Title: Wuthering Heights
Author: Emily Brontë (1818 – 1848)
Published: 1847
Pages: 416 Pages
Structure: 34 chapters
Wuthering Heights is a turbulent novel that left me feeling like I had weathered a tempest of passion and revenge. At numerous times throughout this powerful book I felt anger and exasperation at the cruelty of the characters.
Title: War and Peace
Author: Leo Tolstoy
Published: 1869
Pages: 1,440 Pages
Translator: Anthony Briggs (2005)
Structure: 4 “volumes”, each split into up to 5 “parts”, each split into up to 30 chapters.
“War and Peace” is a rich and vast work of literature set during the Napoleonic Wars that gives an intimate insight into the upheaval caused by military conflict. For me it was a vivid multi-level experience that explored nations, families and individuals as they struggle for survival and search for meaning. Tolstoy refused to call it a novel, or a poem, or even a chronicle of history.
Title: The Revolt of the Angels
Author: Anatole France
Written: 1914
Translator: Emillie Jackson (1924)
Pages: 156
Structure: 35 chapters.
This fascinating novel is a modern retelling of the classic christian “War in Heaven” myth, set in 1914 Paris. It follows a guardian angel, Arcade, who after discovering a love for reading books about Theology and History, comes to the realization that the god in heaven that he has been serving since before time is actually a malevolent impostor.
Title: The Prince (Il Principe)
Author: Niccolò Machiavelli
Written: 1513
Translator: Tim Parks, 2009
Pages: 124
Structure: 26 chapters.
Fifteenth Century Italy was a turbulent place. After a life of exemplary diplomatic service, Niccolò Machiavelli found himself imprisoned, tortured, and on the verge of ruin following a change of political leadership in his country.
This book is an instruction manual that Machiavelli sent to the new leader, explaining how to gain political power, what was necessary to hang on to it, and how not to be a victim of circumstance. In a way, Machiavelli was saying “I have experience, I can be useful. Here is proof. Spare a kind thought for me.”
Title: The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung)
Author: Franz Kafka
Written: 1915
Translator: Michael Hofmann, 2007
Pages: 77
Structure: 3 chapters.
“When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed.”
What an unusual way to start a book! This strange, funny, sad, absurd, and alarming book is a powerful insight into what it’s like to live in a world where things can go wrong through no fault of our own, and we find ourselves rejected out of fear, and when we’re no longer useful.
Title: The Plague
Author: Albert Camus
Written: 1947
Translator: Robin Buss, 2001
Pages: 238
Structure: 5 “parts”.
“The Plague” is a beautifully written book which describes an outbreak of Bubonic Plague in the Algerian town of Oran in the 1940’s. But, as with most great books, it’s about much more than that.
Title: The Odyssey
Author: Homer
Written: circa 700 BCE
Translator: Emily Wilson, 2018
Pages: 582
Structure: 24 “books”, each about 400 to 900 lines (10 to 20 pages) long.
The Odyssey is a timeless tale about trying to return home. After fighting in a brutal war for a decade a brilliant but battered man, Odysseus, finds himself continually thwarted by misfortune for a second decade while he tries to come back to his family. At the same time his wife, Penelope, is harassed daily by suitors who try to convince her that her husband is dead and that she should marry one of them.
Title: The Brothers Karamazov
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Written: 1880
Translator: Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1988)
Pages: 796 Pages
Structure: 12 “Books” and an “Epilogue”, each consisting of up to fourteen chapters
After reading this book I feel like I have experienced a moral and spiritual tempest that has left destruction in its wake, and I am forced to ask how we are supposed to live when horrible things happen, innocent people suffer, and there are no clear resolutions to the conflicts that surround us.
Title: Three Doors to Death
Author: Rex Stout
Published: 1950
Pages: 219 Pages
Structure: 3 Novellas
I’ve never read a Murder Mystery before, but I’m glad I started with Rex Stout. This collection of three novellas was a fun introduction to the genre, and an entertaining holiday read.
