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Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
James Mustich
The best introduction to Austen’s work is surely the second of the six novels she wrote before her death at only forty-one, Pride and Prejudice, in which she introduces us to Elizabeth Bennet, the wittiest and most vivacious of five sisters on the hunt—if their mother has her way, at least—for husba...show more
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Desert Solitaire
Edward Abbey
Written in the middle of the 1960s, yet composed largely from journals kept a decade earlier during the author’s summers as a backcountry ranger at the Arches National Monument (“among,” as he puts it, “the hoodoo rocks and voodoo silence of the Utah wilderness”), Desert Solitaire evokes the paradox...show more
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Sherman Alexie
Drawing on Sherman Alexie’s personal experience growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a young adult novel that has more to say about big virtues like tolerance than a whole shelf of earnest adult tomes could ever manage. The book’s unflinchi...show more
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
John Berendt
One feels the seedy underbelly of a city that prides itself on southern gentility.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams
To say that Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a book that captured the zeitgeist of the late 1970s and the 1980s is an understatement. Beginning as a BBC comedy radio series, it would mutate into versions in print, on stage, in comics, and on screens small and big, becoming an ...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
Anne of Green Gables
L. M. Montgomery
The story is simple: Aging siblings Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, who together live in Avonlea on Prince Edward Island, seek to adopt an orphan to help them with the endless chores on their farm, Green Gables. But the child who arrives from the orphanage in Nova Scotia is not a boy, as they expected...show more
Slaves in the Family
Edward Ball
"My father had a little joke that made light of our legacy as a family that had once owned slaves." So begins Edward Ball’s compelling family memoir, a narrative that reaches far beyond the realm of his own kin to explore the legacy of slavery in America, an inheritance at the heart of the nation’s ...show more
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, the second of four daughters of a noted proponent of Transcendentalism, Bronson Alcott. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a friend of the family, as were Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Despite her transcendentalist pedigree, Louisa May Alcott ...show more
The Book of Three
Lloyd Alexander
Tuck Everlasting
Natalie Babbitt
Loved this book. We all wish for everlasting life at some point, but this brings why we really don’t want it.
Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel
George Saunders
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Jules Verne
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
L. Frank Baum
There’s no greater tribute to the pleasures of L. Frank Baum’s book than to say that the story is so good that it isn’t overwhelmed by the images from the wonderful Judy Garland movie. The story unfolds with a declarative matter-of-factness that puts no barrier between the real and the imagined; bec...show more
The Sweet Hereafter
Russell Banks
Russell Banks writes books about ordinary people trying to live decent lives in less than ideal circumstances. In the case of The Sweet Hereafter, the terrible calamity is a school bus accident in an upstate New York town; the mundane reality is that the town’s life must go on after its children hav...show more
Elizabeth and Her German Garden
Elizabeth von Arnim
Elizabeth and Her German Garden is a slightly fictionalized, comic diary of a woman’s year on an estate in Pomerania, delighting in the refuge her private landscape affords. Outdoors, she can escape routine, read favorite books, play with her babies, and revel in the natural allure of flowers, trees...show more
In Cold Blood
Truman Capote
When Herbert William Clutter and his family were bound, gagged, and murdered on the night of November 15, 1959, there was little evidence of who’d done it, or why. The story of their gruesome end made the New York Times, where it was read by literary light Truman Capote, who determined almost immedi...show more
O Pioneers!
Willa Cather
In Hanover, Nebraska, a Swedish immigrant dies and leaves his farm not to his sons, but to his daughter. Despite drought, economic depression, and the demands of the land the family inhabits, Alexandra Bergson, one of American literature’s most vivid heroines, is determined to make a success of the ...show more
Son of the Morning Star: Custer and The Little Bighorn
Evan S. Connell
The work of an idiosyncratic but engaging storyteller, Son of the Morning Star is discursive, elegant, and unflinching. The Christian Science Monitor called it “the story of Gen. George Armstrong Custer as Flaubert would have written it”; it’s a nice compliment, but the book is better than that, bec...show more