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Margaret Bailey
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Flatland
Edwin A. Abbott
Margaret Bailey
A short novel illustrating the wisdom of recognizing that there are valid perspectives other than our own, limited, ones. Kinda makes you think more about how a fourth dimension would be perceived by those able to experience it.
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The Education of Henry Adams
Henry Adams
Surveying national events from his birth through the era of the Civil War and the subsequent economic expansion of the United States, Adams’s distinctive autobiography is also a brilliant work of historical acumen. It depicts, with imaginative aplomb, the cultural transformations set in motion as th...show more
Skellig
David Almond
A lovely short novel, variously considered children's and young adult, about a boy who meets a magical creature in a time of crisis in his family.
10-year old Michael's family has just moved across town to a derelict house his father is renovating. He can still attend his old school, but it's harde...show more
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Julian Jaynes
Talk about a book that will make you reconsider what you think you know! I've read this at least 3 times, and it never gets old. The stuff about how older epics and books of the Bible were written, compared to more modern writings (with, say, 1000 BC being modern) makes a lot of sense, or will at...show more
All the President's Men
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
All the President’s Men follows Woodward and Bernstein's investigation of the Watergate scandal from start to finish, taking readers behind the scenes, describing in detail their dogged efforts to uncover sources, pursue leads, and—as their most famous informant, “Deep Throat,” had counseled them—fo...show more
The Bible
Agree with the tenets or not, it's seminal to an understanding of our world. And if you are comfortable with the language of King James, it's a gorgeous piece of writing. Otherwise, I guess any version is acceptable as long as you don't use that version to insist your own interpretation is correct...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
If for no other reason than that it is so much a part of western culture.
Silent Spring
Rachel Carson
More than four decades before Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring issued a chilling—and groundbreaking—warning about humanity’s careless contamination of our planet. Researched and written over four years, it examines the interdependence of speci...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
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
The Worst Journey in the World
Apsley Cherry-Garrard
A phenomenal accounting of how early Antarctic exploration was carried out, as well as the best first-hand account of the doomed Scott expedition of 1910-1912, which attempted to be the first to reach the South Pole. Scott and his band died only a short distance from rescue, and Apsley-Garrard, who...show more
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
I thought for sure I'd hate this, given the racist language and the locale, which doesn't interest me. Instead, it was wonderful. A British man, yachting with friends on the Thames, tells them of a time when he took a job running a rundown boat up the Congo River. The central character to his mind i...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
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
Lewis Carroll
More than the sum of its parts, Lewis Carroll’s Alice oeuvre has taken root in our collective imagination like few other literary creations. Despite—or perhaps because of—its nonsensical pedigree, it has proved to be an addictive pleasure for analysts seduced by its dense mix of childish frivolities...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
Confessions
Saint Augustine
Of all the saints of the early Christian church, Saint Augustine of Hippo possesses, for the modern reader at least, the most interesting mind. His ideas on language, time, and the mysteries of personality, humanity, and divinity are still provocative—after sixteen centuries!—and his genius for expr...show more
The Red Badge of Courage
Stephen Crane
The Red Badge of Courage is an American classic and a landmark in the literature of war. Yet it is a book that is very easy to understand too quickly. Although it is subtitled An Episode of the American Civil War, the novel offers little detail specific to the War Between the States other than the b...show more
Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book is prompted in part by his inability to offer any comfort to his son after the latter’s disillusionment in the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the exoneration of the police officers at whose hands he died: “I did not tell you that it would...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