This is a list of reads that I have done in my graduate studies that have been some of my favorites. There are so many classics out there, and this is only a short list of amazing classics. My academic goal is to build up my classic bookshelf to include many more amazing authors. As that bookshelf grows, I will share them here.
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Description:
“This is a troubling story of crime, sin, guilt, punishment, and expiation, set in the rigid moral climate of 17th century New England. The young mother of an illegitimate child confronts her Puritan judges.
However, it is not so much her harsh sentence, but the cruelties of slowly exposed guilt as her lover is revealed, that hold the reader enthralled all the way to the book’s poignant climax” -Wordsworth Classics
Question to Consider:
Does The Scarlet Letter portray Hester’s or Dimmesdale’s story? — I ask this because there as an impromptus class debate when one person in the class mentioned that The Scarlet Letter portrayed Dimmesdale’s story. What are your thoughts? This could be a research paper topic to consider.
Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time by Fanny Fern
Description:
“In Ruth Hall, Fanny Fern drew heavily on her own experiences: the death of her first child and her beloved husband, a bitter estrangement from her critical and unsupportive family, and her struggle to make a living as a writer. Her heroine, too, suffers an early widowhood and is forced to create a life that defies traditional assumptions about a woman’s independence and her place in society. Although Fern herself eventually remarried, she chooses a different path for Ruth, and eschewing the usual ‘happy ending’ wedding expected by readers of the popular fiction of the period, presents a new kind of heroine: a single mother who enjoys a successful career as a journalist, a comfortable income, and a formidable bank account. Written as a series of short vignettes and snatches of overheard conversation, Ruth Hall is an unconventional in style as in substance and is strikingly modern in impact” -Penguin Classics
Question to Consider:
Why does Nathaniel Hawthorne like Ruth Hall?
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Description:
“First published in 1952 and immediately hailed as a masterpiece, Invisible Man is one of those rare novels that have changed the shape of American literature. For not only does Ralph Ellison’s nightmare journey across the racial divide tell unparalleled truths about the nature of bigotry and its effects on the minds of both victims and perpetrators, it gives us an entirely new model of what a novel can be.
As he journeys from the Deep South to the streets and basements of Harlem, from a horrifying ‘battle royal’ where black men are reduced to fighting animals, to a Communist rally where they are elevated to the status of trophies, Ralph Ellison’s nameless protagonist ushers readers into a parallel universe that throws our own into harsh and even hilarious relief. Suspenseful and sardonic, narrated in a voice that takes in the symphonic range of the American language, black and white, Invisible Man is one of the most audacious and dazzling novels of our century” –Vintage International
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Description:
“Jane Eyre (originally published as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography) is a novel by English writer Charlotte Brontë. It was published on 16 October 1847 by Smith, Elder & Co. of London, England, under the pen name “Currer Bell.” The first American edition was released the following year by Harper & Brothers of New York. Primarily of the bildungsroman genre, Jane Eyre follows the emotions and experiences of its title character, including her growth to adulthood, and her love for Mr. Rochester, the byronic master of fictitious Thornfield Hall. In its internalisation of the action — the focus is on the gradual unfolding of Jane’s moral and spiritual sensibility and all the events are coloured by a heightened intensity that was previously the domain of poetry — Jane Eyre revolutionised the art of fiction. Charlotte Brontë has been called the ‘first historian of the private consciousness’ and the literary ancestor of writers like Joyce and Proust. The novel contains elements of social criticism, with a strong sense of morality at its core, but is nonetheless a novel many consider ahead of its time given the individualistic character of Jane and the novel’s exploration of classism, sexuality, religion, and proto-feminism” —Amazon.com
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
Description:
“George Willard is a young reporter on the Winesburg Eagle to whom, one by one, the inhabitants of tiny Winesburg, Ohio, confide their hopes, their dreams, and their fears. This town of friendly but solitary people comes to life as Anderson’s special talent exposes the emotional undercurrents that bind its people together. In this timeless cycle of short stories, he lays bare the life of a small town in the American Midwest” –Penguin Classics
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
Description:
“With more than two million copies in print, The Things They Carried is a classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene. It is a groundbreaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling” –Mariner
The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler
Description:
“Macon Leary is a travel writer who hates both travel and anything out of the ordinary. He is grounded by loneliness and unwillingness to compromise his creature comforts. Then he meets Muriel, a deliciously peculiar dog-obedience trainer who upends Macon’s insular world–and thrusts him headlong into a remarkable engagement with life” –Ballantine Books
Coming Clean by Kimberly Rae Miller
Description:
“Kim Miller is an immaculately put-together woman with a great career, a loving boyfriend, and a tidy apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. You would never guess that Kim grew up behind the closed doors of her family’s idyllic Long Island house, navigating between teetering stacks of aging newspapers, broken computers, and boxes upon boxes of unused junk festering in every room — the product of her father’s painful and unending struggle with hoarding. Coming Clean is a story about recognizing where we come from and the relationships that define us — and about finding peace in the homes we make for ourselves” –Amazon Publishing
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
Description:
“Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world — conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her story collection Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri brilliantly illuminates the immigrant experience and the tangled ties between generations” –Mariner
Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
Description:
“From one of the most brilliant and influential lawyers of our time comes an unforgettable true story about the redeeming potential of mercy. Bryan Stevenson was a gifted young attorney when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending the poor, the wrongly condemned, and those trapped in the furthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man sentenced to die for a notorious murder he didn’t commit. The case drew Stevenson into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship-and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever” –Spiegel & Grau
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Description:
“One of the most important works of twentieth-century American literature, Zora Neale Hurston’s beloved 1937 classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is an enduring Southern love story sparkling with wit, beauty, and heartfelt wisdom. Told in the captivating voice of a woman who refuses to live in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams, it is the story of fair-skinned, fiercely independent Janie Crawford, and her evolving selfhood through three marriages and a life marked by poverty, trials, and purpose. A true literary wonder, Hurston’s masterwork remains as relevant and affecting today as when it was first published–perhaps the most widely read and highly regarded novel in the entire canon of African American literature” –Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Description:
“Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Azar Nafisi, a bold and inspired teacher, secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. Some of the women came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; some had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they removed their veils and began to speak more freely–their stories intertwining with the novels they were reading by Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabakov. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, as fundamentalists seized hold of the universities and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the women in Nafisi’s living room spoke not only of the books they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments.
Azar Nafisi’s luminous masterwork gives us a rare glimpse, from the inside, of women’s lives in revolutionary Iran. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a work of great passion and poetic beauty, a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny, and a celebration of the liberating power of literature” –Random House
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrehreich
Description:
“Nickel and Dimed is a publishing phenomenon that has sold more than two million copies. Funny, poignant, and passionate, this revelatory firsthand account of life in the low-wage America–the story of Barbara Ehrenreich’s attempts to eke out a living while working as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart associate–has become an essential part of the national discourse. Now, in a new afterword, Ehrenreich explains why, ten years on in America, Nickel and Dimed is more relevant than ever” –Picador
H. J. Ortiz 