One morning, a pilot who is stranded in the desert awakens to see the most remarkable tiny fellow standing in front of him. Draw me a sheep, please,” the stranger begs. The pilot also understands that when life’s events are too complex to comprehend, there is no other option except to give in to their mysteries. He takes out a pencil and some paper. And so starts this witty and charming fable, which has forever altered readers’ perceptions of the world by revealing the secret of what is truly important in life.
The Little Prince, offered here in a magnificent new translation with meticulously restored artwork, is one of the few stories that are as widely read and as widely adored by both children and adults. It will captivate readers of all ages because it is the authoritative edition of a global classic.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it.”
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”
“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them”
“It is such a mysterious place, the land of tears.”
American author Ernest Hemingway created the novella The Old Man and the Sea in Cayo Blanco in 1951. It was later published in 1952. It was Hemingway’s final significant piece of published fiction during his lifetime. This brief book, which is already a modern classic, tells the heartbreaking tale of a Cuban fisherman who perishes while pursuing a massive marlin in the Gulf Stream; it is expressly mentioned in the citation that accompanied the author’s 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.”
“But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
“Now is no time to think of what you do not have.
Think of what you can do with that there is”
“Let him think that I am more man than I am and I will be so.”
“Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?”
Animal Farm, a satirical allegorical novella by George Orwell about a farm, was first released in England on August 17, 1945. It depicts the tale of a band of farm animals who rise up to confront their man farmer in an effort to establish an animal-friendly society.
Animals that have been abused and overworked on a farm take over. They went out to construct a paradise of advancement, fairness, and equality with fiery idealism and passionate slogans. The setting is therefore set for one of the most incisive satiric tales ever written—a sharp-edged fairy tale for adults that charts the progression from the revolt against oppression to totalitarianism that is just as dreadful. As Animal Farm was initially published, it was thought to be directed toward Stalinist Russia. Today, it is glaringly obvious that George Orwell’s masterpiece has a meaning and a message that are still fiercely relevant wherever and whenever liberty is attacked, regardless of the cause.
French novelist Albert Camus wrote a novella in 1942 titled The Stranger, which was also released in English as The Outsider. Although Camus expressly disliked the term “existentialism,” its theme and attitude are sometimes regarded as instances of his philosophy, absurdism combined with existentialism.
Camus investigated what he called “the nudeness of man confronted with the ludicrous” through the tale of a regular man who unknowingly becomes involved in a senseless killing on a beach in Algeria. Published for the first time in English in 1946; a new translation by Matthew Ward.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.”
“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
“I had only a little time left and I didn’t want to waste it on God.”
“Since we’re all going to die, it’s obvious that when and how don’t matter.”
“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a unique masterpiece that ranks among the 20th century’s most influential books; as its dystopian purgatory becomes more real, it gets more menacing. The dystopian social science fiction book Nineteen Eighty-Four by English author George Orwell serves as a warning. It was Orwell’s ninth and last book that he finished during his lifetime, and Secker & Warburg released it on June 8, 1949.
The 1949 publication of the book features political satirist George Orwell’s terrifying portrayal of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff’s quest for identity. The novel’s genius lies in Orwell’s prescience of contemporary life—the pervasiveness of television, the linguistic distortion—and his capacity to provide such an in-depth depiction of hell. It has been compulsory reading for students from the moment it was published and is one of the scariest books ever.
Holden Caulfield was recently expelled from a new school after failing the majority of his subjects. Holden quits Pencey Prep after a quarrel with his roommate and ends up in New York City. Holden’s perception of the universe and its people evolves as he finds solace in brief encounters.
He wanders the city like a spirit, always thinking about his young sister Phoebe and his desire to escape the posers (adults) and live a meaningful life. The Catcher in the Rye, like The Outsiders, is a coming-of-age story that portrays the primordial human desire for connections as well as the perplexing feeling of loss we feel as we grow from childhood to adulthood.
The novel was chosen as one of the 100 finest English-language novels that were written since 1923 by Time Magazine in 2005, and it was named one of the 100 greatest English-language novels of the twentieth century by Modern Library and its readers. It was ranked 15th in the BBC’s The Big Read poll in 2003.
John Steinbeck wrote the novella Of Mice and Men. It was published in 1937 and tells the story of George and Lenny that make an unusual couple. George is “small and quick and dark of face,” but Lennie has the brains of a kid despite his gigantic bulk. Regardless, they are just like family to me.
Laborers in the parched vegetable fields of California labor more than they can, whenever they can. Lennie and George have a plan: they want to buy an acre of property and build their own shack.
When they find work on a farm in the Salinas Valley, their dream looks to be within reach. But even George cannot shield Lennie from the acts of others, nor can he predict the consequences of Lennie’s unshakeable devotion to the lessons George taught him.
Raskolnikov, a former student who is homeless and miserable, goes through the slums of St. Petersburg and kills someone at random without feeling guilty or sorrowful. He sees himself as a great man, like Napoleon, who goes above and beyond the bounds of morality. Raskolnikov, meanwhile, is being pursued by his conscience as he engages in a risky game of cat and mouse with a dubious police investigator, and he feels the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. The only person who can give the option of redemption is Sonya, a victimized sex worker.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
“We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.”
