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| The adventures of Aeneas and his men after the Trojan War and ends when Aeneas gains control of the Italian peninsula, which will eventually become the base of the Roman Empire. |
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| All Quiet on the Western Front |
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| A German novel by Erich Maria Remarque about the horrors and futility of World War I. |
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A novel by Leo Tolstoy; the title character enters a tragic adulterous affair and commits suicide by throwing herself under a train.
It begins with the famous sentence “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” |
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| A tragedy by Sophocles. It concerns the punishment of Antigone for burying her brother, an act that was forbidden because he had rebelled against his own city. Antigone argues that the burial is required by divine law as opposed to human law. |
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| A famous collection of Persian, Indian, and Arabian folktales. Supposedly, the legendary Scheherazade told these stories to her husband the sultan, a different tale every night for 1,001 days |
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| Around the World in Eighty Days |
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| A novel by Jules Verne about a fictional journey around the world made in 1872 by an Englishman, Phileas Fogg, and his French servant. Fogg bets other members of his club that he can circle the world in eighty days. |
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| A novel by Feodor Dostoevsky, known for its deep ethical and psychological treatment of its characters. The plot concerns the trial of one of four brothers for the murder of his father. |
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| A novel of satire by Voltaire, in which a long series of calamities happens to the title character, an extremely naive and innocent young man, and his teacher, Doctor Pangloss. Pangloss, who reflects the optimistic philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, nevertheless insists that, despite the calamities, “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” |
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| The title of two well-known autobiographies: that of Augustine from the fourth century, describing his early years and his conversion to Christianity, and that of the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. |
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Crime and Punishment
(1866) |
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| A novel by Feodor Dostoevsky about the poor student Raskolnikov, who kills two old women because he believes that he is beyond the bounds of good and evil. The psychological novel examines Raskolnikov’s anguished mind before, during, and after the crime. |
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| An epic poem written by Dante in the early fourteenth century, describing the author’s journey through the afterlife. It has three parts, each of which is concerned with one of the three divisions of the world beyond: the Inferno (hell), the Purgatorio (purgatory), and the Paradiso (heaven). |
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| A play by Henrik Ibsen about a woman who leaves her husband, who has always treated her like a doll rather than a human being, in order to establish a life of her own. |
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| A novel by Miguel de Cervantes. The hero loses his wits from reading too many romances and comes to believe that he is a knight destined to revive the golden age of chivalry. A tall, gaunt man in armor, he has many comical adventures with his fat squire. |
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| A work on education by Jean Jacques Rousseau, describing how a fictional boy, Émile, should be brought up. The book had an enormous influence on education during the age of romanticism and afterward. |
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| A series of novels by Honoré de Balzac. A forerunner of naturalism, It portrays the complexity of French society. |
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The Hunchback of Notre Dame
(1831) |
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| A historical novel by Victor Hugo. Set in the Middle Ages, it tells the story of Quasimodo, a grotesquely deformed bell ringer at the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, who falls in love with a beautiful gypsy girl, Esmeralda. |
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| An epic by Homer that recounts the story of the Trojan War. |
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A detailed, erotic account of the art and techniques of love, possibly written by a first-century sage. An unexpurgated English translation was published in 1883 by the British explorer and scholar Sir Richard Francis Burton.
(Note to the reader: It is highly unlikely for a question to ever be asked on this book, but it's still fun to know about it.) |
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| A novel by Victor Hugo. The central character, Jean Valjean, is sentenced to prison for stealing a single loaf of bread. Later, seeking respectability, Valjean is hounded by his archenemy, Inspector Javert. |
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| An ancient Greek comedy by Aristophanes (not to be confused with Aristotle). The title character persuades the women of Athens and Sparta, which are at war, to refuse sexual contact with their husbands until the two cities make peace. 1 |
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| A novel by Gustave Flaubert. The title character, dissatisfied with her marriage, seeks happiness in adultery and finally commits suicide. |
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| A long poem by the ancient Roman poet Ovid, in which he relates numerous stories from classical mythology. Many of the stories deal with miraculous transformations, or metamorphoses. |
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“The Metamorphosis”
(1916) |
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| A story by Franz Kafka. It is a tale of psychological terror, in which a salesman named Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect. |
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| A tragedy by Sophocles that dramatizes the fall of Oedipus. |
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| A set of reflections on religion by Blaise Pascal This work contains the famous statement “The heart has its reasons that reason does not know.” |
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| A children’s story of the nineteenth century by the Italian author Carlo Collodi. |
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| Machiavelli, in which he asserts that a prince must use cunning and ruthless methods to stay in power. |
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| The best-known dialogue of Plato, in which Socrates is shown outlining an ideal state, ruled by philosopher-kings. |
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| A major work by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau states that governmental organization should be based on the general will of a society and should conform to the nature of human beings, and that the majority in a government has a right to banish resistant minorities. |
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Summa Theologica
(1266–1273) |
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| The best-known work of Thomas Aquinas, in which he treats the whole of theology by careful analysis of arguments. In one famous section of the ------, Aquinas discusses five ways of attempting to prove that there is a God. |
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| The Swiss Family Robinson |
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| A Swiss adventure novel by Johann Wyss. The title characters are shipwrecked and live for many years on a desert island. |
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| A novel by the French author Alexandre Dumas, set in seventeenth-century France. |
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| A novel by Leo Tolstoy. It recounts the history of several Russian families during the wars against Napoleon Bonaparte. Many consider it the greatest novel ever written. |
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| A novel of satire by George Orwell. Animals take over a farm to escape human tyranny, but the pigs treat the other animals worse than the people did. A famous quotation from the book is “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” |
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| A novel by Sinclair Lewis. The title character, an American real estate agent in a small city, is portrayed as a crass, loud, overoptimistic boor who thinks only about money and speaks in clichés, such as “You’ve gotta have pep, by golly!” |
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| An epic in Old English, estimated as dating from as early as the eighth century; the earliest [b]long[/b] work of literature in English. The critical events are the slaying of the monster Grendel and Grendel’s mother by the hero ------ and -----’s battle with a dragon, in which he is mortally wounded. |
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