The Really Long List of Great Literature (cont'd)

The Vicar of Wakefield is supposed to be a satire, an ever gentle one in which the wide-eyed trust and peiety of the good pastor leave him at the mercy of larcenous rascals, until they have stripped him clean of everything.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It's to the credit of Castle Rackrent that it's usually taken to be a novel. By its meagre word count, the text constitutes a novella and—shorn of introduction, footnotes and glossary—barely that. But Maria Edgeworth's.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

By several standards Frankenstein is a very poorly written novel. The narrative wanders all over, bogging down in irrelevant subplots and extraneous characters, the characters (except for one) are thinly and.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

First thing to remember about "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is that it's a short work. By word count it qualifies as a story, as opposed to a novella or a novel, which it is sometimes called. It's to the credit.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Thanks in part to movies based on it, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame calls up images of Gothic horror in the public imagination. The novel is associated with other dark nineteenth-century classics like Frankenstein.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Oliver Twist may be the novel most publicly associated with Dickens, though it's not nearly his best nor his most admired. It may also be the first major novel to feature a child as the central character, which.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

First, put this book's title aside. No one really knows what "tales of the grotesque and arabesque" means. Poe himself indicated he intended more than the usual meanings of bizarre and fanciful writing; his theories on.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is often called the first detective story or the first modern murder mystery. It and the two sequels also featuring amateur sleuth C. Auguste Dupin, "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" and.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Coming out a year after The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Jews' Beech Tree is considered one of the first crime or mystery works. But while Edgar Allan Poe's story is obviously seminal as detective fiction.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

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I'm somewhat stumped by Wuthering Heights. It's solidly ensconced in the literary canon and inflicted on classes of students. And plenty of people—readers and writers alike—seem to love it. But three readings.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

The first half of David Copperfield, concerning a young boy's struggles against repressive step-parents and draconian schoolmasters, is one of the greatest, most affecting novels ever written. The second half.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

Everyone knows the general story of The Scarlet Letter as referenced in the title. A young, married woman in an early American colony, Hester Prynne, becomes pregnant from an affair with a man she refuses to name, and.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Bleak House has its ardent admirers who declare it among Charles Dickens's masterpieces, as well as its detractors who call it one of his most grotesque potboilers. The author's strengths are here.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

Some critics and writers consider it the greatest novel ever. And most consider it the most influential. Yet, Madame Bovary on first reading may strike the modern reader in English as, well, all right but hardly the best.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It's the most political of Charles Dickens's novels, it's the least political—even anti-political—of Dickens's novels in some ways. But its positions on politics, revolution, mob rule, democracy and reformism has tended to.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

George Eliot's first great popular novel gives only hints of the depths to be plumbed in the future, yet it has become an enduring favourite for its own virtues. In many ways, The Mill on the Floss is a silly romantic.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Les Misérables is one of the few translated books English speakers know by the original title, in part because we are familiar with the name (or its abbreviation Les Miz) from popular film and stage productions. But.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

All fiction—all art or entertainment really—is either disturbing or comforting. Most works both disturb and comfort in varying measures. It's why we read: to experience ups and down of life outside our own. Some works.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

I'm not sure we should even call Erewhon a novel. If it is one, it's a novel of ideas. Not like, say, one of Aldous Huxley's novels of ideas though. Great ideas don't play out among characters or decide the plot. In Butler's.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

What's incredible about Middlemarch, George Eliot's masterwork, is how engrossing it is. I mean, this is a novel that deals with issues of art, education reform, scholarly research, medical science and provincial British politics.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

In our world the escapades of young Tom Sawyer are recounted in the shadow cast by his more famous friend, Huckleberry Finn. Yet, during author Mark Twain's life, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was his most.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

It's easy to overlook Mark Twain's bite in The Prince and the Pauper. The social criticism is not as sharp as in some of his later novels, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

No one needs to be told what Treasure Island is about. Robert Louis Stevenson's novel has defined the pirate story, not to mention the treasure-hunting story, the mutiny-on-the-seas story—and.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of those modern classics you should re-read every ten years or so. Partly because, like most classics, it keeps giving, offering up more and different aspects each time. Read in youth.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

In the article on John Buchan, I called his novels seminal thrillers surpassed by the later best-selling works of intrigue for which they showed the way. Stevenson's Kidnapped takes us back yet another generation.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

The surprising thing about Robert Louis Stevenson's horror story, if you had previously known the Jekyll and Hyde character only indirectly through popular culture, is that it's so brief. Not only is the novella short.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

An unfair charge against Rudyard Kipling's story, "The Man Who Would Be King", is that it's not very credible. Full of British Empire arrogance that can imagine a couple of white, soldierly ne'er-do-wells could manage.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

If your first exposure to Mark Twain's time travel tale was the Disney or other screen adaptations, you may be shocked by your reading of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Shocked by how rough.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

When Tess of the D'Urbervilles first came out in book form in late 1891, it was in equal parts hailed as Thomas Hardy's masterpiece and condemned as a moral outrage. The latter opinion was due mainly to the novel's.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Everyone knows the central conceit of The Picture of Dorian Gray: a beautiful young man remains unblemished by age, while his painted portrait, hidden from public sight, grows older and corrupted by moral degradation.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

When we're talking about Arthur Conan Doyle's contribution to detective literature, we really mean the entire oeuvre of fifty-six Sherlock Holmes stories, plus four Holmes novels. But if you're looking for a.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

It's instructive how much of our literature has to do with warfare. From ancient works like the Iliad, through the epics of medieval slaughter and Shakespeare's historical dramas, to modern novels—bloody conflict has.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

A Shropshire Lad hasn't much to do with Shropshire. A.E. Housman famously had little personal acquaintance with that part of the English countryside, and his local references in his "Shropshire" poems are either generically.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

The first part of Dracula, when Britisher Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania to inform his firm's mysterious client about its purchase of real estate in London on his behalf, has got to be some of the most entrancing.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy