Alternate: Emma

Alternate: Henderson the Rain King

A fantasy in which Alice follows the White Rabbit to a dream world. The characters she encounters (the Mad Hatter, the Queen of Hearts, and others) are part of the adult world she must deal with. Tenniel’s illustrations are as classic as Carroll’s story.

Also: Through the Looking Glass

A realistic novel about immigrant pioneers as they strive to adapt to the Nebraska prairies. It is the story of the struggles of Antonia and other women who are strengthened by the harsh realities of life.

Alternate: Death Comes for the Archbishop

A novel in which an eccentric old gentleman who imagines he lives in the age of heroic knights, and sets out to right the wrongs of the world. This work, made up of twelve stories, has been translated into most of the world’s languages.

This is the story of a New Orleans woman who abandons her husband and children to search for love and self-understanding. It was controversial when it was published due to the unconventional choices made by the main character.

A probing psychological novel that explores the darkness in the soul of each man. Marlow, the narrator, makes a journey into the depths of the Congo, where he discovers the extent to which greed can corrupt a good man.

Alternate: Lord Jim

This Civil War novel, which Crane called "a psychological portrayal of fear," reveals the grim aspects of war in the life of an ordinary soldier. Henry Fleming joins the army full of romantic visions of battle, which are shattered by combat.

Based on the true story of a sailor named Alexander Selkirk, this novel is about the adventures of a man who spends 24 years on an isolated island. With the help of an islander he calls Friday, Crusoe shows courage and ingenuity in meeting the challenges of his predicament.

A novel about Pip, a poor boy who is made rich by a mysterious benefactor, sets out to realize his "great expectations," and finally becomes a man of worth and character. Dickens’ works are known for their memorable and eccentric characters.

Also: Oliver Twist

Real and fictional people from widely different economic and ethnic groups interact in turn-of-the-century America.

A psychological novel about a poor student who murders an old woman pawnbroker and her sister. After the crime, his conscience bothers him until he confesses. He is sent to Siberia, and finally becomes truly repentant.

Alternate: The Brothers Karamazov

This swashbuckling historical novel is an adventure tale about the determination of a young man to achieve his dream to become a member of the elite King’s Own Musketeers, who represent to him the qualities of honor and loyalty.

Alternate: The Count of Monte Cristo

The Victorian world of male supremacy is the background for this novel of a stormy relationship between a brother and sister. Maggie Tulliver’s life is miserable because her brother Tom disapproves of her choices of romances. George Eliot was a pseudonym; the author’s real name was Mary Ann Evans.

Alternate: Silas Marner

"I am an invisible man," begins this novel of an unnamed black man’s search for identity as an individual and as a member of his race and his society. This story goes beyond one man’s search and chronicles every man’s struggle to find himself.

As the youngest of three daughters in a turn-of-the-century Mexican family, Tita may not marry but must remain at home to care for her mother.

The tragic life of the Compsons, a degenerate Southern family, is described by Benjy, a thirty-three year-old idiot.

A humorous novel about the adventures of an amorous young man whose impulsiveness often leads him into difficult situations.

A novel in which a young man corrupts himself and the American Dream in order to regain a lost love.

See also Short Stories.

A realistic novel in which a young wife is bored with her husband. In her extramarital affairs, she seeks unsuccessfully to find the emotional experiences she has read about in romantic novels.

This Latin American novel portrays seven generations in the lives of the Buendia family. Garcia Marquez employs a technique called magic realism - the use of magic, myth, and religion to intensify reality.

Also: Love in the Time of Cholera

In this novel a group of English schoolboys who are stranded on an island without adults become savages. This moral fable implies that defects in society are caused in part by the defects in individuals.

A Victorian novel in which the happiness and marriage of Tess and her husband are destroyed because she confesses to him that she bore a child as the result of a forced sexual relationship with her employer’s son.

Alternate: The Return of the Native

A novel about an adulterous Puritan woman who keeps secret the identity of the father of her illegitimate child. Her sin and the secret sin of the father are dwarfed by the vengefulness of her husband.

