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Elizabeth
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Emma
Jane Austen
James Mustich
At twenty, Emma Woodhouse—“handsome, clever, and rich”—knows that she’s the most fantastic woman in Highbury, and nothing amuses her more than meddling in other people’s affairs. But although she has good intentions, her matchmaking goes seriously awry, wrecking a perfectly good engagement for her f...show more
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Friday Night Lights
H. G. Bissinger
Even readers with no interest in football are likely to be fascinated by the surprising world that Bissinger describes so well—a world in which a lot of adults have a big stake in whether teenage football players win or lose. Those players, in turn, enjoy the indulgence of teachers and the adulation...show more
Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
Guy Montag is a fireman. But, in the dystopian future of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 classic, a fireman’s duty is not to put out fires, but to start them. His job, in fact, is to burn books, a task that requires the temperature of 451° Fahrenheit. It’s natural to see Fahrenheit 451 as an allegory about cens...show more
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
Destitute young woman leaves rotten boarding school for job as governess in sprawling mansion, falls in love with broodingly handsome employer with dark secret. In the twenty-first century, the plot of Jane Eyre might sound clichéd, yet Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel, about a plain orphan girl exceed...show more
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
In its intense drama and disregard for orthodox morality, Wuthering Heights continues to surprise and challenge us today. To attempt to chart the web of relationships of blood, marriage, social strata, economic dependence, love, envy, hatred, and revenge that bind Catherine and Heathcliff to the boo...show more
A Walk in the Woods
Bill Bryson
Waddling slothfully through middle age, popular travel writer Bill Bryson decided one day that he could do with a walk in the woods—a lengthy walk, in fact: 2,100 rugged miles along the celebrated Appalachian Trail (AT), the longest continuous footpath in the world. Did Bryson dare? Well, not only d...show more
The Thirty-Nine Steps
John Buchan
Having returned to London after long residence in southern Africa, Richard Hannay finds himself stuck in a rut. Much to the reader’s delight, Hannay will make his way out of it by falling into another ditch so deep that it hides in its dark recesses murder, espionage, and a plot to undermine the sec...show more
Ham on Rye
Charles Bukowski
It's not so much that I love this book - though I do - it's that Bukowski was left out of the first 1000 books, and that's a shame. His writing is so brutally honest, funny, and beautiful in its own unique way, that I think he's essential reading before you die.
The Postman Always Rings Twice
James M. Cain
David Heska Wanbli Weiden, runner-up in Denver Public Library’s Battle II, returned for DPL’s Battle III in January, 2023 with his compelling case for The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain. Published in 1934, this was Cain’s first novel, and it was an immediate success, despite its controv...show more
Ender's Game
Orson Scott Card
The Wiggin children are unusual, even for the unusual world in which Ender’s Game unfolds. There’s the oldest, Peter, a power-mad sociopath; Valentine, the sister who turns her eloquence to Peter’s service; and then there’s Ender, their little brother, who is singled out by the authorities as the mi...show more
The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer
The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s most enduring work, began in the 1380s as a loose collection of stories, myths, and fantastical anecdotes—most in verse, though some in prose—that were all written in different voices. Only in the 1390s did Chaucer start to think of his baggy assemblage as a single na...show more
Matilda
Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl’s roster of youth-delighting tales is as rich as that of any twentieth-century children’s author. From The Gremlins (1943) to The Minpins (1991), Dahl created marvelous confections for young readers for nearly five decades. Standing out among his storytelling treats is Matilda, whose supe...show more
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Philip K. Dick
As the basis for the first and best adaptation of a Dick novel to film (Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner), this book occupies a central place in the PKD oeuvre. But its virtues and affect are different from the cinematic interpretation, more in line with Dick’s core preoccupations. All told, Do And...show more
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
Henry Fielding
Henry Fielding had begun his literary career by parodying the most popular novel of his day, the sanctimonious Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded, in two works, Joseph Andrews and Shamela (the title says it all). Having upended Pamela, so to speak, Fielding set out to write a novel that was truer to real li...show more
The Third Man
Graham Greene
Spare, fast-paced, and utterly gripping, The Third Man concerns the adventures of Rollo Martins, a comic, earnest figure summoned to Vienna in the aftermath of World War II by his boyhood chum Lime. Arriving to discover that his friend has apparently been killed in a traffic accident, Martins is tro...show more
The Silence of the Lambs
Thomas Harris
Hannibal Lecter is one of the most chillingly drawn villains in the annals of modern fiction. He is perverse, polite, charming, brilliant, and brutal, and the FBI would like to lure him into helping with an ongoing investigation of a string of savage killings of young women that have left them baffl...show more
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The story, at least in outline, is probably familiar. Its setting is seventeenth-century Boston, during the Puritan era. Hester Prynne wears the scarlet “A” that marks her as an adulteress. While she thus pays openly for her sin, the “godly” Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale endures the torments of a guilt...show more