| Author |
Title |
Description |
Young Adult |
| Alcott, Louisa May |
Rose in Bloom |
Romantic, witty tale of a young woman growing up and falling in love. |
YA |
| Austen, Jane |
Emma |
A rich, clever and beautiful young woman can't resist orchestrating other people's love lives. |
|
| Beckett, Samuel |
Waiting for Godot |
A play that combines metaphor and metaphysics, by the Nobel Prize winning playwright of the theater of the absurd. |
|
| Bradbury, Ray |
Something Wicked This Way Comes |
Two boys encounter the sinister wonders of Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show, which changes the life of every person it touches. |
YA |
| Burnett, Frances |
Little Lord Fauntleroy |
Little Lord Fauntleroy, through his innocence and goodness, wins his English relatives over to accepting his American-born mother. |
YA |
| Carroll, Lewis |
Hunting of the Snark |
The adventures of a motley crew in search of an elusive prey, this fantasy sails along on magical language, surreal images, and an undercurrent of sly humor. |
|
| Carroll, Lewis |
Through the Looking Glass |
Alice steps through a looking glass where she finds she must walk in the opposite direction to get where she wants to go. |
|
| Conrad, Joseph |
Lord Jim |
Jim spends a lifetime trying to redeem himself for a moment of cowardice when he abandoned his sinking ship. |
|
| Cooper, James |
The Deerslayer |
Natty Bumppo has several adventures keeping the lake community residents safe from the Indians. |
|
| Cormier, Robert |
The Rag and Bone Shop |
It becomes increasingly evident that Trent is more concerned with getting Jason to say the words he wants to hear than discovering what really happened on the day Alicia died. |
YA |
| Dante, Aligheri |
The Divine Comedy |
This brilliantly imagined epic journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, by one of the world's greatest poets, is a timeless story of faith and love. |
|
| Dostoyevsky, Fyodor |
Crime and Punishment |
A half-starved student murders two women as he tries, unsuccessfully, to prove himself as extraordinary, indeed, a superman |
|
| DuBois, William |
Twenty-one Balloons |
Professor William Waterman Sherman intends to fly across the Pacific Ocean. But through a twist of fate, he lands on Krakatoa, and discovers a world of unimaginable wealth, eccentric inhabitants, and incredible balloon inventions. |
|
| Dumas, Alexandre |
Man in the Iron Mask |
The self-serving King Louis XIV is all-powerful and fears no one except the man he condemned to wear an iron mask and imprisoned for life. Retired Musketeers vow to free the mysterious prisoner who may be France's only hope for survival. |
|
| Edmonds, Walter |
Drums Along the Mohawk |
Story of the Revolutionary War era settlers in the Mohawk River valley. |
YA |
| Elliott, George |
Middlemarch |
A penetrating analysis of Victorian provincial life, in which Dorothea Brooke's splendid aspirations are defeated by her failure in self-knowledge and ignorance of the limits set by her society on female behavior. |
|
| Faulkner, William |
The Sound and the Fury |
A superb evocation of the decay and degeneration of a southern family. |
|
| Ferber, Edna |
Cimarron |
Restless Yancey Cravat, a pioneer newspaper editor and lawyer, settles in Osage, a muddy town thrown together overnight when the Oklahoma territory opens in 1889. To this place he brings his wife Sabra, a woman both conventional and well-bred. |
|
| Ferber, Edna |
Showboat |
Tells parallel love stories of two doomed marriages that are set on a Mississippi show boat. |
|
| Fitzgerald, F. Scott |
The Great Gatsby |
A major scrutiny of American values during the Jazz Age through the experience of a near-mythic hero and his grand though ill-fated masquerade. |
|
| Flaubert, Gustave |
Madame Bovary |
Often called the first modern realistic novel. Emma Bovary seeks vainly in a dull marriage the romance she has read and dreamed of. |
|
| Forester, C.S. |
Captain Horatio Hornblower |
