Title: Lavinia
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Published: 2008
Pages: 288
Imagine discovering that you were a character in a story, and that you could converse with the poet who “wrote” you. How would that change you?
“Lavinia” by Ursula Le Guin is a delightful retelling of the latter half of Virgil’s Aeneid from the perspective of the Latin princess over whose marriage a war is fought, but with the added twist that Lavinia knows that she’s in a story.
Title: The Handmaid’s Tale
Author: Margaret Atwood
Published: 1985
Pages: 311
Structure: 46 chapters in 15 sections, plus “Historical Notes on The Handmaid’s Tale”
The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian novel about a woman’s experience in what was once the north-eastern United States after a coup has imposed a Christian fundamentalist theocracy. I found it both frightening and compelling, and could not put it down.
Title: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1: Swann’s Way
Author: Marcel Proust
Published: 1913
Pages: 379
Structure: 3 parts
Swann’s Way is the most challenging book that I have read, and the most descriptive. It is, however, merely the first of seven volumes in a work recognised by Guinness World Records as the world’s longest novel. There is very little plot, sections of it are incredibly dense, with complex sentences that continue for more than a page, and it took me two attempts in six months to finish just the first volume. So why read it?
Title: How to Love the World
Author: Ilka Tampke
Published: 2026
Pages: 336
Structure: 45 chapters in two parts
A large branch falls on a woman walking alone in the Australian bush and pins her to the ground. Seriously injured, in pain and unsure whether she will survive, she lies there over the course of a day while her life passes before her. She is forced to confront the question: “Why should you live?”
Title: Great Expectations
Author: Charles Dickens
First published in book form: 1861
Pages: 672 pages (Barnes & Noble edition)
Structure: 59 chapters in three stages
How do our hopes affect the course of our lives? Can our “Expectations” change who we become? What happens when those hopes are dashed?
Great Expectations answers these questions through Pip, who tells us his life story, from his earliest memories as an orphan living with his sister and her blacksmith husband, Joe, on the North Kent marshes near the mouth of the Thames in nineteenth-century England.
Title: To the Lighthouse
Author: Virginia Woolf
Published: 1927
Pages: 209 pages (Harcourt edition)
Structure: 42 chapters in three parts
On the surface, this novel describes a simple event: a trip to a lighthouse which is postponed, and then finally undertaken ten years later. But it is a rich experience which allows us to inhabit the thoughts and feelings of several different people over that period. I was surprised by how immersive that experience was.
Title: Ulysses
Author: James Joyce
Published: 1922
Pages: 1,040 pages (Penguin Classics Hardback)
Structure: Eighteen Episodes in three parts
What a strangely wonderful book!
I have never read anything like Ulysses by James Joyce before. I have no idea how to describe it in one sentence. Vast, intimidating, funny, life-affirming – it is all of these things, but crafted in such an ingenious way.
Title: Heart of Darkness
Author: Joseph Conrad
Written: 1899
Pages: 188 pages
Structure: Three Chapters.
Heart of Darkness is a chilling story set in the Nineteenth Century about corruption and colonialism on the Congo River, told by Charles Marlow, the captain of a river steamboat. By the end of it, I wondered whether the darkness that Conrad spoke about throughout the novella was in our own hearts rather than in the dark jungles of the Congo.
Title: Mrs Dalloway
Author: Virginia Woolf
Written: 1925
Pages: 224
Structure: No chapters.
What does it feel it like to be a middle-aged woman in 1920’s London? Or a traumatised war veteran battling insanity? Or dissatisfied playboy who never really got over being rejected by the love of his life? Mrs Dalloway answers these questions in an intimate way, allowing us to dwell in the minds of different people for one day in June 1922, flitting from mind to mind like a telepathic butterfly.
It’s one of the most unusual novels I have read, and one of the most rewarding.
Title: Middlemarch. A Study of Provincial Life
Author: George Eliot
Written: 1872
Pages: 912
Structure: Prelude, 86 Chapters, Finale, in eight “Books”.
