The truth about war, the truth that men on the front lines live every day, is full of absurdities and terrors that no one wants to talk about, but these two books look at war from two different perspectives, the darkly humorous with flashes of realism, and the realistic with flashes of absurd truth that make you laugh. . . or cry.

Catch-22

1961

by Joseph Heller

This black comedy about World War II Army Air Corps aviators attempting to survive the absurdities of military bureaucracy has become a part of the American collective consciousness.

All Quiet on the Western Front

1929

by Erich Maria Remarque

Though the war he describes is World War I, Remarque writes eloquently of all wars in this tale of a young German sent to fight in the trenches.

The future is what we make it, but two authors looked around and thought to themselves—we aren't going to make it very pretty if we keep going down this path. These two great dystopian novels present a dark look at the world we might create if the human race can't change.

Brave New World

1932

by Aldous Huxley

Huxley brilliantly satirizes contemporary society’s dehumanization in this grim novel of a future where the perfect society turns out to be less than perfect

Nineteen Eighty Four

1949

by George Orwell

Ignorance is strength and peace is war in Orwell’s darkly imaginative vision of a future controlled by Big Brother and the Thought Police.

Societies shift, and sometimes the focus is on the big picture: the changing politics and policies and borders on the map. But every political and social change catches people inside it, people who must learn to adapt to a new world or they find themselves crushed as history moves on without them.

Cry, the Beloved Country

1948

by Alan Paton

In beautiful prose, Paton relates the moving story of a Zulu minister who searches for his children in Johannesburg, only to learn that South African society has destroyed their lives.

Things Fall Apart

1959

by Chinua Achebe

Okonkwo struggles to get himself and his family through a constantly changing world as the tribes of Africa meet the early white explorers and missionaries.

The greatest of all human emotion is love. Sometimes it's tangled and leads to misery, but sometimes (just sometimes), love is the end goal that can make the misery and annoyance of life worth it, if we can just figure out how to fall in love without making a fool out of ourselves.

Pride and Prejudice

1813

by Jane Austen

A delightful comedy, these characters alternatively succeed and fail at life and love after an eligible bachelor moves in next to Bennet family and their five unmarried daughters.

Jane Eyre

1847

by Charlotte Bronte

Orphaned and left to her cold aunt, Jane is shipped off to Lowood charity school. Rather than breaking, she emerges far too headstrong for any woman of her day and age. But is she too headstrong for love?

These two novels take a brutal and honest look at characters who are basically good, but who are flawed and damaged, both by their own choices and by societies that have turned them into something darker and more cynical than they should be.

Beloved

1987

Toni Morrison

Sethe is an escaped slave in post-Civil War Ohio. Her body is scarred from whippings and her mind from the memory of Beloved, the child who didn't survive to escape with her.

Native Son

1940

Richard Wright

In Chicago of the 1930's, where Bigger Thomas murders a young white woman. Though the killing is accidental, it becomes a kind of retroactive act of defiance against a world that hates him.

Mysteries and thrillers are exciting, but they can also highlight the best and worst in society. Under pressure, some people shine and others show their weakness. Some government organizations function to protect the innocent, and some chew the innocent up in the name of bureaucracy.

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

1964

John le Carre

English spy named Alec Leamas undertakes a terrifying mission in the hope that it will be his last: He pretends to defect to East Germany, the better to infiltrate the enemy's espionage network.

Murder on the Orient Express

1934

Agatha Christie.

While traveling from Syria to Paris, the famous train, the Orient Express, is stopped by a snowdrift. In the cabin next to our detective, a man is brutally stabbed to death leading to questions of justice and revenge.

Love and reality are not always the best of friends. Relationships can grow strained and tangled when war and politics climb in bed with them. These may be love stories, but they're the type of love stories that might end up in a newspaper, not a romance novel.

My Antonia

1918

Willa Cather

This story focuses on Jim Burden, a young man who moves out to Nebraska after his parents' deaths. He falls in love with Antonia, the young daughter of new immigrants who can't seem to fit into life on the Nebraska frontier.