All the ingredients for a great adventure story. Exotic locations, a mad dictator, romance, hardship, friendhsip and the big ship to ship dual. Historical fiction. |
|
| Forester, C.S. |
The African Queen |
Centers on the relationship between Charlie, a gin loving engineer, and Rose, a religious missionary, with the war as a backdrop. Rose convinces Charlie to take his rickety old boat, The African Queen, down a treacherous river to destroy a German gunboat patrolling the lake at the end of the river. |
|
| Forster, E. M. |
Passage to India |
Written while England was still firmly in control of India, Forster's novel follows the fortunes of three English newcomers to India--Miss Adela Quested, Mrs. Moore, and Cyril Fielding--and the Indian, Dr. Aziz, with whom they cross destinies. |
|
| Garcia Marquez, Gabriel |
One Hundred Years of Solitude |
A century-long history of a town and family, with subtle insights into the psychology of the people and the mores of Colombia. |
|
| Greene, Bette |
Philip Hall Likes Me, I Reckon Maybe |
(Newbery) Eleven-year-old Beth thinks that Philip Hall likes her, but their on-again, off-again relationship sometimes makes her wonder. |
YA |
| Greene, Graham |
Third Man |
Murder, racketeering, mystery, and subterfuge combine for a compelling tale that is simple, economical, concise, and very satisfying. |
|
| Hale, Edward |
Man without a Country |
Concerns the fate of Philip Nolan, a young army officer who was caught up in the eddies of the Aaron Burr affair of 1807, and the granting of his wish "to never hear the name of the United States again." |
YA |
| Hersey, John |
A Single Pebble |
Journeying on Yangtze River, an American engineer comes to understand the difference between his world and the Orient. |
YA |
| Hersey, John |
Bell for Adano |
An Italian-American major in World War II wins the love and admiration of the local townspeople when he searches for a replacement for the 700 year-old town bell that had been melted down for bullets by the fascists. |
|
| Hesse, Hermann |
Siddhartha |
Siddhartha journeys in search of contentment through Indian mysticism. |
|
| Hilton, James |
Good-bye, Mr. Chips |
An eccentric but lovable British schoolmaster, Arthur Chipping (Mr. Chips), destined to be a bachelor for life, meets and marries a young woman who loosens him up quite a bit, before dying in childbirth. |
|
| Hilton, James |
Lost Horizon |
Romantic adventures of a group of people kidnapped in India and taken to an idyllic civilization in the mountains of Tibet. This civilization was called Shangri-La. |
|
| Hilton, James |
Random Harvest |
A story of lost identity, a result of shell shock in the...World War of 1914-1918 and of a two year gap in the memory of a man who has become a successful industrialist. |
|
| Hope, Anthony |
Prisoner of Zenda |
Danger, daring and noble deeds as Rudolph Rassendyll takes the place of the abducted heir to the throne of Ruritania. |
|
| Kafka, Franz |
The Trial |
Joseph K is up for trial. But for what? Is this a neurotic man's anxiety dream or a revelation for Everyman? |
|
| Kerouac, Jack |
On the Road |
This book defined the Beat Generation of the 1950's, following the adventures of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty as they travel the America of that time. |
|
| Levitin, Sonia |
Journey to America |
A Jewish family fleeing Nazi Germany in 1938 endures innumerable separations before they are once again united. |
YA |
| Lofting, Hugh |
Story of Dr. Doolittle (series) |
The adventures of a kind-hearted doctor, who is fond of animals and understands their language, as he travels to Africa with some of his favorite pets to cure the monkeys of a terrible sickness. |
YA |
| London, Jack |
The Sea Wolf |
Violent adventure in the wild Alaskan seas on board the "Ghost" with Captain Wolf Larsen. |
YA |
| Machiavelli, Niccolo |
The Prince |
A brilliant and notorious analysis of the brutal realities of getting power and keeping it. |
|
| MacLachan, Patricia |
Sarah, Plain and Tall |
