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Rebecca Pool
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Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett
James Mustich
Waiting for Godot was Samuel Beckett’s first performed play, written in French and then translated by the author into English. It is one of the signal accomplishments in twentieth-century theater and one of the touchstones of modern literature. It is also, as one contemporary critic said of its two ...show more
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The Hunger Games
Suzanne Collins
As story and as media phenomenon, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games is at the top of the pile of wildly popular dystopian teen fiction that has dominated twenty-first-century bestseller lists (in no small part by appealing to readers well beyond their teen years). In the nation of Panem, power and ...show more
The Moonstone
Wilkie Collins
While the plot of The Moonstone is compelling, it is the play of its distinctive voices upon our understanding of events that makes the book truly absorbing. Clues are laid out carefully and, in retrospect at least, quite tellingly, but their meaning is obscured as we read by the shifting perspectiv...show more
The Moving Toyshop
Edmund Crispin
If you can imagine a plot that has imbibed too much champagne, you’ll have some idea of the giddy pleasures of this classic 1946 mystery, in which Oxford don Gervase Fen and poet Richard Cadogan unravel a murderous scheme so convoluted your head will be spinning even if you’re drinking tea. Fast, fu...show more
Four Quartets
T. S. Eliot
Written in the years before and during World War II, the Quartets consist of four long poems, each cohering around a season, one of the four natural elements (earth, air, water, fire), and a place: “Burnt Norton,” an English manor house and garden; “East Coker,” a village in Somerset, home to Eliot’...show more
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
Vivid, unpredictable, insinuating, uncomfortably intimate, the voice that tells Invisible Man is one of the most supple and powerful instruments ever fashioned in American prose. His skin is black, his soul is blue, his mind is lit with both desperation and deep thought. Naturalistic and surreal, fa...show more
The Oresteia
Aeschylus
If you seek between covers an education in the trials and tribulations, the hopes and fears, the terrors and triumphs of the human spirit, the majestic tragedies of the ancient Greeks are the place to begin, and perhaps the place to end as well. In their beautiful, haunting, unsparing plays, Aeschyl...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
Essays and Lectures
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emerson was a philosopher, poet, and essayist. Though he’s credited with being one of the fathers of Transcendentalism, the New England movement that privileged idealism over empiricism and found a natural divinity in all things, he valued independent thought above adherence to any creed or system. ...show more
Inferno: The Divine Comedy, Book 1
Dante Alighieri
From the dark wood of its beginning, down through the nine circles of hell, across the seven terraces of purgatory, and into the ten heavens of paradise, Dante’s medieval tour de force gives us, in T. S. Eliot’s estimation, the greatest altitude and the greatest depth of human passion any writer has...show more
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
David Copperfield is a novel so filled with character, invention, suspense, and inspired storytelling that one finishes it with an overwhelming regret: The turning of the last page closes the book on such a vivid world that one feels immediately impoverished. Dickens famously called Copperfield the ...show more
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities may have the most famous opening of any novel ever written, the frequent application of its words outside the novel’s specific context giving it an edge over the nearest competition, Anna Karenina and Pride and Prejudice. Echoing the dichotomies invoked in its opening sentences,...show more
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Is life unfair? Is circumstance fate? Can we ever take the law into our own hands to change it? Fyodor Dostoevsky’s first major novel poses these questions in the tale of a man who enacts brutal crimes in order to break the strictures of his social destiny. For Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, the han...show more
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens
You know the story of this quintessential holiday tale, but have you ever read it? So many times has the tale been told—in numerous stage and screen adaptations—that we are apt to take the power of its invention for granted. Yet no retelling comes close to capturing the humor and human sympathy, the...show more
A Coffin for Dimitrios
Eric Ambler
Love a good spy book and Ambler is a master at the genre. Well plotted and paced. I will be back for 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
Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle
Student of Plato, tutor of Alexander the Great, founder of the Athenian Lyceum, Aristotle possessed a pedigree every bit as singular as his influence would prove to be. His ideas, instruments of investigation, and observations of nature both loom over and underlie much intellectual endeavor. His wor...show more
Bleak House
Charles Dickens
Although it lacks the affectionate warmth of David Copperfield and the narrative unity of Great Expectations, Bleak House is considered by many critics to be its author’s greatest achievement. Unlike those other two novels, which, of course, have their own ardent champions, Bleak House is not steepe...show more
Bulfinch's Mythology
Thomas Bulfinch
Published in America in the middle of the nineteenth century, Thomas Bulfinch’s retellings of Greek, Roman, and medieval myths have been popular since their first appearance, and deservedly so: They offer a splendid, leisurely tour through the landscape of fable on which so much of our literature, a...show more
Emma
Jane Austen
Emma is Austen’s most “real” heroine. She both endearing and annoying, never boring.