Books I think that EVERYONE should read!! And I mean it!!!
Discover must-read books that everyone should explore! From timeless classics to life-changing reads, this curated list has essential titles you can't miss. Dive in now!
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The Metamorphosis
by Franz Kafka
âWhen Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.â With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowingâthough absurdly comicâmeditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction. As W.H. Auden wrote, âKafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man.â
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The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov
Originally published: Dana Point, Calif.: Ardis, 1995.
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Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
Huxley's story shows a futuristic World State where all emotion, love, art, and human individuality have been replaced by social stability. An ominous warning to the world's population, this literary classic is a must-read.
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
Introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides ⢠Nominated as one of Americaâs best-loved novels by PBSâs The Great American Read Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wildeâs story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the authorâs most popular work. The tale of Dorian Grayâs moral disintegration caused a scandal when it ďŹrst appeared in 1890, but though Wilde was attacked for the novelâs corrupting inďŹuence, he responded that there is, in fact, âa terrible moral in Dorian Gray.â Just a few years later, the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wildeâs homosexual liaisons, which resulted in his imprisonment. Of Dorian Grayâs relationship to autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter, âBasil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to beâin other ages, perhaps.â
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The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
The "brilliant, funny, meaningful novel" (The New Yorker) that established J. D. Salinger as a leading voice in American literature--and that has instilled in millions of readers around the world a lifelong love of books. "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth." The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caufield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days.
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The Stranger
by Albert Camus
With the intrigue of a psychological thriller, The StrangerâCamus's masterpieceâgives us the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach. With an Introduction by Peter Dunwoodie; translated by Matthew Ward. Behind the subterfuge, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd" and describes the condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life. âThe Stranger is a strikingly modern text and Matthew Wardâs translation will enable readers to appreciate why Camusâs stoical anti-hero and Âdevious narrator remains one of the key expressions of a postwar Western malaise, and one of the cleverest exponents of a literature of ambiguity.â âfrom the Introduction by Peter Dunwoodie First published in 1946; now in translation by Matthew Ward.
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel GarcĂa MĂĄrquez
The rise and fall, birth and death, of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the BuendĂa family.
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Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury
First pub. 1954. Classic fable about a hazardous future world which condones the burning of books.
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Blindness
by JosĂŠ Saramago
A stunningly powerful novel of man's will to survive against all odds, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature. "This is a shattering work by a literary master."--The Boston Globe A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers--among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears--through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of man's worst appetites and weaknesses--and man's ultimately exhilarating spirit.
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On the Road
by Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouacâs classic American novel of freedom and the search for originality that defined a generation âAn authentic work of art.ââThe New York Times Inspired by Jack Kerouacâs adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naĂŻvetĂŠ and wild abandon and imbued with Kerouacâs love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hopeâa book that changed American literature and changed anyone who has ever picked it up.
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The Royal Game & Other Stories
by Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig gained early fame as a poet, translator, and biographer. When he added fiction to his repertoire, his work was critically acclaimed. However, Zweig has fallen into an undeserved obscurity, and unlike the works of his contemporaries and admirers--fellow Austrian and German writers such as Thomas Man, Herman Hesse, and Sigmund Freud--Zweig's writings have become almost completely unavailable to the English-speaking audience. The Royal Game and Other Stories is a collection of five of his brilliant creative achievements, revives Zweig's art, making it once again available to a wide range of readers. Spanning his entire career, the stories included-""The Royal Game,"" ""Amok,"" ""Letter from an Unknown Woman,"" ""The Burning Secret,"" and ""Fear""-each reveal an individual's passionate response to life. Toying with the theme of the mind left to itself, Zweig gives the reader everything from the story of a child's distrust of his mother to one of a man driven to insanity by his imaginary chess games. Zweig's enormous interest in psychology and psychological problems combine with early century settings to provide compelling stories that prove Zweig to be a master of psychological narrative. Through the years, the stories of Stefan Zweig have been hailed as intense and memorable psychological thrillers-adventures of the mind-with wide, universal appeal. The five masterpieces in this book reveal why Zweig has earned such praise, and should help his legacy continue on to a new generation of readers.
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Rhinoceros, and Other Plays
by Eugène Ionesco
A collection of three modern plays by the master of the absurd and member of the French Academy.
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The Complete Maus
by Art Spiegelman
The definitive edition of the graphic novel acclaimed as âthe most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaustâ (Wall Street Journal) and âthe first masterpiece in comic book historyâ (The New Yorker) ⢠PULITZER PRIZE WINNER ⢠One of Varietyâs âBanned and Challenged Books Everyone Should Readâ A brutally moving work of artâwidely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever writtenâMaus recounts the chilling experiences of the authorâs father during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats. Maus is a haunting tale within a tale, weaving the authorâs account of his tortured relationship with his aging father into an astonishing retelling of one of history's most unspeakable tragedies. It is an unforgettable story of survival and a disarming look at the legacy of trauma.
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