedies.

Title: Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Author: Harriet Beecher Stowe

Summary: Uncle Tom’s Cabin brought the evils of slavery to the consciences and hearts of the American people by its moving portrayal of slave experience.

Title: Vanity Fair

Author: William Makepeace Thakeray

Summary: No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her sentimental companion Amelia, however, longs only for caddish soldier George. As the two heroines make their way through the tawdry glamour of Regency society, battles – military and domestic – are fought, fortunes made and lost. The one steadfast and honorable figure in this corrupt world is Dobbin with his devotion to Amelia, bringing pathos and depth to Thackeray’s gloriously satirical epic of love and social adventure.

Title: Waiting for Godot

Author: Samuel Beckett

Summary: The story line revolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone – or something – named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree on a barren stretch of road, inhabiting a drama spun from their own consciousness.

Title: War and Peace

Author: Leo Tolstoy

Summary: Tolstoy’s masterpiece of love and loss, tragedy and triumph is set against the panorama of the Napoleonic Wars at the dawn of the 19th century. This is an unforgettable story of two Russian families whose lives become intertwined amidst a collision of empires.

Title: War of the Worlds

Author: H.G. Wells

Summary: The daring portrayal of aliens landing on English soil, with its themes of interplanetary imperialism, technological holocaust and chaos, is central to the career of H.G. Wells, who died at the dawn of the atomic age. This is the story of the survival of mankind in the face of “vast and cool and unsympathetic” scientific powers that are spinning out of control.  

Title: White Fang

Author: Jack London

Summary: Part wolf and part dog, orphaned White Fang relies on his instincts as well as his inborn strength and courage to survive in the Yukon wilderness despite both animal and human predators but eventually comes to make his peace with man.

Title: Wings of the Dove

Author: Henry James

Summary: A young couple, deeply in love but penniless, embarks upon a scheme to become rich by seducing a wealthy heiress who is terminally ill. But the plans they hatched have run awry, and in ways that they could never have foreseen.

Title: The Wizard of Oz

Author: L. Frank Baum

Summary: The story of Dorothy and her dog, Toto, who are swept off the Kansas plains by a huge cyclone, and find themselves in the Land of Oz.

Title: A Wrinkle in Time

Author:  Madaline L’Engle

Summary: Meg Murry, her brother, Charles Wallace, along with their neighbor, Calvin O’Keefe, travel through time and space to find their scientist father and battle a growing cosmic evil.

Title: Wuthering Heights

Author: Emily Bronte

Summary: The turbulent and tempestuous love story of Cathy and Heathcliff spans two generations – from the time Heathcliff, a strange, course young boy, is brought to live on the Earnshaw’s windswept estate, through Cathy’s marriage to Edgar Linton and Heathcliff’s plans for revenge, to Cathy’s death years later and the eventual union of the surviving Earnshaw and Linton heirs.