Middlemarch surprised me. It’s brilliantly clever: intimate, and vast at the same time. On the surface it is about life in a small provincial town in the English Midlands around 1830, but under the surface it explores the hopes, motivations and frustrations of people just like us. We can understand what drives each of the characters, even though we may disagree with them. The result feels more than a story, it is almost a detailed philosophy our own minds.
Title: The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Author: Thornton Wilder
Written: 1927
Pages: 255
Structure: Five Parts
In this beautiful novel, an Inca rope bridge collapses in Peru in 1714, killing five people. This leads the priest who witnessed the disaster to ask questions about the lives of the victims as he tries to come to terms with why God allowed these people to die.
Title: Northanger Abbey
Author: Jane Austen
Written: 1799
Published: 1818 (Posthumously)
Pages: 251
Structure: 31 Chapters in two volumes
Northanger Abbey is a delightful coming-of-age story about a young woman exploring the world of eighteenth-century England. Although it is both comical and satirical, I was surprised at how engaged I became with the heroine.
Title: The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince)
Author: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Written: 1943
Pages: 160
Structure: A novella with 27 Chapters
Is this a children’s book, or is it a masterfully written work of philosophy which challenges the way we observe the world? Either way you approach it, “The Little Prince” is a magical creation which has much to teach those who are either young, or young at heart.
Title: Cat’s Cradle
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Written: 1963
Pages: 306
Structure: A novel with 127 Chapters
Cat’s Cradle is a fascinating story about the end of the world, told with Kurt Vonnegut’s classic dry wit and gentle sarcasm.
Title: The Book of Two Ways
Author: Jodi Picoult
Written: 2020
Pages: 417
Structure: A novel in 15 Chapters plus notes and bibliography
What does it mean to live a good life? What is a good death? Is there only one true path for us to follow, or are there a variety of good decisions that we can make? “The Book of Two Ways” explores these ideas in the context of Egyptology, Quantum Mechanics, and tangled relationships.
Title: In Dreams and other stories
Author: Andrew Leggett
Written: 2026
Pages: 211
Structure: A novel in 24 chapters, plus seven short stories
Set in inner-city Brisbane, In Dreams is both beautiful and deeply unsettling. It combines lyrical poetry with scenes of shocking violence, all wrapped in an atmosphere of gathering dread.
Title: The Idiot (Идиот)
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Written: 1869
Translator: David McDuff (2004)
Pages: 732 Pages
Structure: 4 “Parts”, each consisting of up to sixteen chapters
Is it possible to live a perfectly good and innocent life in a hostile society? If you did, what sort of effect would you have on the world? How would it affect you?
In “The Idiot”, Fyodor Dostoyevsky asks these painful questions by placing a simple but good man in the midst of the worldly selfishness of nineteenth century Russia, and then examining the consequences of the ensuing conflict.
Title: Antigone
Author: Sophocles (circa 440 BCE)
Translator: Robert Fagles (1982)
Structure: A play consisting of 1,470 lines
Antigone is a powerful Greek tragedy about civil disobedience, and the abuse of political power. Although it is set during a civil war that occurred almost two and a half thousand years ago, it is as relevant today as it was then.
Title: Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus
Author: Mary Shelley (1797 – 1851)
Pages: 352
Structure: 24 Chapters
Frankenstein is where it all started. The mad scientist, the evil laugh on a stormy night, the experiment that went wrong, the man who dared to discover forbidden knowledge: these are all tropes that were born of the ingenious imagination of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.
Title: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Author: Anonymous (circa 1370)
Translator: Simon Armitage (2007)
Pages: 198
Structure: 4 “Fitts”, 101 Stanzas, 2,530 lines
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a delightful fourteenth-century epic poem set in the time of King Arthur’s court and tells of the quest undertaken by a young knight in response to a challenge from a mysterious Green Knight.
