Best Classic Literature Books

The second canticle of The Divine Comedy — Dante and Virgil climb the mountain of Purgatory, where souls atone for the seven deadly sins and prepare for Paradise. The most human and most hopeful of the three canticles, written with greater lyric tenderness than Inferno.

Stanisław Lem's classic of philosophical science fiction. On a station orbiting the planet Solaris, scientists confront a vast, sentient ocean that resurrects their most painful memories in living form, forcing a reckoning with the limits of human understanding.

A dinner party in Athens, 416 BCE: Socrates, Aristophanes, Alcibiades, and others deliver speeches in praise of Love (Eros). Each speech offers a different theory; the climax is Socrates's account of what the priestess Diotima taught him — that Eros is the ascent from beautiful bodies to beauty itself.

Aeneas, survivor of Troy, journeys to Italy to found the civilization that will become Rome. In twelve books of Latin hexameter, Virgil traces Aeneas's trials at sea, his affair with Dido in Carthage, his descent into the underworld, and his final wars in Latium — creating the founding myth of the Roman world.

An aristocratic Russian family returns to their estate, which must be sold to pay debts. The merchant Lopakhin offers a solution — cut down the cherry orchard and build summer cottages. They cannot bring themselves to act. The orchard is sold at auction. They leave. The sound of the axe begins.

P.G. Wodehouse's classic collection of linked Jeeves and Wooster stories. The amiable, dim-witted Bertie Wooster blunders through romantic and social scrapes — chiefly those of his lovelorn friend Bingo Little — only to be rescued, again and again, by the brilliant valet Jeeves.

Le Guin's landmark science fiction novel about an envoy from a galactic federation who visits a planet whose inhabitants are ambisexual — neither male nor female — and the profound implications for society and consciousness.

Chichikov travels through provincial Russia purchasing 'dead souls' — serfs who have died since the last census but are still recorded on landowners' rolls, and can therefore be used as collateral for loans. The scheme is comic, opaque, and darkly satirical. Gogol described the novel as the first part of a Russian Divine Comedy.

When the Yoruba king dies, his horseman Elesin is required by tradition to follow him in ritual suicide. The British colonial officer—genuinely believing he is saving a life—intervenes. The intervention destroys more than it saves. Soyinka's masterwork, based on events that occurred in Oyo, Nigeria in 1946.

Miles Roby manages the Empire Grill in Empire Falls, Maine — a dying mill town owned entirely by the widow Francine Whiting. He has waited his whole life for things to resolve themselves. His marriage is failing, his teenage daughter is struggling, and the town is slowly emptying. Russo's Pulitzer Prize winner.

Arkady brings his friend Bazarov home to his father's estate. Bazarov is a nihilist — he believes in nothing except empirical science and rejects all authority, sentiment, and tradition. His conflict with the older generation, his unexpected passion for Madame Odintsova, and his death define the Russian novel's engagement with the question of what to believe.

Marlow travels up the Congo River in search of the mysterious ivory trader Kurtz — and discovers the horror at the heart of European imperialism.

Jason abandons Medea, his wife and the mother of his children, to marry the Corinthian princess. Medea, a foreigner and sorceress, takes revenge — poisoning the princess, and killing her own children to destroy Jason utterly. Euripides gave Medea her choice where earlier versions made it accidental.

William Gibson's groundbreaking cyberpunk novel coined the term 'cyberspace' and defined the aesthetic and concerns of an entire science fiction movement.

The third canticle of The Divine Comedy — Dante ascends through the nine spheres of Heaven with Beatrice, encounters the souls of the blessed, and culminates in the vision of God as a point of light and the rose of the redeemed. The most theologically demanding and most visually dazzling part of the poem.

In a Parisian boarding house, the ambitious young Eugène de Rastignac encounters two extremes: old Goriot, who has sacrificed everything for daughters who abandon him, and the criminal Vautrin, who offers a ruthless shortcut to success. The central novel of the Comédie humaine and Balzac's most concentrated study of money and society.

A group of pilgrims travelling to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury agree to tell stories to pass the time. Each tale reflects its teller — the Knight's romance, the Miller's bawdy fabliau, the Wife of Bath's self-portrait, the Pardoner's moral tale told by an immoral man. The foundational work of English literature.

London, the Blitz. Writer Maurice Bendrix begins an affair with Sarah Miles, wife of a civil servant. When Sarah suddenly ends the affair without explanation, Bendrix's jealousy drives him to hire a detective. What he discovers is not another lover but a bargain Sarah made with God. Greene's most personal novel: faith, jealousy, and the possibility of grace.

The only complete ancient Greek trilogy to survive — Agamemnon returns from Troy to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra; their son Orestes kills Clytemnestra in revenge; the Furies pursue Orestes until Athena establishes a jury court to try him. The founding myth of justice.

Miss Jean Brodie, teacher at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh in the 1930s, dedicates herself to educating her chosen set of girls for life rather than for exams. She is charismatic, dangerous, and will be betrayed. Spark's masterpiece in 137 pages.

Julien Sorel, brilliant son of a provincial carpenter, rises through seduction, hypocrisy, and calculation — as tutor in the Rênal household, then as secretary to a Parisian aristocrat. His relationship with two women (Mme de Rênal and the volatile Mathilde de la Mole) ultimately destroys him.

Socrates and his interlocutors ask what justice is — and end up designing an ideal city, debating the nature of the soul, defining the philosopher-king, arguing for the immortality of the soul, banning poets from the ideal state, and constructing the allegory of the cave. The most influential philosophical text in the Western tradition.

Marian Forrester, wife of a retired railroad pioneer in Nebraska, is observed across years by Niel Herbert — first as a boy who worships her, later as a young man who watches her adapt to reduced circumstances after her husband's financial ruin. A novel about idealism and its loss.

Brighton, the 1930s. Pinkie Brown is a seventeen-year-old gang leader, a Catholic who believes in damnation and acts accordingly. After a murder, he marries Rose, a waitress who could testify against him, intending to kill her after she can no longer be called as a witness. Ida Arnold, a cheerful hedonist, pursues him. Greene's darkest and most theologically exact novel.