As ranked on our podcast, “Between the Covers,” through Tuesday, December 23, 2025. To tune in to the podcast, try this link: https://betweenthecoverspodcast.podbean.com:
1. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
But why did it sell so well? One reason is Tolkien’s use of what Carl Jung calls archetypal motifs—motifs that are part of the human psyche that appear in mythologies the world over, such as the quest, the father figure (Gandalf), the Shadow involving a descent into an underworld (Mordor): any work of literature that contains universal elements like these (e.g. Star Wars) will appeal to readers. But more specifically, the first readers of Lord of the Rings saw it as an allegory of the Second World War, during which much of the manuscript was composed: the importance of defeating Nazism (Hitler=Sauron) which had threatened to swallow up England, and could only be defeated through great sacrifice. But when the work really took off in popularity was in the later 1960s, when young people at the time saw it as applicable to things they were concerned about. The One Ring suggested nuclear weapons—those symbols of the absolute power that corrupts absolutely. Treebeard and the Ents, who decisively resist the destruction of the natural environment by the traitor Saruman, were early spokespersons for environmentalism. And there was the draw of escapism from a world that seemed to be going all wrong, into a world where good and evil were more clearly delineated.
2. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Catch-22 is a satirical, anti-war novel that follows the increasingly frantic attempts by the American bombardier Captain John Yossarian to stay alive. He has become convinced that everyone, not only the Germans but also his own incompetent and self-interested superior officers, is out to kill him, and so his only goal in life becomes the avoidance of death: He aims to “live forever or die trying.”
3. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice is a delightful comedy of manners, written with brilliant wit and what Austen would call a characteristic “archness.” It contains some of the most memorable characters in British fiction, and its theme of the superficial perceived virtue that first impressions might create, as opposed to the deeply committed virtue of a truly good person, is one that still resonates, and might be considered a genuine “truth universally acknowledged.”
4. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro takes on genetic engineering and supporting technology, in order to raise questions about what it means to be human …. Are cloned beings as “human” as people born “normally”? Do they even have a soul? The dominant society in Ishiguro’s novel would say no, but reading Kathy’s account will convince you otherwise. Does life have a purpose—and is it the same for cloned individuals as others: to love?
5. Atonement by Ian McEwan
There is a part four, that takes place six decades later. Here an octogenarian Briony, now a well-known novelist, discusses her latest book—which, it is implied, we have just read. And here we discover that the novel is also about fiction itself. How much of what we have just read is true, and how much of it is the invention of the (fictional) author? And how much of that invention is in fact a gesture of atonement? You’ll need to read the book to find out. And to find out how much you yourself are willing to forgive Briony. Or McEwan.
6. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Racism is not the only theme in To Kill a Mockingbird, but it’s the most pervasive. The book is also a condemnation of both the schools and the courts—two institutions that should define and promote justice, but often fail to do so. It’s a feminist text as well, in which tomboy Scout fights against the views of femininity promoted by Aunt Alexandra and her ilk. And of course it’s a story of heroism that suggests even one person can make a difference in a difficult situation.
7. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
In the end, The Grapes of Wrath touches us through Steinbeck’s deep conviction of a social injustice that many of his fellow Californians were a party to. Having been born on a farm himself, Steinbeck felt a great empathy with the victims of the economic hardships of the “dust bowl” days. But the issues of the novel remain relevant even today, some 85 years after its publication. The ever-growing gap between the wealthy and the lower classes, particularly those who work for an inadequate minimum wage. The rights of workers in a time when unions have virtually disappeared from the American landscape, and the plight of the workers who harvest our food, are all issues the book forces us to consider—as well as the tendency to demonize immigrants or any “others” who move into our communities. The book’s title—taken from the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (which took it from the Book of Revelation)—suggests a reckoning that Steinbeck sees coming if these issues are not addressed: “and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
8. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Billy [Pilgrim] does spend the rest of his life…trying to get people to stop fearing death and convert to the Tralfamadorian view of things:
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore (Billy tells people) was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.
Certainly this is comforting to Billy, who believes he is spreading a reassuring message. Whether Vonnegut wants us to think this way is anyone’s guess, but it is at least a message of acceptance. Vonnegut’s real purpose is to retell the horror of his own experience as a POW during the Dresden firebombing, the terrible aftermath of searching the rubble for the endless corpses, a horror he had carried with him for 24 years before he finally told the story.
9. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
These are rarified heights for a modest little book like Salinger’s. Parts of the novel were published in magazines right after the Second World War, but The Catcher in the Rye was not published in book form until 1951. Salinger intended the novel for an adult audience, but since teenagers could relate easily with Salinger’s sixteen-year-old protagonist Holden Caulfield and his alienation from a society he finds superficial and “phony,” his depression and angst over the loss of innocence, his search for identity, and his feelings of rebellion, it was inevitable that the novel would become a staple in high school classes across the country.
10. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
On one level, it is a realistic picture of a boy’s childhood, and dialect, in the antebellum South: the first important American novel written in first-person dialect. On another, it’s a classic anti-slavery and anti-racist novel written by a southern novelist with first-hand knowledge of the Old South. But perhaps most importantly, it’s a story of Huck’s maturation process: Huck is by nature unthinkingly good. That inner virtue is consistently in conflict with the conventional values of the society he lives in, and he is unable in his untutored innocence to mentally refute the social conventions of his world, but at the most crucial moment of his young life, he trusts his gut, as it were, and takes the moral stand. Twain himself wrote that “a sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience,” and calls Huckleberry Finn “a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat.”
