Timeless classics and modern masterpieces that challenge, inspire, and leave a lasting impact. Ideal for thought-provoking discussions.
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.
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov, 1955
317 pp.
September 2008
Lolita has achieved iconic status as a literary masterpiece, albeit a disturbing one, highly disturbing because of its subject matter—pedophilia.
What's worse is that you find yourself taking the side of—rooting for, and identifying with—a pedophile. And you even find yourself laughing because the pedophile is a wickedly funny, sophisticated narrator.
The Iliad
Homer; Robert Fagels, trans., 1990
576 pp.
August 2008
If it weren't for this great translation by Robert Fagels, I probably wouldn't recommend The Iliad as a book club read. Honestly? I probably wouldn't have read it myself.
Fagels' writing is so powerful—and remarkably understandable—that you find yourself enthralled, caught up in a dreamlike world of gods and mortals.
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck, 1939
446 pp.
July 2008
It's hard to imagine that a book set during the dust-bowl and great-depression, about a migrant farm family beset with poverty and tragedy (grim subjects at best) would have much appeal.
But The Grapes of Wrath is one of America's most beloved works—and a perennial book club favorite. It's simply a beautiful book.
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.