Here Are 10 Time-Tested, Must Read Classic Novels That You have to Read So That You Don’t Regret In Your After-Life, sighing: So Many Books, So Little Time!
Good books are the best companion and teacher. A good reader respects the wisdom of books that have passed the passage of time and has a universality to which everyone can connect and relate.
Here are 10 time-tested, must-read classic novels that you need to read and have in your bookshelf!
Gulliver’s Travels
Author: Jonathan Swift
Published: 1726
A travelogue into different fictional parts of the Gulliver’s Travels satirically brings out the human hypocrisy and scathingly attacks the political structure of the world, particularly the pompous society of 18th Century England.
A humorous and satirical travel tale where humans as tiny as ants and horses are grossed out with uncivilised the human race, the novel with its extravagant imagery and graphic imagination will hold you till the end.
2. Moby Dick or The Whale
Author: Herman Melville
Published: 1851
A book that makes you come back, again and again, with an intriguing journey of an existential outsider. With one of the most astonishing opening lines in the record of world literature, “Call me Ishmael” Moby Dick is an unending quest of one’s identity and soul.
3. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Author: Mark Twain
Published: 1885
This path-breaking novel traces the theme of freedom v/s civilization as one of its major themes. Twain’s understanding of human relations across various ethnicities and culture across the Mississippi river makes it a rich novel. Huck and Jim’s friendship, the one that’s across races, is a classic example of the revelation of innate humanity.
It brings in question the selective consciousness of people, not very uncommon these days and how Huck overcomes his class conditioning after all odds is commendable.
Author: Jane Austen
Published: 1813
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Austen’s novel is one of the smoothest read with deeper descriptions of pre-Victorian life. The question of finding suitors for the Bennet sisters and their subsequent falling in love finds the central plot of the novel.
Its humour lies in its honest depiction of manners, education, marriage, and money during the Regency era in Great Britain. A well depicted English life could not be any more real. Read and find what it offers for a modern reader, you won’t get disappointed.
5. The Catcher in the Rye
Author: J. D. Salinger
Published: 1951
No doubt that this book has influenced people’s almost as much as any good literature would do. It’s out of the place narrative and an understanding of the world by a young boy, who is growing in it is uncanny. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye became a guide-book for the young rebels, inspired by the insights of 16-years-old Caulfield about railing into the phoniness of the adult world and the problems that come with it. That this book remains amongst the most favourite of many, even after 70 years of its publication is proof of its influence.
Author: Emily Bronte
Published: 1847
Goofy and a bizarre setting with a strange love story, Wuthering Heights has all my wide-eyed attention. A mason, a spirit, a man obsessed so with the memories of his deceased companion that he starts talking to her ghost and whatnot!
You have got to read this unconventional story spinning around Heathcliff and Catherine.
Author: Charles Dickens
Published: 1861
Great Expectations is invested in the focal point of the novel, the moral conflict within Pip’s soul. The read questions if Pip, a good-natured and generous boy triumphs, or would he be destroyed by the excessive ambitions that made him reject those who loved him and his “Great Expectations?”
The prose is engaging and how Dickens depicts moments of emotional intensity is particularly admirable. He has been accused of sentimentality, and he is indeed guilty of that, but for most, it is a feature rather than a flaw. One can never go wrong if s/he picks up Dickens for a valuable read!
Author: Leo Tolstoy
Published: 1878
Anna Karenina, regarded as one of the most significant books ever written borrows from the lives of Russian aristocrats and their abundances, affairs, and other un-assumed struggles. His novel moves ahead exploring the extreme changes that took place in the then Russian society while addressing timeless themes such as love, marriage, jealousy, and death.
A peruse through the extensive read reveals how Tolstoy borrows from his own journey to animate characters that make us believe that although humans will always make errors, a remedy usually follows with them. Anna Karenina is another piece in the canon which deserves your attention.
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Published: 1955
Read through various lenses and analysed in different spotlights, Lolita is a classic masterpiece of a narrator who is known for his unreliability.
The novel portrays a middle-aged literature professor under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert who is obsessed with a 12-year-old girl, Dolores Haze, with whom he becomes sexually involved after he becomes her stepfather.
This book shakes your sitting conscience when the witty story of a child’s abuse oscillates from the act being precocious sexual desires in a child to a passionate and destructive tragic love story.
Humbert who should be a villain in plain light manages to gain the reader’s sympathy.
Author: George Orwell
Published: 1945
A story about a revolution which turned into tyranny, Animal Farm has English speaking pigs and other clever future animals than now.
It’s a story set in future, where pigs started a revolution against their human farmers. Read this simple and intriguing novel which has political undertones where the cause of revolution is lost to power greed.
The novel is a crude reflection of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union.
Originally published at https://www.fuzia.com.