 | War and Peace (Vintage Classics) by Leo Tolstoy
Buy new: $13.57 / Used from: $11.68 Considered by many to be the greatest novel of all time, by the greatest novelist of all time. I can't argue with that.
|
 | The Last of the Just by Andre Schwarz-Bart
Buy new: $10.85 / Used from: $2.96 Excruciatingly painful, unforgettable, everyone should read this and weep.
|
 | Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
Buy new: $10.37 / Used from: $6.40 More than ever relevant in its depiction and discussion of the structure and mechanics of totalitarian fascism, especially relevant today given the dangerous propaganda of the right-wing ideology rampant today within the Republican party.
|
 | Life and Fate (New York Review Books Classics) by Vasily Grossman
Buy new: $15.61 / Used from: $12.95 Possibly the best novel written in the twentieth century about the most pivotal era of the twentieth century.
|
 | The Count of Monte Cristo (Enriched Classics) by Alexandre Dumas père
Buy new: $6.95 / Used from: $2.75 Great story by a true master of dramatic historical fiction - Dumas' best one.
|
 | Bleak House (Oxford World's Classics) by Charles Dickens
Buy new: $8.54 / Used from: $4.01 This is probably Dicken's best, but "Our Mutual Friend," "Little Dorrit," or "David Copperfield" would be fine substitutes. But unless you've read some Dickens, you really can't be taken seriously.
|
 | The Way We Live Now (Oxford World's Classics) by Anthony Trollope
Buy new: $9.20 / Used from: $7.99 In lieu of this one, read the six novels of the Chronicles of Barset series. Wonderful characters and masterfully written English prose. A pleasure to read.
|
 | Love in the Time of Cholera (Vintage International) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Buy new: $10.17 / Used from: $0.77 Consistently poignant throughout, a heart-breaking love story. Marquez is a master, and holds his own at a party attended by Dickens and Tolstoy. "A Hundred Years of Solitude" is great, but this is his best.
|
 | A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin
Buy new: $10.88 / Used from: $1.47 Wholly engrossing, beautifully told story. I dare you to put it down once you've read twenty pages.
|
 | The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Buy used from: $3.92 You already should have read this. If not, no one can help you.
|
 | Timbuktu: A Novel by Paul Auster
Buy used from: $0.01 I can't help it - I love this book. Auster's best, in my opinion. A wonderful fable in the same class with Coelho's "The Alchemist."
|
 | Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Buy new: $12.95 / Used from: $31.36 Wonderful adventure, both mystical and exciting. Also, culturally astute and edifying. A must read.
|
 | Dune, 40th Anniversary Edition (Dune Chronicles, Book 1) by Frank Herbert
Buy new: $11.56 / Used from: $5.21 The best Sci-fi book ever written. Conceptually mind-expanding.
|
 | The Dharma Bums: 50th Anniversary Edition by Jack Kerouac
Buy new: $16.47 / Used from: $2.70 This and "On The Road" are the classic novels which precipitated the 60s counter-culture.
|
 | To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Buy new: $9.20 / Used from: $4.24 A true American classic of innocence and tragedy, as contemporary today as when it was published over forty years ago.
|
 | The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
Buy new: $7.95 / Used from: $0.01 This and "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,": haunting masterpieces, precursors to David Lynch and other "post-modernists."
|
Listmania!
