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Chris Schneider
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The Sagas of Icelanders
James Mustich
The eleven sagas and six shorter tales included here—set mostly around the turn of the first millennium AD (although written two to four centuries later)—charted new literary territory. While the rest of medieval literature was locked in lines of verse, the unknown authors of the sagas freely employ...show more
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
A book of shimmering social surfaces and hauntingly evanescent private depths, The Great Gatsby imbues its fleet narrative with a formal elegance that has been readily apparent even to the generations of high school students to whom it has been assigned—generally long before they might understand th...show more
The Lord of the Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien
Appearing in three separate volumes between July 1954 and October 1955, The Lord of the Rings constitutes a single linear narrative that was segmented for publishing convenience rather than by authorial intent. Tolkien’s hero, Frodo, is the adoptive heir of Bilbo Baggins, protagonist of The Hobbit. ...show more
Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson
On any list of the best adventure stories ever written, Treasure Island deserves a place at the top. Hewing to a taut narrative line that ripples with ominous vibrations, it pulls the reader headlong into a fantastic realm of pirates and buried treasure. Read the first few pages and see if you can s...show more
The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins was only thirty-three in 1976 when he published The Selfish Gene, a landmark of popular science that summarized a genetic view of evolution then gaining currency among biologists. It was such a success that its title has entered the lexicon. But the title, as Dawkins has admitted, is...show more
Beowulf
Surviving in one manuscript dating from around AD 1000, and believed to have been composed some two or three hundred years earlier, Beowulf is a poem composed in Old English, also known as Anglo-Saxon, a language worlds apart from even Chaucer’s Middle English. Although written in England, the poem’...show more
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
What people can’t get in the technologically determined society of Aldous Huxley’s imagined future are family, religion, literature, art, individuality, love, or a genuinely human relationship of any sort. In this brave new world, poverty, conflict, and unhappiness have all been eliminated by way of...show more
Charlotte’s Web
E. B. White
Someone once called E. B. White the most companionable of writers, and the adjective fits him like a glove. His conversational genius set the enduring tone of The New Yorker in the magazine’s formative years, and his unassumingly authoritative personal essays gave the genre a genuine American accent...show more
Dracula
Bram Stoker
You’re probably familiar with the outlines of the story: A centuries-old vampire lures an English visitor to his castle in Transylvania, then journeys to London to seek fresh blood from his visitor’s paramour—with first mystified, then terrified, and finally horrified pursuers on his trail. But what...show more
France and England in North America
Francis Parkman
Conceived in 1841, when its author was a sophomore at Harvard College, this monumental work would occupy Francis Parkman for the five decades that followed. Its first installment was published in 1865, its last in 1892, a year before Parkman’s death. Together the seven volumes of France and England ...show more
Frankenstein
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Mary Shelley’s novel is the work of a thinker, and not just the cheap thrill that countless sequels, spin-offs, and spoofs might lead one to expect. The philosophical, psychological, and ethical complexities in which she has tangled her tale deepen its strangeness and wonder. Strange and wonderful i...show more
The Book of Job
As translated by Stephen Mitchell
Job’s tale is the Bible’s profound and unsettling meditation on suffering, justice, and the inscrutability of life. It begins in prose (as it will close), introducing the legend of the pious man from the land of Uz and revealing what Job himself never knows: that the miseries visited upon him result...show more
Kon-Tiki
Thor Heyerdahl
Part of this book’s immediate and enduring appeal, no doubt, can be traced to its romantic portrayal of scientific investigation: A maverick thinker conceives a theory at odds with accepted wisdom and sets out on a task demanding enormous courage to prove it. Was Polynesia in fact settled by voyager...show more
Tao Te Ching
Most scholarship dates the Tao Te Ching to the mid-third century BC; its authorship has been traditionally ascribed to Lao Tzu (the name means “old philosopher”), but there is no certainty such a figure ever actually existed. The Tao’s eighty-one brief chapters fall into two parts. The first emphasi...show more
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley
The Bible
In the first chapter of the Book of Genesis—in just thirty-one short verses—the world is given form, light is summoned into being, Day and Night are named, Heaven hatched, the stars invoked, and Earth fashioned into land and sea, seeded with plants and populated with creatures. All in less than eigh...show more
The Call of the Wild
Jack London
Like Buck, the big dog that is this book’s protagonist, the reader of The Call of the Wild is swiftly and irrevocably swept from the “sun-kissed” world of its opening pages into a realm of elemental and unsparing experience. A favorite of his owner, Buck has known a placid, even pampered life in Cal...show more
The Hobbit
J. R. R. Tolkien
In the late 1920s, J. R. R. Tolkien, a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, scribbled a sentence while correcting some student papers: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” Those ten words are the seed from which grew a complex and elaborate mythology that would captivate the ima...show more
A Little Princess
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Like most heroes whose trials and triumphs readers have loved to assume as their own through the power of fanciful identification, Sara Crewe possesses a poise that never deserts her, no matter what misfortunes are thrown her way. And make no mistake: A Little Princess is an adventure story as fille...show more
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess
Alex, the frightening narrator of this brutal and brilliant novel, is an amoral, Beethoven-loving gang leader in a near-future
dystopian Britain. Whether adolescent girls or a schoolteacher returning from the library, the gang’s victims are treated with an exuberantly vicious disregard: They might ...show more