Title: There are Rivers in the Sky
Author: Elif Shafak
Published: 2024
Pages: 483 Pages
Structure: 5 parts, numerous chapters.
This is one of the most beautifully crafted books I have ever read. Often whilst reading it, I asked aloud “how can this woman weave something so perfectly intricate with words? What sort of magic is this?”
Title: The Silmarillion
Author: J.R.R.Tolkien
Published: 1977
Pages: 358 Pages
Structure: 4 major sections, plus a series of tables, genealogies, index, and appendix
This is a difficult to read book which is also delightful. It is well worth the effort for anyone who is a lover of Tokien’s world of “Middle Earth”. The Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit were such successful books because they’re built on a massive mythic foundation. They’re like the top 10% of the proverbial iceberg. The other 90% is represented by the depth of epic detail in the Silmarillion.
Title: Faust. A Tragedy
Author: Johann von Goethe
Written: 1772 – 1831
Translator: Walter Kaufmann
Pages: 503 Pages
Structure: A play in two parts, 12,111 lines
“Faust” is an old German legend that has been retold many times by many different authors. It is based on the life of Dr Johann Faustus, a German magician and astrologer who lived in the fifteenth century.
We have been fascinated with his story for centuries. His legend has inspired music by Beethoven, Schubert, Verdi, Wagner, Mendelssohn, and many others. It has inspired literature by Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Mann, Oscar Wilde, Louisa M Alcott, Lord Byron, and Robert Louis Stevenson, to name a few. But the work that stands our among all these is the play “Faust” by Johann von Goethe, considered by many to be the greatest work of German literature.
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Title: The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha
Author: Miguel De Cervantes
Written: 1605, 1615
Translator: Edith Grossman
Pages: 940 Pages
Structure: Two “Parts”. Part 1 (1605): 87 Chapters. Part 2 (1615): 74 Chapters
I was shell-shocked after reading this book. How can something which, on the face of it, is a farcical comedy about the exploits of a mad man have such a huge impact? I sat there for ages afterwards trying to soak in this amazing story and realizing that in the folly of the protagonist I saw myself many times over.
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Title: The Left Hand of Darkness
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Pages: 304 Pages
Published: 1969
Structure: 20 Chapters and an appendix
Title: The Lord of the Rings
Author: J.R.R.Tolkien
Published: 1955
Pages: 1567 Pages
Structure: 6 “Books” each containing between 9 to 12 chapters, plus 6 appendices and 3 indexes, published in 3 volumes
Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” (LOTR) is a masterpiece – one of the greatest works of literature of the twentieth century. I have never read a book with so much depth in its world, and such broad and majestic themes.
Title: The Old Man and the Sea
Author: Ernest Hemmingway
Written: 1952
Pages: 99 Pages
Structure: No Chapters
How can such a short and simple story about an old man going fishing have so large an impact? Hemmingway’s “Old Man and the Sea” is one of the great stories of the twentieth century, earning the author the Nobel Prize for Literature shortly after it was published.
Title: The Grapes of Wrath
Author: John Steinbeck
Written: 1939
Pages: 476 Pages
Structure: 30 Chapters
This is one of the greatest books I have ever read. It’s a powerful masterpiece that made me rethink the meaning of words we use every day such as “justice”, “community” and “compassion”.
Title: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Author: Gabriel García Márquez
Written: 1967
Translator: Gregory Rabassa
Pages: 422 Pages
Structure: 20 Chapters
What a wonderfully unusual book!
Title: Beowulf
Author: Anonymous
Written: 750 CE
Pages: 213 Pages
Structure: An epic poem consisting of 3,182 lines
Beowulf is a wonderfully strange book.
Title: Anna Karenina
Author: Leo Tolstoy
Written: 1878
Pages: 747 Pages
Structure: 7 “parts”, each split into about 30 chapters.
“Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy is an overwhelming novel with huge themes. I feel dwarfed by it and can’t possibly do it justice by sharing my small thoughts.