11. Middlemarch by George Eliot
On a related note, Middlemarch also deals with what at the time, and for decades beyond, was called “the woman question.” Dorothea is intelligent, ambitious, and dedicated to improving the lives of her neighbors. Before her marriage she has the notion of redesigning all the living spaces of the tenants on her uncle’s manor. And she marries Casaubon fully expecting to help him in researching his great project, the study The Key to All Mythologies. But she is thwarted at every turn. Toward the end of the book Eliot comments that Dorothea, though she had the makings of a heroic woman like Antigone or St. Teresa, lived “amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.”
12. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
So throwing out the wildly inaccurate notion that Gulliver’s Travels is intended for tender youths, let’s embrace the real intent of Jonathan Swift’s best-known work: it is a book that uses fantasy and science fiction to comment satirically, often bitterly, on human nature and the state of eighteenth-century society, particularly in Britain, and particularly the workings of the government. In its own time, the book was a popular success, the playwright John Gay declaring that Swift’s book “is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery.” Other contemporaries, though, condemned the book for going too far in its misanthropy, perhaps confusing Gulliver’s opinions with Swift’s own. Swift probably expected the objections, but may have been surprised by this book’s success, since as he put it, he had written Gulliver’s Travels “to vex the world rather than divert it.”
13. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
As a bastard, Tom is assumed to be as base as he is base-born, and the narrator tells us “it was the universal opinion of all Mr. Allworthy’s family that he was certainly born to be hanged.” Yet Tom is a pillar of virtue compared with many of the novel’s upper class characters. Tom’s frank admission that “I have been guilty with women, I own it; but I am not conscious that I have ever injured any—nor would I, to procure pleasure to myself, be knowingly the cause of misery to any human being” is admirable in its honesty and its Christian charity in a way one does not see in the often hypocritical values of Fielding’s society. We see this early on in the novel, when the two tutors Allworthy has hired to educate Jones and Master Blifil—the avaricious clergyman Thwackum and the hypocritical philosopher Square—extol the virtue of “justice” over Allworthy’s tendency toward mercy. Tom’s great rival Blifil justifies his own selfish designs likewise:
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
The growth of the artist, from dedication to Love, to God, and ultimately to Art, has been the theme of these chapters, and Joyce’s words have presented the consciousness of the protagonist at each stage. In the fifth and final chapter, Stephen, now at University, can be seen transcending his previous interests—family, country, Church, Ireland itself—and the language reflects that growth. He sees himself here as “a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life”—one definition of “the artist.” Later, talking with his friend Cranly, he relates a quarrel with his mother over celebrating Easter. Why not do this simple thing for his mother? Stephen’s answer, “I will not serve,” is, theologically, Lucifer’s response to his duty to God, which results in his expulsion from Heaven. Stephen, having decided he must leave Ireland to become the writer he was meant to be, speaks in the last few pages of the novel in his own voice rather than through free indirect discourse, but the language comes from his diary and not from the commenting perspective of the later writer—and it sounds much like the language of this last chapter, full of the confidence and idealism of youth. Some readers see Stephen as being presented ironically here, Joyce looking back at his own early ambitions and presenting them through the bloated self-image of youth. Others see the idealistic portrayal of the artist-as-hero embracing an unknown future. You’ll have to decide for yourself when you read Stephen’s words at the novel’s conclusion:
15. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The novel is certainly about social status and the nature of New York’s “high society” in the late nineteenth century. Opinions of the novel have varied over the years since its publication and many have seen May as ultimately a strong woman protecting her marriage and family against the scheming homewrecker Ellen. More recently, readers have found Ellen more sympathetic and seen May as manipulative. It seems to me that Wharton looks on society as benign on the surface but hypocritically ruthless and malicious. The single strongest impression one takes from the novel is the feeling of intense but confined and inexpressible passion, a love forever anticipated but never realized, a love whose only outlet may be the touch of a hand or a lock of hair brushing the cheek..
16. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
“Having lost his mother, father, brother, and grandfather, the friends and foes of his youth, his beloved teacher Bernard Kornblum, his city, his history—his home—the usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf…”
17. Emma by Jane Austen
The novel, set in the small fictional village of Highbury, follows the relationships among the more important families of that tiny village, itself a microcosm of early nineteenth century society of Regency England, a society in which estates were entailed upon male relatives, and women could not inherit. A society in which, as a result, women were absolutely concerned primarily with marriage as, essentially, their only possible road to success and respectability was to make a good marriage. By which is meant finding a wealthy husband. These are the particular concerns of Pride and Prejudice, as we’ve seen. Emma herself is, however, immune from this necessity: She has a personal fortune from her father that will allow her to live comfortably on her own, and thus, relieved of the pressure that most of her class and gender would feel, she is able to maneuver in this society with the agency of a man
18. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
But chiefly one reads Dickens for the characters. It’s no coincidence that “Dickensian” has become an adjective often applied to memorable characters, especially those who are larger than life, full of warmth or jollity, or weirdly grotesque. Uriah Heep, the “‘umblest” creature on earth, is certainly one of these, as is Copperfield’s Aunt Betsey, who stormed out of the house when David was born because he was not a girl, and her kite-flying houseguest Mr. Dick, who is obsessed with the execution of King Charles I two hundred years earlier. But the most Dickensian of all David Copperfield characters is the impractical but ever big-hearted spendthrift, the jovial and optimistic Mr. Micawber. The novelist J.B. Priestley wrote that “With the one exception of Falstaff,” Micawber was “the greatest comic figure in English literature.” Of the fourteen different film or television versions of the novel, George Cukor had the genius to cast W.C. Fields as Micawber in 1935, and I’ve never been able to see him as anybody else.
19. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
The end of the book brings all of these things together in surprising ways, which I won’t discuss to avoid spoilers. But they work out in a way that causes John Wheelwright to praise Owen Meany as a prophet and hero and, as the novel’s first sentence says, the reason John is a Christian. Don’t get me wrong, A Prayer for Owen Meany is not an evangelical book—though it may be the kind of story that a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth might have told long after the crucifixion, after he’d had time to put it all together to make sense of things in his own mind. Owen’s story does push readers to consider the universal ideas of fate, chance, and providence, and the question of which, if any, of these things determine one’s life. And, of course, the novel forces the reader to consider where faith actually comes from, and whether it is a logical response to events.
20. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
This is a novel that was seemingly close to Greene’s heart. It’s a psychological drama whose structure is reminiscent of an old morality play, with Sarah in the role of Everyman, Bendrix cast as the devil, and God himself in the role of the Good Angel. When Sarah dies about halfway through the book (did I say that out loud?) Maurice is left with no one to hate but the God who has robbed him.
21. Light in August by William Faulkner
Beyond the style, what engages us in Light in August are the novel’s themes. The most emotionally engaging issue the novel explores is the obsession with race that persisted in the rural south in 1932, three quarters of a century after the Civil War. American obsession with race has hardly disappeared even now, just seven years short of a century since Faulkner’s novel. The book’s protagonist, the anti-hero Joe Christmas, happens to have a slightly darker complexion then the typical white southerner and, being raised as an orphan in Mississippi, cannot evade the suspicion that he may have a sprinkling of African American “blood” in his heritage. Thus like Mark Twain’s Puddnhead Wilson, he never quite knows whether he belongs to the white race or the black, and in the south at this time there is no middle ground. His life has been confusing and difficult, and sometimes violent, because of this suspicion, and while Christmas may be accepted as a white man wherever he goes, if once the suspicion of his “blackness” comes out, he is immediately recategorized by white society as a specimen in the “N word” category with all the prejudices and stereotypes that categorization would imply in the unenlightened south of 1932.
22. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
What’s always hooked readers and kept them coming back to this dark story is the unrestrained passion and wild undercurrents of brutality in the fierce love between Heathcliff and Catherine, the protagonists of the novel—a fierceness that reflects the harsh natural world of the rugged West Yorkshire moors on which the story takes place. The book’s title, “Wuthering Heights,” is the name of the ancient house where much of the action takes place. The term “Wuthering” is an old Yorkshire word describing the strong winds that blow across the moors. Bronte herself defines it in the novel as “descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed, in stormy weather.” It comes in the novel to figuratively describe the violent passions that govern the book’s chief characters.
23.Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Part of the reason for the novel’s wide appeal is that, even though it is essentially a realistic novel, it has the structure and motifs of fairy tale or myth, and therefore appeals to that part of our psyche that responds almost instinctively to archetypal literary patterns. Jane’s story is essentially a Cinderella story, in which the poor orphaned girl, tormented by her wicked stepmother, winds up with the wealthy and powerful prince. There are also elements, of course, of the Bluebeard story, in which the madwoman in the attic at Rochester’s Thornfield Hall stands in for Bluebeard’s murdered wives in the closet. And so it’s also a Beauty and the Beast story—though Jane is hardly a beauty and the brooding Rochester not a complete beast, it is she who humanizes him in the end.
24. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Who actually were Esther’s parents? And what happens when she survives her illness? Who killed Tulkinghorn and why? Does Lady Dedlock come back from her disgrace (what exactly is that disgrace?)? Do Ada and Richard find happiness? Does Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce ever reach a conclusion? I hope if you’ve not read Bleak House I’ve at least piqued your interest in the novel. The convoluted multi-level plot is likely enough in itself to make this novel a must-read: The Byzantine bureaucracy of the Chancery court system has a Kafkaesque appeal of its own, and the mystery surrounding Lady Dedlock and Captain Hawdon, investigated by a fellow named Inspector Bucket, puts the novel among the earliest works of detective fiction in British literature, in line with what Dickens’ friend Wilkie Collins was doing with books like The Woman in White.
25. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Perhaps what makes Gatsby such a profoundly affecting story is its aspects of tragedy. An admirable self-made figure who rose from humble obscurity to a position of great wealth, Gatsby easily fits Aristotle’s characterization of the tragic hero as a person superior to others in some way, who falls from his high position as a result of his hamartia, literally his failure to hit the mark, usually interpreted as a “tragic flaw” or, more accurately, an “error of judgment.” Gatsby’s error is his monomaniacal quest to win back Daisy through his pursuit of the elusive “American dream.”
26. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Of course, knowing Dickens gives you an idea of the role these characters are going to play in the story. But the plot of Demon Copperhead is not therefore predictable, as Kingsolver translates these characters’ motivations and effects on the protagonist into a completely different milieu of time and place. Ultimately, what’s important about the influence of Dickens on Kingsolver’s book is not the superficial correspondences of plot or character, but rather their very significant agreement in terms of theme and authorial intent. In an afterword to her novel, Kingsolver writes, “I’m grateful to Charles Dickens for writing David Copperfield, his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us. In adapting his novel to my own place and time, working for years with his outrage, inventiveness, and empathy at my elbow, I’ve come to think of him as my genius friend.” It is precisely those social evils that Kingsolver has directly in her sights in this novel: Most broadly she attacks the institutional poverty of former coal-mining areas of her native Appalachia—a fact she lays unequivocally at the door of the owners and exploiters of those coal fields and the powerful political forces that supported them.
27. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
One of the novel’s themes is the inescapable nature of time—underscored by the constant remembrance of things past in the characters’ minds as well as this inevitability of death and the meaning of life in the face of it: the novel gives us no definitive answer to this overwhelming question, but we are told that Clarissa, known in London society as the perfect hostess, “is always giving parties to cover the silence.”
28. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Essentially a Bildungsroman or “coming of age” novel, Song of Solomon follows the life of its hero, Macon “Milkman” Dead III, from birth to maturity as he comes to recognize and understand his true heritage. The novel opens as the Black insurance agent Robert Smith leaps from the roof of Mercy Hospital, falling to his death while trying to fly on a pair of blue silk wings (the image of flight becomes important in the book), as dozens of people watch. One of these is the pregnant Ruth Dead, who goes into labor and in the ensuing turmoil is taken into the hospital where she gives birth the first African American baby ever born there—Macon Dead III.
29. The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
As Elwood becomes more and more like Turner, he chides himself, lying awake at night and thinking that “In keeping his head down, … he fooled himself that he had prevailed. … In fact he had been ruined. He was like one of those Negroes Dr. King spoke of in his letter from jail, so complacent and sleepy after years of oppression that they had adjusted to it and learned to sleep in it as their only bed.” And accordingly he comes up with a plan to try to obtain justice one more time. Revealing what that is would be spoiler territory I won’t enter.
30. The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich
A Mormon who associated Native Americans with the evil Lamanite tribe in the Book of Mormon, Watkins conceived of and pursued a policy aimed at terminating the special status of Indian tribes under U.S. law. In 1953, Watkins’ allies introduced a bill concurrently in the House and the Senate that was passed as House Concurrent Resolution 108. This law aimed to eliminate any laws that treated Native Americans differently from any other U.S. citizens; to eliminate the BIA; to end all federal supervision over individual Indians, Indian tribes, and their resources. Of course, it was those resources that were the chief target. Watkins compared his bill to the Emancipation Proclamation, saying it would “free” Indians and entitle them to “the same privileges and responsibilities as are applicable to other citizens of the United States.” In other words, it would force them to assimilate, and would wipe out their tribal identity, their identity as Indians. And of course it would nullify all promises made to Indian tribes when they signed their treaties. The bill became known as the “termination bill,” and it specified the first thirteen tribes to be terminated. Among these tribes were the Turtle Mountain Chippewa.
31. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
In telling the story of Henry’s divorce from Catherine, his marriage to Anne, and most importantly his break with Rome, Mantel focuses in great detail on her chosen protagonist, the much reviled Thomas Cromwell. What if, she seems to ask, Cromwell has been unfairly maligned by history—by his contemporaries who were jealous of his political skill and legal acumen, by members of the court who perhaps looked down upon him for his humble birth, by Catholics who saw him as ruthless because of his support for the Protestant cause in England.
32. The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
There are set pieces in the novel that I might lift up to give you a sense of the flavor of the narrative if you haven’t read it: You will discover a hilarious retelling of the story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith (described in a journal written by Burlingame’s Jamestown grandfather) that turns history into farce. There is one chapter that is completely in rhyme. Another chapter contains some eight pages dedicated to an exchange of insults between two women abusing one another with synonyms for “whore” through alternating English and French epithets. And there is a section late in the book that is in large part a retelling of Chaucer’s “Reeve’s Tale.” But perhaps the most entertaining aspect of the novel is Barth’s adaptation of an 18th century narrative voice, apparent from his very first very long sentence:
33. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
The multiplicity of possible interpretations of the text—the indeterminacy of the novel’s meaning—is one characteristic of the post-modern. It’s also an example of the postmodern staple metafiction—a form of fiction emphasizing its own fictionality so that the readers are never unaware that they are perusing a fictional text. The novel also encourages an interactive reading process, a post-modern technique known as hypertext that, like an electronic text, may be read straight through, or by jumping between Shade’s lines and Kinbote’s commentary on them.
All of these innovative techniques make Pale Fire a revolutionary and incredibly influential novel, and one that deserves to be on my exclusive list. Besides, it’s just so darn funny it’s hard to resist.
