Timeless classics and modern masterpieces that challenge, inspire, and leave a lasting impact. Ideal for thought-provoking discussions.
Moll Flanders: The History and the Misfortunes of the Famoius Moll Flanders
Daniel Defoe, 1721
368 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
June 2014
Virginia Woolf referred to Moll Flanders as one of the "indisputably great" novels of the English language. Yet not everyone thought (or thinks) so. Defoe was one of the founders of the new-fangled novel in the 17th century, and after more than 300 years of practice, it's tempting to find fault with those early steps. And so we do, but all the while admiring Defoe's brilliance.
Still, no one disputes this single fact: Moll Flanders herself remains one of the most dazzling heroines of all time.
Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf, 1925
~100-150 pp. (varies by publisher)
October 2006
Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? A lot of us. Despite her fragile elegance, Woolf is no quaint Edwardian. She's very much of the 20th-century: a writer who can be ferociously intellectual and sometimes downright intimidating.
Fortunately, we don't have to be all that intimidated by Mrs. Dalloway. On one level, it is accessible as a novel about class, unrequited love, and madness.
My Antonia
Willa Cather, 1918
280 pp.
December 2007
Read this beautiful book. I should just stop here. So I will.
Well...no. On second thought, maybe not. At least I should explain. Truth is there's not much more to say about this American classic than what H.L. Mencken said in 1918:
The Natural
Bernard Malamud, 1952
231 pp.
February, 2012
In his beloved baseball classic, Bernard Malamud bestows mythic status on America's national past-time. Baseball becomes the quest of the Arthurian hero facing down forces of evil, both internal and external.
We first meet our hero, Roy Hobbs, on the cusp of adulthood, staring at his reflection in a train window. He may be Narcissus gazing at himself in the pond—a self-love that can only bring disaster. Or perhaps the reflection mirrors back to him his own purity, which neither he nor the world will enable himself to live up to.
Night
Elie Wiesel, 1958
144 pp
June 2008
One could write a great deal about this book—the first ever published from a concentration camp survivor. But whatever I write will seem trite compared to the words Elie Wiesel has written.
In a slender volume, Wiesel relates his experience as a young boy as he and his family are transported from their village in Hungary to Auschwitz in Poland. "Transported" does no justice to the horror of that journey—or what comes later.
Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
Joseph Conrad, 1904
500 pp.
May 2010
Many scholars have considered Nostromo one of the finest novels in the English language. If I lost you at the word "scholars," please don't let that be a deal breaker—Nostromo is a dense but compulsive read.
As he does in all his works, Conrad plumbs the depths of human frailty, offering an intimate study in psychology and human relations. Yet here he uses a vaster canvas to consider the wider political and economic world.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1970
417 pp.
February 2008
This book is the granddaddy of magical realism. Written 40 years ago, it was recognized immediately as a classic, one of the great works of all time. So buckle your seat belts—because you're in for a ride.
Marquez has created an epic re-imagining of the genesis of life. The book fairly teems with...well, everything under the sun—which is, in fact, a major theme: the richness, amazing variety, fecundity and mystery of all of life under the sun.
Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass
Isak Dinesen, 1937 and 1960
480 pp. (incl. Shadows)
April 2007
“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”
With that beautifully modulated opening, Dinesen begins her epic memoir: 17 years (1914–31) as a coffee grower in Kenya, then a British protectorate. This is a powerful love story—but not the one between Redford and Streep as told in the 1985 movie.
A Passage to India
E.M. Forster, 1924
pp. 300-400 (varies by edition)
July 2011
A funny thing about empires: empires pack up and carry their own culture with them, then impose it on those they've conquered. It's a lovely custom...if you're the ones in charge.
So it was with the British Raj in India, which is the subject of E.M. Forster's masterpiece, A Passage to India. In another Forster work, Howards End, the mantra was "only connect." In Passage the last thing the British wish to do is connect with the Indian people they rule over.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde, 1890-91
150-175 pp. (varies by publisher)
December 2010
Wilde's novel has intrigued, enraged, and delighted readers for 100 years. It is many things: a novel of manners, a gothic fantasy, a morality tale (or, as Victorians believed, an immorality tale), and a philosophical treatise on the aesthetic movement sometimes referred to as "art for art's sake." Finally, the very name "Dorian Gray" is a cultural byword for lasting youth.
Dorian is ageless, he never suffers the destruction of time—only his picture does. We first meet him as a young man, sitting for his portrait in Basil Hallward's studio. Also in the studio is Lord Henry Wotton, whose corrupting influence (on Dorian) Basil greatly fears, a fear well placed.