Alternate: The House of the Seven Gables

See also Short Stories.

A broad comedy confronting the humbug and hypocrisy of war and mass society as Captain Yossarian frantically attempt to stay alive despite being sent on endless bombing missions.

In this semi-autobiographical novel that takes place during World War I, an American lieutenant falls in love and runs away with the woman who nurses him to health. Hemingway, the winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize, is known for his journalistic style.

Alternate: The Sun Also Rises

See also Short Stories

Emerging from a kaleidoscope of experiences and tasted pleasures, Siddhartha transcends to a state of peace and mystic holiness in this strangely simple story.

This novel vividly describes and condemns the social injustice of 19th-century France, in which a poor man who steals bread for his family must run from the police for years.

Alternate: The Hunchback of Notre Dame

A moving, heartfelt novel about a young black woman’s search for self-knowledge and self-fulfillment.

In this bitter satire about the future, Nobel Prize-winner Huxley conceives a world controlled by advances in science and social changes. Individuals are no longer important and their lives are planned out for them.

This novella is a study of good and evil in which a governess in charge of two children discovers that they are under the evil influence of ghosts, and attempts to save them.

Alternate: Portrait of a Lady

A novel about a young man growing up in Ireland and rebelling against family, country and religion to become an artist. Joyce is known for his use of the stream-of-consciousness style.

In this novel a man is tried for a crime he knows nothing about, yet he feels guilty and is executed.

See also Short Stories

This tells the story of an aging Greek miner with an unconquerable zest for life.

Alternate: The Last Temptation of Christ

Oskar Schindler, a rich factory owner, risks his life and spends his personal fortune to save Jews listed as his workers during World War II in this historical novel based on real events.

This is a loosely structured and mostly autobiographical account of the Beat experience in America, regarded as one of the classic works of the Beat Generation. It recounts the hitchhiking adventures of several characters who embrace drugs, sex, and music in their wanderings across the United States.

An irrepressible rebel leads fellow inmates of a mental hospital in a struggle with the tyrannical Head Nurse Ratched.

Against the backdrop of World War II, the rivalry of two roommates in a boys’ school turns into a private war.

An autobiographical novel about a youth who is torn between a dominant working-class father and a possessive genteel mother.

In a sleepy Southern town, one man stands up for what he knows to be right when he comes to the defense of a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman. He is an example to his young children of moral courage.

First envoy to the technologically primitive world of Winter, Al must deal with a hostile climate; a suspicious, bickering government; and his own conventional sexual mores.

A satirical novel about a middle-class businessman in an average Midwestern city. Babbitt becomes a pathetic yet comical character because of his exaggerated sense of his importance. Lewis was the first American to win the Nobel Prize.

Alternate: Main Street

Born into luxury on a California estate, a dog is stolen into captivity and put into service as a sled dog in Alaska, where he must learn to trust again.

A Gentile hoodlum goes to work for a Jewish grocer whom he has robbed. Finally taking the grocer’s place, he becomes a Jew himself and accepts all that is Jewish.

Alternate: The Fixer

An author becomes aware of a darker side of himself when he visits Venice and fantasizes a love for a young boy he sees there. This story alludes frequently to Greek literature and mythology.

A complex novel about a mad sea captain’s pursuit of revenge against Moby-Dick, the Great White Whale who injured him years earlier. Captain Ahab is the embodiment of the ultimate self-destructiveness of revenge and its pursuit.

This classic best-seller is the epic tale of Scarlet O’Hara, a Southern belle who will survive the Civil War despite war, poverty, and several husbands

A novel about the lifelong friendship of two vastly different women who become estranged when one causes the other’s husband to abandon her.

Alternate: Beloved

The classic satire of communism, in which the pigs lead the other farm animals in a revolution against the humans, setting up their own government where "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

Alternate: 1984

This story of the doctor/poet Yuri Zhivago, his lover Lara, and the Russian Revolution was banned in the Soviet Union for many years.

