Timeless classics and modern masterpieces that challenge, inspire, and leave a lasting impact. Ideal for thought-provoking discussions.
A Doll's House
Henrik Ibsen, 1879
80 pp. (varies)
May 2008
Talk about theatrics—or drama queens—Nora Helmer is the real thing, bless her heart.
Nora's slammed door at the end of Ibsen's play became known as the "slam heard around the world"—affronting Victorian values and igniting suffragette hopes everywhere. It signaled a revolution in the Western World and eventually led to the female vote.
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy, 1877
838 pp.
April 2008
Powerful, tragic (you know what happens, right?), and one of the greatest reads in all of literature.
Outwardly, Anna Karenina is the story of a woman struggling to break free of one web—marriage—only to find herself entrapped in a different web. The latter, more pernicious, is the futility of life centered on self. In a final, brilliant interior monologue, Anna realizes she cannot escape her own self.
Beloved
Toni Morrison, 1987
316 pp.
March 2008
This book is too recent to have stood the "Test of Time" of the great classics. But it will. Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize winner, and Beloved is her crowning achievement—so this work well deserves its place in the pantheon of enduring Literature.
Possibly the most powerful and imaginative rendering of slavery we have, Beloved confronts the horror of both its practice and legacy.
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.
Far From the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy, 1874
512 pp.
January 2008
Hardy's rep as a writer is one who plumbs the depths—and what he finds beneath the surface is often grim. Not so with Madding Crowd, an earlier novel and joyful celebration of England's pastoral life.
It's a great story, with two enduring...and endearing...heroes: Bathsheba Everdene and Gabriel Oak (you can have fun just sussing out the symbolic allusions of those names).