The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James, 1880-81
656 pp.
September 2009
The Portrait of a Lady is Henry James's most famous work, and Isabel Archer his most famous heroine. This is James at his best. (scholars would rise up in arms at that, but they're not reading this, I assure you.)
We follow Isabel, a beautiful and intellectually gifted young American woman, who longs for experience of the wider world, especially the world of Europe. A large inheritance offers her the freedom she needs to gain the experience she wants.
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen, 1813
~250-300 pp. (varies by publisher)
August 2007
Not long ago, I received an email from someone struggling through Pride and Prejudice. Why, she wondered, is it considered a great classic? It's wordy and dense, making it difficult to cut through the pile of verbiage to get to the meaning.
It's an excellent question!—and all the more interesting because of the vital role Jane Austen played in the development of the young novel.
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen, 1813
~250-300 pp. (varies by publisher)
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
March, 2012
Some time ago, I received an email from someone struggling through Pride and Prejudice. Why, she wondered, is it considered a great classic? It's wordy and dense, making it difficult to cut through the pile of verbiage to get to the meaning.
It's an excellent question!—and all the more interesting because of the vital role Jane Austen played in the development of the young novel.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark, 1961
127 pp.
October 2009
While I'm not sure this is truly one of literature's "great works," it has nonetheless endured for 50 years, inspiring stage and film productions along the way. The reason lies in its heroine, Miss Jean Brodie, who intrigues, infuriates and always captivates readers.
Miss Brodie is a born teacher. She refuses to follow prescribed curricula, preferring instead to enliven her lessons with stories and class trips. Education, she believes, is not stuffing young minds with facts but drawing out what's already in them, enlarging and polishing their innate curiosity and imagination.
The Quincunx
Charles Palliser, 1989
788 pp.
April 2010
I'm taking a chance here. First, The Quincunx is not a true "classic," in terms of age. Second, it's long (800 pages)...at times overly complicated...and other times downright tiresome.
But it's a rare reviewer who would tell you to stay away from it. If you read this book, you will lose sleep...forget meals...miss work...and ignore your family. You will become depraved.
Rebecca
Daphne du Maurier, 1938
384 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
February 2014
Frst published over 75 years ago, Rebecca remains one of the best loved of modern Gothics: a genre known for its old manses and heavy atmospherics. The sense of foreboding in du Maurier's book is brought to bear on an uneasy marriage—of a naive, untested bride and her sophisticate husband, a man twice her age.
In truth, Rebecca is the story of two marriages, one in the present...and one in the recent past. Our poor heroine finds herself competing for the affections of her husband with his dead wife...who seems all too alive.
Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austin, 1811
~350 pp. (varies by publisher)
January 2011
Jane Austen liked nothing so much as to poke fun at convention, and in her novels she does just that. In Sense and Sensibility, she takes aim at the then-current craze for all things sentimental.
Novels in the late 18th- and early 19th-century featured characters of delicate emotions, or sensibility. They wept, sighed, and fainted—proof of their heightened sensitivity to intellectual and emotional stimuli. (Think Heathcliff wandering the moors or, better yet, the Heathcliff of Bridget Jones who bangs his head against a tree, shouting "Cathy, Cathy, Caaaaathy....!")
A Separate Peace
John Knowles, 1959
208 pp.
January 2010
As a comping-of-age story, I wanted to recommend Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. (Notice how I seem to be recommending it anyway.) One of the great C-of-A novels of modern America, it manages to be side-splittingly funny and tender at the same time—but so focused on the male member and bathroom humor that many find it offensive. (Others' sensibilities are more finely tuned than mine...so now you know.)
Instead, I offer John Knowles's A Separate Peace, a beautiful rendering of youth, war (within and without), and hard-gained self-knowledge. Published in 1959, A Separate Peace has maintained its power to move us for 50 years.
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut, 1969
224 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
December, 2012
A movie producer once told Kurt Vonnegut that, if he was planning to write an anti-war book, he might as well write an anti-glacier book—for all the good it would do. Wars are inevitable, "about as easy to stop as glaciers," was the point. Vonnegut agreed.
Why then did Vonnegut go on to publish a novel—about the firebombing of Dresden at the end of World War II? As he later explained, Slaughterhouse-Five was a book he had to write: he himself had been present in Dresden at the very time of its destruction. The rest, of course, is history—Vonnegut's book has become one of the world's great anti-war novels.
Sons and Lovers
D.H. Lawrence
481pp.
