QotD: What five books should every person read?
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald "First published on April 10, 1925, it is set on Long Island's North Shore and in New York City during the summer of 1922 and is a critique of the American Dream. The novel chronicles an era that Fitzgerald himself dubbed the "Jazz Age". Following the shock and chaos of World War I, American society enjoyed unprecedented levels of prosperity during the "roaring" 1920s as the economy soared. Although Fitzgerald, like Nick Carraway in his novel, idolized the riches and glamor of the age, he was uncomfortable with the unrestrained materialism and the lack of morality that went with it, a kind of decadence."
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding One of my favorite all time books. "An allegorical novel by a Nobel Prize-winning author, it dissects how culture created by man fails, using as an example a group of British schoolboys stuck on a deserted island who try to govern themselves, but with disastrous results. Its stances on the already controversial subjects of human nature and individual welfare versus the common good."
- Ulysses by James Joyce "One of the most important works of Modernist literature, it has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement". Ulysses chronicles the passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin during an ordinary day, June 16, 1904. The title parallels and alludes to Odysseus (Latinised into Ulysses), the hero of Homer's Odyssey. Ulysses totals about 265,000 words from a vocabulary of 30,030 words (including proper names, plurals and various verb tenses), divided into 18 "episodes"... "
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck "Published in 1939 by Steinbeck, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on a poor family of sharecroppers, the Joads, driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, and changes in the agriculture industry. Steinbeck scholar John Timmerman sums up the book's impact: "The Grapes of Wrath may well be the most thoroughly discussed novel - in criticism, reviews, and college classrooms - of twentieth century American literature." Part of its impact stemmed from its passionate depiction of the plight of the poor, and in fact, many of Steinbeck's contemporaries attacked his social and political views."
- Animal Farm by George Orwell A dystopian novella in the form of an allegory; published in England on 17 August 1945, the book reflects events leading up to and during the Stalin era before World War II. The novel addresses not only the corruption of the revolution by its leaders but also how wickedness, indifference, ignorance, greed and myopia destroy any possibility of a Utopia."
summaries via wikipedia
So really, I'm terrible at limits as there is also: 1984, Gone with the Wind, Lolita, Catch-22, On the Road, A Farewell to Arms, The Sound and the Fury, Don Quixote, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Moby Dick, Romeo & Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, War and Peace, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and all the rest (a good number of which I should read again)...
