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A Classic Book January 2026 |
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Rebecca
by Daphne Du Maurier
The novel begins in Monte Carlo, where our heroine is swept off her feet by the dashing widower Maxim de Winter and his sudden proposal of marriage. Orphaned and working as a lady's maid, she can barely believe her luck. It is only when they arrive at his massive country estate that she realizes how large a shadow his late wife will cast over their lives - presenting her with a lingering evil that threatens to destroy their marriage from beyond the grave.
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100 Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendi a family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, and alive with unforgettable men and women -- brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul -- this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.
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Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
Austen's most popular novel, the unforgettable story of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. Few have failed to be charmed by the witty and independent spirit of Elizabeth Bennet in Austen's beloved classic Pride and Prejudice.
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The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early-twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance, and silence.
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The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.
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The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas
Thrown into prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and he becomes determined not only to escape, but also to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration.
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Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë
Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange, situated on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place years before. What unfolds is the tale of the intense love between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw.
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To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep South—and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatred.
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Botchan
by Natsume Soseki
One of Japan's most treasured novels--A hilarious tale about a young man's rebellion against the system in a country school, Natsume Soseki's Botchan has enjoyed a timeless popularity in Japan. The setting is Japan's deep south, where the author himself spent some time teaching English in a boys' school. Into this conservative world, with its social proprieties and established pecking order, breezes Botchan, down from the big city and with scant respect for either his elders or his noisy young charges. The result is a light, funny, fast-paced novel.
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Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley's timeless gothic novel presents the epic battle between man and monster at its greatest literary pitch. In trying to create life, the young student Victor Frankenstein unleashes forces beyond his control, setting into motion a long and tragic chain of events that brings Victor to the very brink of madness.
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Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
In this deeply compelling novel and epic milestone of American literature, a nameless narrator tells his story from the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.
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Little Women
by Louisa May Alcott
Little Women Louisa May Alcott Little Women or, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy is a novel by American author Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888). The novel follows the lives of four sisters - Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March - and is loosely based on the author's childhood experiences with her three sisters.
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Go Tell It on the Mountain
by James Baldwin
The story of John, a fourteen-year-old boy whose stepfather is a Pentecostal minister in Harlem in 1935, as he struggles to discover his own identity.
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Animal Farm
by George Orwell
Overworked, mistreated animals on a farm revolt and take control over it. They set out to create an ideal space brimming with the ideas of progress, justice, and equality only to result in an equally problematic environment. This makes the backdrop of one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned. With flarning idealism and stirring slogans, this book chronicles the evolution from revolution against tyranny to totalitarianism just as terrible. An allegory on the Soviet regime, Animal Farm was banned in the Eastern bloc and is one of the great political works of the 20th Century.
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Ceremony
by Leslie Marmon Silko
Tayo, a young Native American, has been a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, and the horrors of captivity have almost eroded his will to survive. His return to the Laguna Pueblo reservation only increases his feeling of estrangement and alienation. While other returning soldiers find easy refuge in alcohol and senseless violence, Tayo searches for another kind of comfort and resolution. Tayo's quest leads him back to the Indian past and its traditions, to beliefs about witchcraft and evil, and to the ancient stories of his people. The search itself becomes a ritual, a curative ceremony that defeats the most virulent of afflictions: despair.
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Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury
A book burner in a future fascist state finds out books are a vital part of a culture he never knew. He clandestinely pursues reading, until he is betrayed.
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The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
First published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads--driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity.
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The Catcher in the Rye
by J. D. Salinger
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caufield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days.
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Native Son
by Richard Wright
Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Native Son is the story of Bigger Thomas, a young Black man caught in a downward spiral after killing a young white woman in a brief moment of panic.
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Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order.
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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain
A classic American novel by Mark Twain, following the journey of a young boy, Huck Finn, and an escaped slave, Jim, down the Mississippi River in the antebellum South.
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