November 2007
If you've never read Lawrence, this is a good place to start—Sons and Lovers is an early novel, more conventional than his later works. It is also somewhat autobiographical.
The book recounts the struggle of young Paul Morel, the son of a miner, to establish himself in the middle-class and to break free—or not—of his mother's domineering love.
The Hamlet
William Faulker, 1940
432 pp.
August 2009
For my money this is Faulkner's finest, certainly his most readable work. In the vein of a traditional 19th-century novel, The Hamlet showcases Faulkner's immense talent—for humor, storytelling, luscious prose, and characterization.
The first novel in what is known as the "Snopes Trilogy," The Hamlet follows the fortunes of the Snopes Family, interlopers who gain a foothold in the hill-cradled hamlet of Frenchman's Bend.
The Magus
John Fowles, 1965
672 pp.
March 2010
Best known for The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles often tells what first appear to be straightforward love stories but are, instead, open-ended, unresolved meditations on the difficulties of knowing. That is...knowing the world and knowing the self.
Enter The Magus, one of Fowles's earliest works, a novel of illusion and deception. The book's epitaph is such:
The Magus, Magician, or Juggler, the caster of the dice and mountebank in the world of vulgar trickery.
Till We Have Faces
C.S. Lewis, 1956
313 pp.
June 2007
Dismissed by critics at first, Till We Have Faces is now thought by some to be one of Lewis’s most profound works. Certainly it is mysterious, complex, and imaginative—and on any level a wonderful read.
Faces is a retelling of the ancient myth of Psyche and Eros. If you’re unfamiliar with the original story, get hold of Edith Hamilton’s classic Mythology (a book you might want for your personal library). But here’s a stripped down version:
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf, 1927
309 pp.
October 2008
Family and guests gather at a rambling seaside cottage, time passes and, 10 years later, father, son and daughter take a boat trip out to a light house. There you have the sum total of plot in Virginia Woolf's famed novel.
Characters and their individual perception are what intrigue Woolf, not plot—and in Lighthouseshe gives full rein to her modernist ideas: reality is subjective, life is transient, truth and certainty are unattainable. It is only art that offers an antidote to an ever changing, death-threatening world.
The Turn of the Screw
Henry James, 1898
~100 pp. (varies by publisher
May 2011
Like the best of ghost stories, Turn of the Screw is as much a pshychological as it is paranormal thriller. Henry James himself never indicated it was anything other than a ghost story, but critics have debated that point for the past 100 years.
And that is precisely what makes the novella such a delicious read: were there ever ghosts...or not?
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray, 1848
912 pp.
May 2009
Becky Sharpe is the heroine you love to hate. She so dominates this novel—like Satan in Paradise Lost—that Thackeray must have been, as William Blake said about Milton, of the "devil's party and didn't know it." His Becky is mesmerizingly awful!
Yet maybe she isn't. Placed in the early 1800's, in a cultural mileau that values only lineage and wealth, Becky Sharpe has neither. And so she makes use of the only assets in her possession—beauty, intelligence, and a sturdy will—to gain entry into the good life. If people are foolish enough to be taken in ... then so be it.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Edward Albee, 1961
272pp.
December 2009
Rough stuff, maybe more than you've a mind for. But if you're up to it, Edward Albee's dramatic masterpiece can be bracing, to say the least, as well as powerful and illuminating. It's marriage at its absolute worst...yet, perhaps strangely, at its best. You be the judge.
George and Martha, a middle-aged college professor and his wife go at each other tooth-and-claw. They're at home, having returned from a party earlier in the evening. It's already 2:00 a.m. when Nick and Honey arrive; a young couple new to the campus, they've stopped on their way home at Martha's invitation.
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins, 1859-60
720 pp.
November 2009
One of the earliest detective novels, The Woman in White was a sensation when published over 140 years ago—and, in fact, it helped establish the sub-genre of the "sensation" novel, wildly popular in the 1860's in England.
Walter Hartright (get the names, here) falls in love with his art student Laura Fairlie—and she with him. Yet Laura is engaged to, and soon marries, Percival Glyde, a man older than she and a titled baron.
Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do
Studs Terkel, 1974
694 pp.
October 2010
Working caused a major stir when published in 1974—everyone was talking about it. It even spawned a Broadway play. Thiry-five years later the book has attained iconic status for its bird's eye view into the world of the American worker.
Terkel had a simple but brilliant idea: let's go out and actually talk with real people to see how they feel about their jobs. Let's give voice to the "nobodies"—instead of the rich and famous "somebodies" we always hear from.