A novel about a black minister in South Africa who goes in search of his children and finds them corrupted and destroyed by white society. The roots of both the generational and racial conflicts of black South Africans are explored.

If you’ve read Jane Eyre, and wondered what the real story was behind Mr. Rochester’s dark past, read this.

A novel in which Holden Caulfield, a prep school dropout, rejects the "phoniness" he sees all about him. This is a book that has influenced each generation since its publication.

A story of chivalry in which the Norman hero Wilfred finally wins his true love, the Saxon Rowena, with the help of the Black Knight, and brings a temporary peace between the Normans and the Saxons.

This historical novel focuses on several individuals as they endure the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War.

A gothic tale of terror in which Frankenstein creates a monster from corpses. Because everyone who sees him fears him, the monster despairs and turns on his creator.

Sentenced to eight years in prison for anti-Stalinist remarks written to a friend, Solzhenitsyn later used his prison experiences as the background for this first novel.

A historical novel by the 1963 Nobel Prize-winner about the desperate flight of tenant farmers from Oklahoma during the Depression. The Joad family struggles to retain their humanity and dignity in the face of the hostility they find in California.

Also: Of Mice and Men

In this horror story the extremes of good and evil appear startlingly in one character when the physician Henry Jekyll discovers a drug that changes him, first at will and later involuntarily, into the monster Hyde.

A satire on mankind in which an 18th-century Englishman visits foreign lands populated by bizarre creatures who illuminate many of the vices and weaknesses of his society.

A young Chinese American woman realizes her mother’s early life in China is an important reason for the rift between them.

A novel of 19th-century upper-middle-class British society that portrays 20 years in the lives of two young women very opposite in character: gentle, sentimental Amelia and lively, cunning Becky.

Tolkien, a professor of medieval literature, created a mythological world and populated it with creatures who face the concerns we face in our world.

The Hobbit Bilbo Baggins leaves his beloved Shire and quests through Middle-Earth for dwarves’ treasure, only to face the temptations of greed himself.

The Lord of the Rings Three separate volumes, in which Bilbo’s nephew Frodo Baggins faces the greater danger presented by ultimate evil. The story is a saga which mixes mythology, poetry, adventure, and philosophy.

A historical novel of the Napoleonic Wars that celebrates the Russian spirit and shows the effect of war and peace on every social class in Russian society.

Alternate: Anna Karenina

In this novel two young men experience difficulty in their relationships with their parents and with their women friends.

In this novel Huck takes a trip down the river with a runaway slave and learns the worth of life.

See also Short Stories.

This is the first of the Rabbit Angstrom novels, in which an immature young man, still longing for the lost glory of his youth, runs away from his responsibility and abandons his wife and child.

A satire against those who complacently accept life’s disasters, this bitter criticism in disguised as a rollicking travel story in which Candide is puzzled because everything bad happens to him in this, the "best of all possible worlds."

A semi-autobiographical novel about the firebombing of Dresden in World War II. In the story, a time traveler named Billy Pilgrim finds peace on another world where he is "grateful that so many of those moments are nice."

See also Short Stories

In a series of letters to God and her sister, Celie reveals her struggle to overcome the violence and brutality of her life.

Based on the true story of politician Huey Long, power ultimately corrupts everyone associated with popular Southern politician Willie Stark.

In this social allegory, a time traveller arrives in the year 802701, and finds society divided into two classes: the underground workers known as Morlocks, and the above-ground, decadent Eloi.

Allso The War of the Worlds

A novel about people condemned to a loveless marriage by the conventions of their social class.

Alternate: The House of Mirth

King Arthur learns his lessons from Merlin the Magician, creates Camelot and the knights of the Round Table, and loves and loses Guinevere.

Written in stream-of-consciousness, this semi-autobiographical novel describes the Ramsey family’s life in their country home. The lighthouse they see from the window is a symbolic goal for them all.

Alternate: A Room of One’s Own

In this novel, Bigger Thomas, a young black man from the Chicago slums, lashes out against a hostile society by committing two murders