Love in the Time of Cholera

1985

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Florentino Ariza spots the young Fermina Daza and falls in love, courting her through letters only to have his heart crushed. The book then follows 50 years of love in all its imperfect glory .

What does it mean to be the hero and save the world? Sometimes you can only save individuals while the world burns, but these two novels of the French revolution take ridiculously different approaches to creating a hero that can counter the blood and slaughter of those dark days.

A Tale of Two Cities

1859

by Charles Dickens

Love and sacrifice, fear and denial, living long enough to see your own mistakes come back and bite you on the butt: it's all in this stunning novel set in the French revolution.

Scarlet Pimpernel

1903

Baroness Orczy

This classic novel features romance, dangerous missions and disguise. The Scarlet Pimpernel and his antics embarrass the French authorities by rescuing the French nobles. Get the original and not one of the sequels.

Sometimes the poor, the minorities, the oppressed become increasingly invisible. These books look at families, who because of circumstance, have become victims. Sometimes they are victims of those who would make money of another's suffering, and sometimes they're the victims of well-intended ignorance.

The Grapes of Wrath

1939

John Steinbeck

Storytelling at its finest, Steinbeck tells of an Oklahoma family, the Joads, who suffer discrimination and outright thievery during the Depression as they try to find the promised land where a man can earn enough to feed his family.

The Plum Plum Pickers

1969

Raymond Barrio

It emphasizes life in migrant camps and the working conditions of Chicano farm workers in the mid-1960's. Instead of improving, the money they earn only serves to trap them in a system of injustice.

These stories focus on the struggle to find (or hold on to) faith in God when life doesn't seem to be easy or even particularly fair. These feature strong main characters trying to find themselves and their faith through dark times that tempt them to simply give up.

Go Tell It on the Mountain

1952

James Baldwin

A young man finds himself struggling to find himself as he feels cut off from his father and God. John Grimes struggles to find a way to survive a difficult family situation and a crisis of religion.

The Color of Water

1996

James McBride

This is really two biographies: James, a young man lost when his step father unexpected dies, and Ruth, his mother who gave up everything to marry a black man and convert from Judism to Christianity in the 1930's.

Growing up is never easy, but there's not easy, and then there's *not easy.* In these two books, the main characters feel out of place in societies that just don't seem to have a place where they fit in, and that rejection is not just in their imaginations.

The Diary of a Young Girl

1947

Anne Frank

Anne Frank began to keep a diary on her thirteenth birthday, June 12, 1942, three weeks before she went into hiding with family as the Nazis invaded Amsterdam and began arresting and deporting Jews. She spent years in hiding as the World War II swept through Europe.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

1970

Maya Angelou

This is the autobiographical story of a young woman who feels lost, and when her parents reclaim her from the grandmother who has raised her, her life takes such a dark turn that she is in danger of losing herself altogether.

Horror novels tend to fall into two categories: blood & gore or books that shine the light on the darkness in our own psyche. These two classic horror novels are about the supernatural, but look again and you'll see that they're also about the twisted human mind.

Frankenstein

1818

Mary Shelley

A scientist learns how to reanimate flesh and creates a being in the likeness of man out of body parts taken from the dead (the scientist is Frankenstein, the monster isn't). But the ability to do something is not the same as the moral right to do it.

Dracula

1897

Bram Stoker

Set up as a set of letters, this is the story of the undead count who comes to London. The good versus evil tale with the famous Van Helsing as the vampire hunter, this is a classic story of horror.

Justice is an abstract concept that sometimes gets lost in prejudice, hatred, or revenge. In these novels, justice doesn't just get lost, it outright vanishes as revenge sets everything in motion, but whether things end badly depends on whether the protagonists can overcome what has happened to them.

The Fixer

1966

Bernard Malamud

After becoming the victim of a anti-Semitic conspiracy, Yakov Bok gets sent to a Russian prison for killing a child, a crime he definitely didn't commit. He only has his will and hope to sustain him.

The Count of Monte Cristo

1844

Alexandre Dumas

Edmond Dantès has a life that anyone would envy: great job, great girl, and great friends. Only, his friends aren't that good and they set him up to go to jail. He vows revenge… if he can ever get out of jail.