Novels are packed with romance, adventure, tragedy, and so much more. We are held in suspense. The pages fly by. Or, perhaps, the reading is slow, as you savor every line. Every author is different, but the great novels are always worth reading. Spoil yourself. Delve into the greatest classic novels. Here's a list of a few...
1. The Awakening - Kate Chopin
The Awakening is a novel by Kate Chopin. The book was published in 1899, and it centers around Edna Pontellier. She is a young wife and mother until she begins to awaken to herself (who she is and what she wants) while on vacation in Grand Isle, Louisiana. Many readers have very strong opinions about this novel. But, whether you love The Awakening or hate it, the novel is an important work in American literature--representative of Realism, Local Color, Regionalism, and Feminist literature.
2. Brave New World
In a futuristic society based on pleasure without moral repercussions, Aldous Huxley places a few oddball characters to stir up the plot. With eugenics at its core, this novel hearkens back to Shakespeare's The Tempest, where Miranda says, "O brave new world, that hath such people in it." Aldous Huxley published Brave New World in 1932. He was already established as a drama critic and novelist of such books as Crome Yellow (1921), Point Counter Point (1928), and Do What You Will (1929). He also was well-known to many of the other great writers of his day, including the members of the Bloomsbury Group (Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, etc.) and D.H. Lawrence.
3. Don Quixote
What can anyone say about Don Quixote that hasn't been said? The book's been around for four hundred years, has inspired virtually every literary movement from the eighteenth-century picaresque to the most obscure works of twenty-first century post modernism, and has provided the impetus for critical works by everyone from Thackeray to Ortega y Gasset.4. The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby is probably F. Scott Fitzgerald's greatest novel--a book that offers damning and insightful views of the American nouveau riche in the 1920s. The Great Gatsby is an American classic and a wonderfully evocative work.
5. The History of Tom Jones, Foundling
The History of Tom Jones, Foundling is an eighteenth-century comic novel. With the works of Samuel Richardson and Daniel Defoe, this novel is part of the early canon that defined the novel genre in English. The novel mixes slapstick comedy with farce, and it's also a satire of the England of Henry Fielding's time--delivered with good humor and a deft lightness of touch.
6. A Moveable Feast
A Moveable Feast is a softer novel-cum-memoir, a story of a young artist--impoverished and living in Paris. The book is also tribute to the numerous characters he meets. Hemingway projects himself to us as a young man. He examines his younger self--his foibles--but we also get a sense of nostalgia for the struggle and hardship that characterized his introduction into a writer's life in literature. The book is often hilariously funny, as well as incredibly touching. The novel is a tour of many of the great figures in modern literary history, and a remarkable evocation of their bohemian lifestyle.
7. A Passage to India
E.M. Forster's A Passage to India was written at a time when the end of the British colonial presence in India was becoming a very real possibility. The novel now stands in the canon of English literature as one of the truly great discussions of that colonial presence. But, the novel also demonstrates how friendships attempt (though often failing) to span the gap between the English colonizer and the Indian colonized.
8. The Three Musketeers
The Three Musketeers was written by one of the foremost French story-tellers of the nineteenth century, Alexandre Dumas, and is a rip-roaring adventure. The novel concentrates on the adventures that four men undertake (three seasoned musketeers and a young recruit, D'Artagnan).
9. To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee's coming-of-age tale, To Kill a Mockingbird, is set in the Deep South, and is a searing portrayal of race and prejudice told through the eyes of a little girl. Filled with atmospheric evocations of life in the 1930s and a moral and caring sensibility, the novel is both a brilliant rendering of a specific time and place as well as a universal tale of how understanding can triumph over old and evil mindsets.