(Newbery) When their father invites a mail-order bride to come live with them in their prairie home, Caleb and Anna are captivated by their new mother and hope that she will stay. |
YA |
| Mann, Thomas |
The Magic Mountain |
One of the most profound and provocative novels of our time, picturing a mountaintop sanitarium as a symbol of humanity in a pathological universe. |
|
| Mathis, Sharon |
The Hundred Penny Box |
(Newbery) Michael's love for his great-great-aunt who lives with them leads him to intercede with his mother who wants to toss out all her old things. |
YA |
| Milton, John |
Paradise Lost |
Great landmark in English literature which portrays the Fall of Adam and Eve, the defeat of Lucifer. |
|
| Mitchell, Martha |
Gone with the Wind |
Flaming epic of Civil War and reconstruction. |
|
| Nordhoff, Charles |
Mutiny on the Bounty |
Captain William Bligh recorded the most famous mutiny in sea history, when a group of his men forced him from his ship and cast him adrift into the sea. |
|
| McCullers, Carson |
Member of the Wedding |
Frankie Addams, a bored twelve-year-old, must face issue sof growing up when her brother gets married. |
|
| Norton, Mary |
The Borrowers |
Miniature people who live in an old country house by borrowing things from the humans are forced to emigrate from their home under the clock. |
YA |
| O'Dell, Scott |
Black Pearl |
(Newbery) In claiming as his own the magnificent black pearl he finds, a sixteen-year-old youth enrages the sea devil who legend says is its owner. |
YA |
| O'Hara, Mary |
My Friend Flicka |
A young Wyoming ranch boy chooses a headstrong filly to raise as his own, and earns his father's respect while learning important life lessons. |
YA |
| O'Neill, Eugene |
The Iceman Cometh |
An overwhelming tragic drama by the father of serious American theater. |
|
| Orczy, Baroness |
The Scarlet Pimpernel |
In 1792, during the French Revolution an English aristocrat, with a small band of dedicated friends, secretly undertakes dangerous missions to save members of the French nobility from the guillotine. |
|
| Portis, Charles |
True Grit |
14-year old hunts down her father's murderer. |
YA |
| Proust, Marcel |
Rememberance of Things Past |
In recovering his past through the dedicated exercise of memory, Proust lays bare a growing self, a changing age, a many-stranded philosophy. |
|
| Rostand, Edmond |
Cyrano de Bergerac |
A tour de force romantic drama about a real-life poet and playwright, lover and swordsman in mid-17th century Paris. |
|
| Salten, Felix |
Bambi |
Tells the adventures of a young deer growing up and learning about life in the forest. |
YA |
| Sparks, Muriel |
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie |
A Scottish school teacher manipulates the girls she teaches with tragic results. |
|
| Thoreau, Henry |
Walden |
Thoughtful reflections of life's meaning and man's place in the universe, in essays written during a retreat. |
|
| Tolstoy, Leo |
Anna Karenina |
An engrossing story of adultery among the Russian nobility |
|
| Travers, P.T. |
Mary Poppins |
The wind brings two English children a new nanny who slides up the bannister and introduces them to some delightful people and experiences. |
YA |
| Voltaire, Francois |
Candide |
An incurable optimist sets off to seek his fortune during the Revolution. |
|
| White, E. B. |
Charlotte's Web |
(Newbery) Wilbur the pig is desolate when he discovers that he is destined to be the farmer's Christmas dinner until his spider friend, Charlotte, decides to help him. |
YA |
| Wright, Richard |
Native Son |
When a black chauffeur smothers the daughter of his rich white employer in 1940's Chicago, his trial brings all their fears and prejudices to light. |
|
| Yep, Lawrence |
Dragon's Gate |
(Newbery) When he accidentally kills a Manchu, a fifteen-year-old Chinese boy is sent to America to join his father, an uncle, and other Chinese working to build a tunnel for the transcontinental railroad through the Sierra Nevada mountains in 1867. Sequel to "Mountain light." |
YA |