Rorys Reading List: Old School Faves 2
Explore Rory's Reading List: Old School Faves 2 for a curated collection of timeless book recommendations. Discover classic must-reads and beloved favorites perfect for any book lover.
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Cousin Bette
by Honoré de Balzac
Cousin Bette (1846) is considered to be Balzac's last great novel, and a key work in his Human Comedy. Set in the Paris of the 1830s and 1840s, it is a complex tale of the devastating effect of violent jealousy and sexual passion. Against a meticulously detailed backdrop of a post-Napoleonic France struggling with massive industrial and economic change, Balzac's characters span many classes of society, from impoverished workers and wealthy courtesans to successful businessmen and official dignitaries. The tragic outcome of the novel is relieved by occasional flashes of ironic comedy and the emergence of a younger generation which has come to terms with the new political and econimic climate. This new translation by Sylvia Raphael has an Introduction by David Bellos which sets the novel in its social, historical, and literary context. - ;This new translation has an Introduction which sets the novel in its social, historical, and literary context. -
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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Classic literature of duality between good and evil.
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Uncle Tom's Cabin
by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Uncle Tom, Topsy, Sambo, Simon Legree, little Eva: their names are American bywords, and all of them are characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's remarkable novel of the pre-Civil War South. Uncle Tom's Cabin was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and for its presentation of Tom, "a man of humanity," as the first black hero in American fiction. Labeled racist and condescending by some contemporary critics, it remains a shocking, controversial, and powerful work -- exposing the attitudes of white nineteenth-century society toward "the peculiar institution" and documenting, in heartrending detail, the tragic breakup of black Kentucky families "sold down the river." An immediate international sensation, Uncle Tom's Cabin sold 300,000 copies in the first year, was translated into thirty-seven languages, and has never gone out of print: its political impact was immense, its emotional influence immeasurable.
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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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Time and Again
by Jack Finney
Simon Morley is selected by a secret government agency to test Einstein's theory of the past co-existing with the present and is transported back to 1880s New York.
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Awakening
by Kate Chopin
"She grew daring and reckless. Overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out. Where no woman had swum before."
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Flowers for Algernon
by Daniel Keyes
A mentally retarded adult has a brain operation that turns him into a genius.
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A Separate Peace
by John Knowles
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read. An American classic and great bestseller for over thirty years, A Separate Peace is timeless in its description of adolescence during a period when the entire country was losing its innocence to World War II. Set at a boys' boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, A Separate Peace is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. Gene is a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas is a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete. What happens between the two friends one summer, like the war itself, banishes the innocence of these boys and their world.
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith
A young girl from an impoverished family comes of age in Brooklyn at the turn of the twentieth-century.
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Sethe. Proud and beautiful, she escaped from slavery but is haunted by its heritage - from the fires of the flesh to the heartbreaking challenges to the spirit.
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Complete Tales & Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
by Edgar Allan Poe
One of the most original American writers, Edgar Allan Poe shaped the development of both the detectvie story and the science-fiction story. Some of his poems—"The Raven," "The Bells," "Annabel Lee"—remain among the most popular in American literature. Poe's tales of the macabre still thrill readers of all ages. Here are familiar favorites like "The Purloined Letter," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," together with less-known masterpieces like "The Imp of the Perverse," "The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym," and "Ligeia," which is now recognized as one of the first science-fiction stories, a total of seventy-three tales in all, plus fifty-three poems and a generous sampling of Poe's essays, criticism and journalistic writings.
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Hamlet
by William Shakespeare
Folger's Shakespeare Library presents these definitive editions of Shakespeare's classic tragedies, featuring scene-by-scene plot summaries, full explanatory notes, and much more. Original. (Plays/Drama)
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ID: 0394720288
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Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury
Guy Montag is a fireman, his job is to burn books, which are forbidden.
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Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray
William Makepeace Thackeray's classic tale of class, society, and corruption, soon to be an Amazon mini-series starring Olivia Cooke No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her sentimental companion Amelia, however, longs only for caddish soldier George. As the two heroines make their way through the tawdry glamour of Regency society, battles—military and domestic—are fought, fortunes made and lost. The one steadfast and honourable figure in this corrupt world is Dobbin with his devotion to Amelia, bringing pathos and depth to Thackeray's gloriously satirical epic of love and social adventure.
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The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hailed by Henry James as "the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the country," Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter reaches to our nation's historical and moral roots for the material of great tragedy. Set in an early New England colony, the novel shows the terrible impact a single, passionate act has on the lives of three members of the community: the defiant Hester Prynne; the fiery, tortured Reverend Dimmesdale; and the obsessed, vengeful Chillingworth. With The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne became the first American novelist to forge from our Puritan heritage a universal classic, a masterful exploration of humanity's unending struggle with sin, guilt and pride.