Books I was forced to read--and found I really liked
Discover the books I was forced to read—and ended up loving! Explore this surprising list of must-read titles that turned into unexpected favorites.

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Nineteen Eighty-four
by George Orwell
Eternal warfare is the price of bleak prosperity in this satire of totalitarian barbarism.

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Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
Catch-22 is like no other novel. It is one of the funniest books ever written, a keystone work in American literature, and even added a …

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The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
The "brilliant, funny, meaningful novel" (The New Yorker) that established J. D. Salinger as a leading voice in American literature--and that has instilled in millions …

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The Great Gatsby
by Francis Scott Fitzgerald
Tells the tragic love story of Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan.


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Beowulf
by Seamus Heaney
Presents a new translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic chronicling the heroic adventures of Beowulf, the Scandinavian warrior who saves his people from the ravages of …

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Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
Dark allegory describes the narrator's journey up the Congo River and his meeting with, and fascination by, Mr. Kurtz, a mysterious personage who dominates the …
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The Crucible
by Arthur Miller
A haunting examination of groupthink and mass hysteria in a rural community The place is Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, an enclave of rigid piety huddled …

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The Aeneid
by Virgil
"Fitzgerald's [translation] is so decisively the best modern Aeneid that it is unthinkable that anyone will want to use any other version for a long …
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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll
First published in 1865, these endearing tales of an imaginative child's dream world by Lewis Carroll, pen name for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, are written with …

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The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under--maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath …
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Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession …


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A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel of love during wartime. Written when Ernest Hemingway was thirty years old and lauded as the best American novel to emerge …

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Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
“A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” …

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All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque
The masterpiece of the German experience during World War I, considered by many the greatest war novel of all time—with an Oscar–winning film adaptation now …

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One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez
The rise and fall, birth and death, of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family.