Reading These 10 Classic Novels Won’t Feel Like Homework

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin (1953)

Penguin Random House

Baldwin had so many identities — essayist (Notes of a Native Son, 1955), civil rights activist, famous American expat in France, gay icon (see his novel Giovanni’s Room, 1956) — that it can be easy to forget this brilliant work of fiction. His first and most autobiographical published book, Go Tell It on the Mountain focuses on a day in the life of John Grimes, a 14-year-old boy in 1935 Harlem, and uses flashbacks to fill in his family’s Great Migration backstory. Baldwin explores John’s sexuality, his place in the Pentecostal church, his reality as a Black teen marginalized by his poverty and race, and his domination by a cruel preacher father. Time listed it among the 100 best novels of all time, noting that the stories of John and his family members “run dark and deep, while the fierce music of Baldwin’s voice courses through those stories and lends them majesty.”

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)

Simon and Schuster

Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf’s modernist breakthrough, has rightly drawn attention this year for turning 100, but don’t overlook her later novel, To the Lighthouse, a moving meditation on time, love and connection. Divided into three parts, it’s centered around a wealthy family’s summer retreats to the Isle of Skye in Scotland in 1910 and 1920. Circumstances change for Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, their eight children, and a handful of friends and acquaintances in the ten-year span between visits — a span that includes the First World War and its aftermath. The stream-of-consciousness, omniscient point of view jumps from the empath Mrs. Ramsay to her children, her husband, their guests and a housekeeper. In the introduction to a 1981 printing, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Eudora Welty wrote that Woolf “has shown us the shape of the human spirit.”  

1984 by George Orwell (1949)

Penguin Random House

This dystopian story set in an authoritarian state that evokes the Stalin-era Soviet Union helped Orwell join a small club of authors like Dickens and Kafka whose names have been adjectivized. The book’s everyman protagonist is Winston Smith, an employee at the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite history to match the state’s version. Orwell’s vision of an all-seeing Big Brother, a Thought Police fighting independent thinkers, and the manipulation of language to render it virtually meaningless — “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength” — is chilling. Because these elements mirror the real-world tactics of totalitarian regimes (Orwell was inspired by, among other things, the rise of Nazi Germany), some readers view 1984 as a cautionary tale.

Emma by Jane Austen (1815)

Penguin Random House

Rich, beautiful, entitled, 20-year-old Emma Woodhouse — one of Austen’s most endearing, if frustratingly unself-aware, heroines — decides to play matchmaker for her less-affluent protégé, Harriet. Emma’s decidedly unhelpful efforts unleash a comedy of misdirected feelings, as she scuttles Harriet’s romance with the lovely farmer Robert Martin and encourages her relationship with the snobby clergyman Mr. Elton. Alas, Emma’s altruism stalls when Harriet develops feelings for the kind, aristocratic George Knightley, the brother of Emma’s brother-in-law, alerting Emma to his attractiveness, as well. For all her comic shortcomings, Emma remains eternally relatable — because truly, who among us is not an expert at fixing our supposed inferiors’ faults while remaining oblivious to our own? This classic novel inspired (among other shows, films and books) the 1995 teen comedy Clueless.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

Alamy

Lee’s famous novel, set in 1930s rural Alabama, is presented through the eyes of a young girl named Scout Finch, who — with her brother, Jem, and neighbor Dill — is obsessed with a recluse named Boo Radley, the town oddball. Scout and Jem’s lawyer dad, Atticus, the moral hero of the book, agrees to defend a Black man unjustly accused of raping a young white woman, stirring up the racists in town. Boo gets drawn into the conflict when the woman’s father, who made up the accusation, tries to get revenge after Atticus interrogates him in court. An absorbing read, Mockingbird has sold over 40 million copies worldwide, won the Pulitzer in 1961 and was made into the award-winning 1962 movie with Gregory Peck. A controversial 2015 sequel, Go Set a Watchman, which some critics believe was released without the full consent of the author, portrays Scout grown up and Atticus as a segregationist. Expect more Lee-related headlines this October with the release of The Land of Sweet Forever, a compilation of previously published essays as well as unpublished short stories discovered after Lee’s 2016 death.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)

Penguin Random House

Brontë’s only novel is perhaps the gothic masterpiece of English literature (although Dracula, above, is up there too). The brooding, dark tale features an abused hero, the orphaned Heathcliff; his sister through adoption, Catherine; obsessive love; unspoken feelings; and images of wind and snow lashing the English moors. The story begins with a stranger, Mr. Lockwood, a new tenant of Heathcliff’s, trapped in his spooky house by bad weather. He finds the name “Catherine” carved into his bedchamber’s windowsill and repeatedly inscribed on the pages of old books. (“The air swarmed with Catherines,” the frightened Lockwood notes.) He learns the troubling backstory from housekeeper Nelly Dean: Heathcliff and the mischievous Catherine grew up running wild on the moors as children and eventually fell in love. When Catherine is later drawn to a wealthier suitor, Heathcliff flees, then returns years later, rich and heartbroken: His beloved has married another, then dies soon after giving birth to a daughter, Cathy. The haunted Heathcliff exacts revenge on everyone he believes has wronged him (Catherine’s brother Hindley was particularly brutal to young Heathcliff). It’s a mesmerizing tale of love gone wrong, cruelty, and class and racial barriers in 19th-century England.

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)

Alamy

Catcher has been read (both voluntarily and not) by countless high schoolers over the decades, and for good reason: It’s a classic tale of youthful alienation. After 16-year-old Holden Caulfield is expelled from his fourth prep school, he rambles disconsolately around his hometown, New York City, over a cold, cheerless December weekend. He’s avoiding his parents’ apartment and the reckoning — or, to use a Holdenism, the “hemorrhage” — that awaits him when they learn of his expulsion. Throughout Holden’s odyssey through mid-century New York, which includes a tourist’s checklist of classic spots (the Central Park Zoo, the Metropolitan Museum!), he bludgeons what he perceives as the phoniness of the adult world with the moral clarity of a seriously angsty teen. (A cynical Gen Xer before his time, Holden says things like, “Morons hate when you call them a moron.”) His voice lives on in every smart, wry young truth-sayer, whether they know it or not.