The books compiled on this list are not books that came out recently. In fact, some of them are very old books. For some, they are ancient. However, they all have that timeless factors that only the best novels seem to have. After all, books are not a way to relate to the world and it's problems--sometimes its happiness--but to also find solutions to them...or sometimes we just read to escape for who couldn't love a book that simply encapsulates you with its vibrant language and thundering moral commentary?
1. Clockwork Orange
Pixabay
Though often looked over in favor of the novel 1984, Clockwork Orange is a book that captures a farcical social order through wordplay! Who could definitely not like that? These words seem to capture the narrator, a 15 year old delinquent named Alex, in a world of corrupted values, violence, and infantile indulgence, but the main question posed by the book sis this: In a world where evil can be chosen freely and without consequences, is goodness still compelling?
2. Lolita
Flickr
When you are a middle-aged, cynical, and borderline nihilistic man, who cannot love young, hopeful, pretty girls? Right? RIGHT? Lolita, written by Vladimir Nabokov, is the story about a man named Humbert Humbert and his affair with Dolores Haze, a 12 year old girl. Vile and repugnant as you can imagine it to be, Lolita manages to be an endlessly angry, tragic, and twisted epic-- though it almost got buried in drafts by the author.
3. Native Son
Penguin Books
Richard Wright, author of Native Son, wrote a book about Bigger Thomas, a black man in a bloodthirsty 1930s white society, and how he grotesquely murders a young, white girl. This novel explores the effects of racism on the black community and how that violent murder is a sort of retroactive act of will through passages of social preachment, taking Native Son to places literature hadn't been taken yet.
4. Their Eyes Were Watching God
Goodreads
Janie Crawford, a black woman, has outlived three husbands and horrendous weather, and hence it becomes a tale about the bravery and strength of colored women in a world where bad men and equally bad weather can be found by the dozen. Filled with beautiful prose and the enchanting symbolism of the thunderous storms, Zora Neale Hurston wrote a timeless tale in which time cannot affect it.
5. To The Lighthouse
AlmaBooks
Who doesn't love their family? In Virginia Woolf's novel, family dynamics is a theme explored and the effect of time within themselves and the others, showing the fluidity of the human emotional spectrum and the desire to embark on epic voyages--sometimes spiritual--that don't guarantee an even better destination. Packed with vivid prose and stunning characterization, To The Lighthouse is definitely a novel to remember.
These books, if read, can change your whole perspective of our world and the way we function within it. Maybe that's why they are called classics after all.
