Mar 30, 2020
With time on your hands, why not dive into the world of classics you have always wanted to read? Many are available in ebook format! Many were made into movies.
Charles Dickens Dive into the the world of a Tale of Two Cities and the French Revolution, or Oliver Twist and the streets of London in the 1800s, or Great Expectations, the story of the orphan Pip.
Jane Austen Jane Austen’s characters face challenges that do not age. Think of Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, and Mansfield Park.
Fyodor Dostoevsky Crime and Punishment is one of the world's first psychological thrillers. The Brothers Karamazov shows Dostoevsky’s power to depict Russian character and his understanding of human nature. Notes from a Dead House is the first great prison memoir: Fyodor Dostoevsky's fictionalized account of his life-changing penal servitude in Siberia.
Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. War and Peace is set during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812.
Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë These sisters led brief lives, but their books live on today. They wrote Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Agnes Grey. You can also borrow a biography of the sisters that explores the turbulent lives of the three literary siblings and the oppressive times in which they lived.
George Eliot Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life is exactly what it claims. Its multiple plots centre around the inhabitants of a fictitious Midlands town and their evolving relationships to each other. It is critical of social class, ambition and marriage, and religion.
Herman Melville Moby-Dick is a timeless allegory and an epic saga of heroic determination and conflict. At its heart is the powerful, unknowable sea -- and Captain Ahab, a brooding, one-legged fanatic who has sworn vengeance on the mammoth white whale that crippled him.
Jules Verne Jules Verne’s adventures continue to be exciting reads: Around the World in Eighty Days, set in 1872 before cars and planes, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with Captain Nemo and his giant submarine, and A Journey to the Center of the Earth, the fantastic descent through a dormant volcano into a subterranean world.
Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls are set in 1920s in Spain, and The Old Man and the Sea is the story of a Cuban fisherman.
Aldous Huxley Brave New World, a powerful work of speculative fiction that has enthralled and terrified readers for generations, it remains remarkably relevant to this day.
John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men, Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row, and East of Eden, stories that are often heart-wrenching.
George Orwell Enjoy 1984 and Animal Farm, pictures of totalitarian and Soviet states.
Pearl S. Buck Novels set in early 20th century China, where Buck lived, including The Good Earth, a Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling first book in a trilogy.
Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness is a critique of imperialism. It can either be read as an adventure story of a young man's exploits in a foreign mysterious continent or a physiological thriller of another man's descent into madness.
Kurt Vonnegut Drawing on Vonnegut's own experience as a prisoner of war in WWII in Dresden, Germany, Slaughterhouse-Five is an absurdist time-travel story.
French authors, in English or French
Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary is a portrait of a woman who simply succumbs to an utterly brutal fate. Although it's horrifying to watch the inevitable, almost Greek-tragedy-like fall of Emma's fortunes, it's also completely mesmerizing. A translation.
Victor Hugo Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, or Notre Dame de Paris.
Emile Zola The Belly of Paris, Le Rêve, and Son Excellence Eugène Rougon.
Alexandre Dumas Swashbuckling adventure stories: The Count of Monte Cristo, Georges, The Three Musketeers / Les trois mousquetaires, The Lady of the Camelias, The Black Tulip.
Have you enjoyed other classics in ebook format in the OPL catalogue? Share them in the Comments box below!
Blog post prepared by Jill in Program Development