34. The Once and Future King by T.H. White
And that of course is the legend White is playing on with the title of his work. Like Malory’s it’s a compilation of related books written separately—for Malory, it was eight different books; for White it was four. For Caxton, the legend of Arthur’s return can be applied to the advent of the Tudor monarchy; for White, it may be that at the end of his novel, when he gives us a long discussion of the various warring thoughts Arthur struggles with as he worries his career has been a failure, the final return of Arthur, drawing from the imagery with the Second Coming of Christ, may be in White’s own time: recall he writes this last book in 1940, during Britain’s darkest hour. What better time for the return of Arthur—when the king may complete his task and create a truly just society after defeating the dark forces of Nazis who believe raw power is the only criterion for government. It may be that this is what makes White’s novel as relevant today as it was in 1940.
35. Ivanhoe by Air Walter Scott
The most interesting character in the novel is certainly not Wilfrid of Ivanhoe. In fact Ivanhoe is not even given the biggest part in the story. That distinction goes to the anti-hero Brian de Bois-Guilbert, who like Othello’s Iago steals most of the scenes. Scott gives him a good deal of depth, so that despite his unwavering enmity to the Saxons in general and Ivanhoe in particular, his love for Rebecca humanizes him. Of course, he is moved to try to take her by force at first, but as her death seems to loom closer, he finds a desperate way to try to save her. His farewell speech to her as he prepares to act not as her champion but as the Templar Grand Master’s, is gut wrenching.
36. Watership Down by Richard Adams
When I read the book (well past my own YA days) I was absolutely carried away by the adventure story of Hazel and Bigwig and their journey to a new home at Watership Down. Their Odyssey recalls the great myths of the western world—like, for instance, well, the Odyssey. Or Moses leading the chosen people to the Promised Land. And this is particularly unusual because the novel’s protagonists are, well, rabbits.
37. Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass
The second reason, and growing out of the first, is the character of Alice herself, who seems much more like a typical rebellious little schoolgirl than the goody-goody characters in those didactic children’s stories. Alice gets annoyed, angry, and especially curiouser and curiouser at the things she sees and hears and experiences in Wonderland. And she’s not afraid to let the grownups know about her feelings and opinions, or to call a spade a spade when she sees something that seems absurd. This is particularly true in the scenes with the Queen of Hearts, the irrational tyrant of Wonderland, whose response to anything that mildly displeases her, like Alice, is “Off with her head!” When she is called as a witness in the trial of the Knave of Hearts, Alice calls the Queen’s judgment “Stuff and nonsense!” And it is.
38. Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
The plot of the novel weaves the lives of these five protagonists into a glorious and colorful tapestry that, together with the story of Aethon and the land of birds, creates a novel so rich and varied that you’ll marvel at the author’s skill in keeping all the balls in the air without dropping a single one. I won’t go any farther and spoil any of the novel’s developments but I will say that if you’re thinking of reading this book, you’ll never be disappointed in it. It has a good deal to say to any reader—it celebrates the value of fantastic stories, especially for young people, and honors the role of libraries in keeping those books from neglect or disintegration: Byzantine Anna’s manuscript buyers remark at one point that “We know that at least one thousand [classical Greek plays] were written and performed in Greek theaters in the fifth century B.C. You know how many we have left? Thirty-two.” Thus Doerr’s book implores us to appreciate the ancient stories that have survived. What better choice for a list like mine, a list whose whole purpose is to appreciate the great stories of the past–whether that past be 1721 or 2021?
39. Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
Although in its form the novel is unusual for Coetzee, its focus on the theme of colonialism is not. As a native of South Africa and a descendant of Afrikaans colonizers, Coetzee often explores what colonization does to the colonizers as well as the colonized, and that certainly is the case here. The nameless setting, and the anonymous magistrate who tells the story of this remote frontier of what is simply called “The Empire,” give the novel a universal flavor: Coetzee’s 1980 parable was, at the time, a thinly-veiled protest against apartheid South Africa, and a condemnation of European imperialism in Coetzee’s native land. Read forty-five years later, after Black Lives Matter protests have sparked a worldwide awakening to the evils of the White privilege that is the legacy of centuries of colonialism, and at a moment in time when white backlash has prompted neo-fascist racism here and abroad, particularly in Coetzee’s native land, the novel still resonates.
40. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Marlow’s job is to transport ivory. He has heard all the platitudes about the Europeans’ duty to bring civilization to the savages of Africa, but is shocked by the condition of the indigenous people who have come under the influence of the “civilizing” European traders—people who are sick or worked nearly to death, or, in the case of some who work for his company on the boat, “detribalized” natives who have been wrenched from their tribal culture and found no code of ethics to replace it. These latter have, as Marlow puts it, no “restraint.” He comes to realize fairly quickly that the high moral excuse for colonization i nothing but a bald-faced lie:
41. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Achebe’s novel utilizes traditional Western literary patterns as well as the English language, and is in many ways a response to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness while borrowing its title from a poem by William Butler Yeats. But Achebe subverts western colonization by showing the pre-colonial culture of the Igbo as a complex, well-structured society, perfectly competent at governing itself, and not as a tribe of savages in need or civilizing by western powers. And it was the first of its kind to show the ugly face of colonialism to the colonial powers in their own language. And that’s why it belongs on this list.
42. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
But there is more to Adams than a witty punster. The books are a parody of serious science fiction (Adams started his career as a script editor for “Dr. Who”). But more than that they unflinchingly lampoon contemporary western society and pessimistically but humorously poke holes in the search for the ultimate meaning of life, the universe, and everything (which, as you will know if you’ve read the first book, is actually 42). This was the answer as delivered by a great computer in the first novel–an answer that the computer took seven million years to arrive at. Since people don’t quite get it they now seek to find the correct question. As Adams summarizes in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, “The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” And perhaps most seriously, it’s the human race that Adams finds the most absurd of all:
43. Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
More than many of the earlier novels in the Discworld series, Night Watch is a “black humor” novel, or, as Pratchett himself said, it contains “the humour that comes out of bad situations.” There is nothing funny about the kind of torture that the “Unmentionables” of the novel engage in, nor about the sort of despots who utilize such methods. The power mongering and paranoia displayed by the “Homicidal” and the “Mad” are humorous in the exaggerated way they act, but it’s a grim humor when we reflect how close it really is to reality. But responding to the comments of critics who called Night Watch a “dark” book, Pratchett said “I am kind of puzzled by the suggestion that it is dark. Things end up, shall we say, at least no worse than they were when they started… and that seems far from dark to me. The fact that it deals with some rather grim things is, I think, a different matter.”
44. The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse
In The Code of the Woosters, the protagonist Bertie Wooster is, as usual, a helping figure in the courtship of two of his old school pals Gussie Fink-Nottle (engaged, off and on, to the dramatic and sentimental Madeline Bassett), and the hapless curate Harold “Stinker” Pinker (hoping to marry the brash Stephanie “Stiffy” Byng). Both sets of lovers are on-again-off-again, mainly because of the chief blocking figure, Sir Watkyn Bassett, owner of a great country house called Totleigh Towers, who happens to be Madeline’s father and Stiffy’s uncle, and who is not ready to consent to either marriage. He is assisted by his very large and muscular friend Roderick Spode and by the local Constable Oates, who has a particular vendetta against Stiffy because her dog likes to attack policemen. Bertie, on the other hand, is aided by his Aunt Dahlia and by the one person who is never at a loss no matter what the difficulty, his gentleman’s gentleman Jeeves.
45. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Only men have any position of power or influence in Gilead. Women cannot legally own property or money, and are denied the right to literacy. This fact particularly rankles with the Commander’s wife, Serena Joy, a former television evangelist who was highly invested in the patriarchy and helped bring about the revolution that created Gilead, only to find that it was not quite the ideal she envisioned. “How furious she must be,” the narrator opines, “now that she’s been taken at her word.”
46. 1984 by George Orwell
The story focuses on the protagonist, Winston Smith, a government employee in the ironically named Ministry of Truth. His job is to change and rewrite all past news stories to match what the government currently has decided the “truth” actually is…. And Winston must make all necessary changes to all public records as well as news stories posted in the past, so there is never any documentary evidence that the current lie is not the truth. Books, of course, must be destroyed if they do not reflect the current Party line. As the Party slogan insists: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
47. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The future is a nightmare comprising a predetermined and unalterable caste system, psychological conditioning beginning at birth, the elimination of mothers, fathers, family, and romantic love—things that elicit emotions that can’t be easily controlled—and quashes individuality, all in the name of an all-powerful world state.
48. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway called the novel his “Romeo and Juliet” story, and the five books do suggest the five-act structure of an Elizabethan tragedy, with the crucial turning point in Act Three (with Lieutenant Henry’ rejection of the war and dive from the bridge to freedom) and the tragic denouement in Act Five. Some critics have found the novel closer to pathos than tragedy, but it could be argued that Lieutenant Henry’s “anagnorisis” or tragic knowledge in the end may not be an insight into the meaning of suffering as much as it is insight into the meaninglessness of suffering in the Wasteland following the meaningless war.
49. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
I first read The Call of the Wild in 9th grade in an illustrated edition that had clearly been designed for kids and published by a children’s book publisher (Whitman Publishing, Racine, WI). And though at the time I thought it was the best book I’d ever read, I remember thinking even then that this was not a story intended for children, despite its short length and its “adventure novel” reputation. It was full of the deaths of dogs, and men; full of violence and full of brutality; a sometimes grisly picture of what Tennyson called “nature red in tooth and claw.” Nor was the fact that the narrator and protagonist was a dog presented in a cute or anthropomorphic manner. London tried to truly enter into the consciousness of a dog—his sense impressions, his manner of learning through painful experiences, his instinctive motives and reactions to events around him.
50. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
You would think that a novel about political corruption by a populist politician who gets elected on the strength of wild promises but uses his office mainly for personal profit would be obsolete by now, nearly 80 years after its publication, because of course voters will have learned by now to recognize lies when they are blatantly false, but surprisingly Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men remains as relevant now as it was just 50 years ago when the story of corruption in the Oval Office was explored by Woodward and Bernstein in their allusively titled book (and movie) All the President’s Men.
51. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
These themes—truth, courage, and morality—are, being abstractions, all things that O’Brien says true war stories are never about. However, there is always some part of a true war story that is not absolutely true, and that dictum may be one of the untrue things about this story collection. At least one of the chief things a reader takes away from these stories is the sense that such things as truth, courage and morality are not clear cut, perhaps are even turned on their heads, in the reality of the U.S. war in Vietnam.
52. Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage
Henry himself, the central consciousness of the third-person narration, is always called “the Youth” by the narrator. We know his name only because other people call him by it, just as we know he names of the characters the narrator calls “the Tall Soldier” and “the Loud Soldier” because Henry and others mention them. The effect is to give an overall universality to the events of the novel—to imply that most young men through history have felt similar highs and lows, similar excitement and terrors, on the field of battle. Warfare is universal, and Henry could be storming the beach at Normandy or facing English archers at Agincourt, and display the same psychology of fear.
53.The Color Purple by Alice Walker
This is an old fashioned epistolary novel, a form going back to the very origins of the novel as a literary form in the 18th century. It consists of letters written by two sisters, over the course of some 40 years. Walker said in a 1983 interview that she adopted the form as a practical way of solving the problem that one of her protagonists is in Georgia while the other is in Africa. Neither of the sisters actually receives the other’s letters, but the two of them manage to feel closer to each other through the writing of them. Essentially the book is feminist in intent, or as Walker called it, “womanist” (what she calls feminist as applied to women of color, whose experiences are different from those of other feminists). Celie and Nettie are poor Black girls in rural Georgia, who in spite of extreme poverty and early trauma achieve empowerment by the novel’s end.
54. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Rushdie asserts that his chief theme was that “All of India belonged to all of us.” Unlike the Islamic state of Pakistan, partitioned off from India on the day before Indian independence, India was from the beginning intended to be a secular state, in which the many different cultural traditions, religions, and languages form a single multicultural unity. Thus Saleem of the giant nose could be reflective of elephant-nosed Ganesh, the Hindu god of literature (even though Saleem—and Rushdie himself—were born Muslims). The telepathic forum of all midnight’s children reflected Saleem’s vision of that dream. The authoritarian crackdown of Mrs. Gandhi’s Emergency, as presented in the novel, was a betrayal of that vision of democratic multiculturalism. And Rushdie believes the book is just as relevant today, with India’s recent veering once more to the authoritarian right.
55. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
But Baldwin’s book is simultaneously broader and narrower in its concerns than either Wright’s or Ellison’s. It is broader in that it is about more than being Black in America. It’s also about universal concerns like growing up, sexuality and sexual identity, faith and its loss, love and its loss—and the burden of guilt. It is narrower in that it really doesn’t try to tell us about Black experience in a white society. Rather it focuses on one very specific individual—teenaged John Grimes, in a very specific family—one in which his abusive stepfather is a Pentecostal preacher who loves his own son Roy, John’s unreliable half-brother, but cannot bring himself to love John; in a very specific place—Harlem in the 1930s; on a very specific day—John’s birthday. Baldwin makes no implication that John’s experience is the quintessential metaphor for all African Americans everywhere. But readers will extrapolate some general truths from the experiences of this single family.
56. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hester had believed her husband was dead, since he had left Boston and has wife some time before and never returned. But in the course of the novel, Roger Chillingworth, her estranged husband, returns but conceals his identity from all but Hester. He visits Hester in her jail cell as a physician, and having learned of her offense, he tries to force Hester to name the child’s father, but she refuses. Chillingworth then becomes obsessed with learning the father’s identity. Suspecting it to be the young minister Arthur Dimmesdale—a man who has publicly been urging Hester to name her partner in sin—Chillingworth begins to visit Dimmesdale regularly in his role as physician, for the minister has grown ill as a result of the guilt that is eating away at him. And the physician devotes himself to psychologically tormenting Dimmesdale without revealing his guilt publicly. Meanwhile Hester moves into a small cottage at the edge of town and ekes out a living through her excellent needlework, while regularly performing charitable acts for the poor of the community.
57. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
At times his language too rises to the heights of Shakespearean power. … Of these, the most memorable are some of Ahab’s speeches, like Hamlet’s soliloquies or Satan’s mighty lines from the first books of Paradise Lost, full of power, allusion, rhythm and charisma. You cannot read Ahab’s explanation of his need for vengeance without seeing it as the human struggle against a hostile universe in microcosm:
58. The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
But the fact is that even now, 150 years later, there is something quite familiar about the financial flim-flam man and the kind of financial dealings that can cause economic ruin. Just think 2008 all over again. So Melmotte is a timely villain, whatever else he is. He is ruthless, corrupt, and bullying, and quite secretive about his dealings. His origins are shadowy—nobody knows where he came from or whether he actually has all the money that he seems to have. There are rumors that he came to London to escape some economic scandal on the continent. Some say he may be Jewish, although he takes steps to suggest he is a Protestant, and also that he is secretly a Catholic. These latter implications are a part of his political campaign as, being the talk of the town, he decides to run for a seat in Parliament for Westminster as a conservative candidate. He has no political experience, but money can buy anything, right? Including, maybe especially, political influence. He knows absolutely nothing about government or about how Parliament works, but as a recognized star of the business world, he and other gullible people figure he must know how to govern the country. He’s elected, naturally, but this, of course, turns out as badly as you might expect.
59. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
Babbitt’s own stature reaches its height in Zenith on the day he is elected vice-president of the Boosters’ club. On that same day, his friend Paul shoots his wife. The incident is a major turning point in Babbitt’s life, and the crisis reaches a peak when his own wife and daughter leave him alone and go off to visit relatives. Babbitt’s misgivings about his life come to the fore—he begins to lead a more bohemian lifestyle, has an affair with another woman, drinks and parties, and even begins to think sympathetically of the socialist Doane.
60.The Little Stranger by Sara Waters
It’s at this point that careful readers will begin to suspect, if they haven’t done so already, that Faraday is an unreliable narrator. After all, Roderick, Caroline, Betty and Mrs. Ayres all become convinced of some malevolent presence in the house. Caroline suspects that somehow Roderick is projecting his presence in the house, disturbed at his forcible removal. Betty believes that the malevolent spirit of some former servant is haunting the second floor of the mansion. Mrs. Ayres comes to believe that the spirit of her beloved daughter Susan is trying to reach her from beyond the grave—and Faraday suggests that she, too, should be committed to an asylum. It’s not until it is too late that Faraday finally entertains the possibility that the house is “consumed by some dark germ, some ravenous shadow-creature, some ‘little stranger’ spawned from the troubled unconscious of someone connected with the house itself.”
61. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
While chiefly an entertaining adventure tale, Treasure Island is also a thoughtful coming of age story. Jim’s father having died, he spends the bulk of the novel looking for a father figure. Two unsatisfactory possibilities are Billy Bones, whose drunkenness and bullying make him unattractive, and Squire Trelawney, whose foolish gossiping and mistaken self-confidence disqualify him as a potential father figure. The two most significant such figures for Jim are Dr. Livesey, whose courage, wisdom, common sense and intellectual prowess inspire Jim’s admiration, and Long John Silver. Silver is the most colorful and memorable character in the novel, and is indeed one of the great and most immediately recognizable figures in world literature. His charisma wins Jim’s admiration, his command of the pirate crew displays the power of his personality, and his protection of Jim against the other pirates wins the readers’ sympathy despite his ruthlessness at other times.
62.Complete Tales by Edgar Allan Poe
Poe’s own starting point is the assertion that in every piece of writing, the “point of greatest importance” is the text’s “unity of effect or impression.” Since as he asserts “All high excitements are necessarily transient,” for the text to have its strongest effect, the reader should be able to peruse it at a single sitting, not exceeding one or two hours. Thus a novel will of necessity have a weaker effect than a short story. Only thus can the reader receive “the immense force derivable from totality.”
63. His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman
Pullman’s trilogy is a fantasy presented as a kind of coming of age story of two children, Lyra Belacqua (also known as Lyra Silvertongue because she’s so adept at lying convincingly), protagonist of the first book, The Golden Compass(1995, published as Northern Lights in the U.K.); and Will Parry, protagonist of the second book, The Subtle Knife (1997). The two move through a series of parallel universes, culminating in a visit to the kingdom of the dead and the realm of the Authority in the third book, The Amber Spyglass (2000)
64.The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
Spade discovers that “Miss Wonderley” is actually a woman named Brigid O’Shaughnessy and that she’s not looking for her sister at all. In fact throughout the book he never knows when or if she’s telling the truth, especially as she entices him to bed whenever he tries to get to the bottom of her lies. She is the original archetypal “femme fatale” of the noir detective genre. “I’ve been bad—worse than you could know,” she tells him at one point. “But I’m not all bad. Look at me, Mr. Spade. You know I’m not all bad, don’t you? You can see that, can’t you? Then can’t you trust me just a little?”
Turns out what she’s really looking for is but a black statuette of a bird, a 400-year-old golden falcon studded with priceless jewels, which had been made by the Knights of Malta as a gift for the King of Spain, but which had been stolen by pirates before reaching the royal court. The black enamel coating disguises the bird’s enormous value, and others are searching for it in addition to Miss O’Shaughnessy. One of these was apparently Thursby. Another is the jovial but incredibly dangerous fat man, Casper Gutman, who tells Spade the history of the falcon. Another is the Levantine felon Joel Cairo.
65. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
In praising Hammett, Chandler was of course speaking of himself as well, having a style honed, like Hammett’s, in the pulp magazines of the 1930s. Like Chandler himself, Hammett “was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.” Thus for Chandler, realism was important, in details of the plot and the setting. Language is important. Characters are important, every one of which should be drawn from the real life of the world in which murders take place. And of most importance is the reality of the detective himself.
66. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott’s coming-of-age novel has never been out of print in the hundred and fifty years since its first publication in two parts in 1868-69. Generations of women have grown up and been inspired by the four March sisters: domestic Meg; musical, introverted and doomed Beth; aspiring and artistic Amy; and especially by the independent spirited and passionately ambitious Jo. Helen Keller was inspired by Jo March. So was Hilary Rodham Clinton. So was Simone de Beauvoir. And Danielle Steele, Gloria Steinem, Gertrude Stein, J.K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, and, well, probably every aspiring woman writer of the past century and a half.
67. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
So we’re not sure what those “horrors” are, but perhaps we, too, are as crazy as she is, and the madness is the result of, not the cause of, the horrors we imagine. There comes a time late in the novella, when the governess, compelling herself into a final confrontation with Miles, has a momentary doubt that, perhaps, Miles was innocent of colluding with the evil spirit of Peter Quint after all, and wonders that if Miles is truly innocent, what does that say about herself?