Snooty List - Harvard Bookstores Top Ten
Explore the Snooty List - Harvard Bookstores' Top Ten must-read books. Discover curated literary picks from Harvard's finest bookstores for the discerning reader.
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A People's History of the United States
by Howard Zinn
Chronicles United States history from a grassroots perspective and provides an analysis of important events from 1492 through the current war on terrorism.
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The New York Trilogy
by Paul Auster
The remarkable, acclaimed series of interconnected detective novels City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room, from New York Times bestselling author Paul Auster “Exhilarating . . . a brilliant investigation of the storyteller’s art guided by a writer-detective who’s never satisfied with just the facts.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer City of Glass: As a result of a strange phone call in the middle of the night, Quinn, a writer of detective stories, becomes enmeshed in a case more puzzling than any he might have written. Ghosts: Blue, a student of Brown, has been hired by White to spy on Black. From a window of a rented room on Orange Street, Blue keeps watch on his subject, who is across the street, staring out of his own window. The Locked Room: Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and a cache of extraordinary novels, plays, and poems. What happened to him and why is the narrator, Fanshawe’s boyhood friend, lured obsessively into his life? Moving at the breathless pace of a thriller, this is a uniquely stylized trilogy of detective novels that The Washington Post Book World has classified as “post-existential private eye. . . . It’s as if Kafka has gotten hooked on the gumshoe game and penned his own ever-spiraling version.”
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The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon
Oedipa Maas finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy.
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The Lord of the Rings
by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
Presents the epic depicting the Great War of the Ring, a struggle between good and evil in Middle Earth.
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Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
Retells the classic story of an orphaned young woman who accepts employment as a governess and soon finds herself in love with her employer.
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Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
The most famous and controversial novel from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century tells the story of Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. “The conjunction of a sense of humor with a sense of horror [results in] satire of a very special kind.”—The New Yorker One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in Lolita, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsession for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is a meditation on love—love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.
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Nineteen Eighty-four
by George Orwell
Eternal warfare is the price of bleak prosperity in this satire of totalitarian barbarism.
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The rise and fall, birth and death, of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the BuendĂa family.
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The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
J.D. Salinger's classic of adolescent angst is now available for the first time in trade paperback. Holden Caulfield, knowing he is to be expelled from school, decides to leave early. He spends three days in New York City and tells the story of what he did and suffered there.