“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”
“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.”
“I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.”
The surreal tale of a young fellow who trades his soul for everlasting youth and beauty is the subject of Oscar Wilde’s sole book. A youthful aesthete in late 19th-century England was the subject of a devastating depiction by Oscar Wilde in this well-known work. The book centers on a striking premise: As Dorian Gray descends into a life of crime and excessive sensuality, his body retains perfect youth and vigor while his recently painted portrait develops day by day into a grotesque record of evil, which he must keep hidden from the public. The book uses a combination of a Gothic horror novel and decadent French fiction. This captivating tale of terror and suspense has been incredibly popular for more than a century. It is one of Wilde’s most significant works and one of the pioneering examples of its kind.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”
“To define is to limit.”
“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
The third book written by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, was released in 1925. It chronicles the tragic tale of self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby and his pursuit of Daisy Buchanan, a wealthy young woman he once loved, in Jazz Age New York. The narrative of the book is provided by Nick Carraway, who describes the happenings of the summer of 1922 after moving into the fictitious Long Island community of West Egg. He resides there among the newly wealthy, while his cousin Daisy and her violently wealthy husband, Tom Buchanan, reside across the water in the more affluent community of East Egg.
Nick eventually receives an invitation to one of Jay Gatsby’s glamorous parties as the summer goes on. Nick extends an invitation to Daisy to fulfill Gatsby’s wish, and there they rekindle their romance. Tom meets Gatsby at the Plaza Hotel as soon as he learns of the affair. Gatsby claims that he and Daisy have always been in adoration and that she has never loved Tom despite Daisy’s attempts to calm them down. As the altercation intensifies, Tom divulges what he discovered during an inquiry into Gatsby’s affairs: that the man had made his money by dealing in illicit booze. Daisy has abandoned her desire to divorce her husband, and despite Gatsby’s best efforts to the contrary, his case appears doomed.
Daisy, who just knew that Tom was engaging in an affair, does not know who Myrtle Wilson is until she is hit and killed on the road. Daisy is terrified as she continues to drive, but onlookers notice the car. George Wilson, Myrtle’s widower, arrives in East Egg the following afternoon. Tom informs him that Gatsby killed his wife. Wilson visits Gatsby’s home and shoots both the man and himself. Following the Buchanans’ departure from Long Island, Nick plans Gatsby’s burial. Fitzgerald regarded The Great Gatsby as his finest work when it was first released, yet the novel was neither a critical nor financial triumph.
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, an internationally recognized book set in a grim, dystopian future sixty years after its initial publication, continues to be regarded as a masterpiece of world literature. Its message is more pertinent now than it has ever been.
The fireman is Guy Montag. His responsibility is to destroy both the homes where they are hidden and the printed book, the most illicit of all goods. When Montag returns to his boring life and his wife, Mildred, who spends the entire day with her television “family,” he never doubts the devastation and ruins his activities cause. Montag, however, starts to doubt everything he has ever known when he befriends an eccentric young neighbor named Clarisse. Clarisse introduces Montag to a past in which people didn’t live in fear and a present in which people view the world through the ideologies in books rather than the mindless chatter of television.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”
“If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.”
“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”
“The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”
“It was a pleasure to burn.”
The epic history of the Great Depression won the Pulitzer Prize and inspired (and occasionally infuriated) millions of readers. The Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s is covered in Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, which was first published in 1939. The Joads, an Oklahoma farm family, are driven from their homestead and compelled to move west to the promised land of California. A story that is intimately human yet magnificent in scope and moral vision, elemental but blunt, tragic but ultimately uplifting in its human dignity, emerges from their struggles and recurrent collisions with the harsh reality of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots. The novel portrays the horrors of the Great Depression and inquires into the very nature of justice and equality in America. It is a depiction of the fight between the powerful and the downtrodden, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoic strength. Steinbeck’s enduring classic work is arguably the most American of all American Classics because it functions simultaneously as a naturalistic epic, captivity tale, read fiction, and transcendental gospel.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“You got a God. Don’t make no difference if you don’ know what he looks like.”
“Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, and emerges ahead of his accomplishments.”
“And her joy was nearly like sorrow.”
“If you’re in trouble or hurt or need–go to poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help–the only ones.”
“The bank – the monster has to have profits all the time. It can’t wait. It’ll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can’t stay one size.”
Aldous Huxley, an English author, wrote the dystopian book Brave New World in 1931 and had it published in 1932. The novel foreshadows enormous scientific advances in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, mind control, and classical conditioning that combine to make a dystopian society that is challenged by only one person: the protagonist of the story. The novel is basically set in a space-age World State, populated by genetic modification citizens and an intelligence-based social hierarchy.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, the novel that won Gabriel Garcia Marquez the Nobel Prize in Literature, is widely regarded as one of the most important literary works of our time. It is also widely regarded as one of the most brilliant and unique literary achievements ever produced.
Through the history of the Buendia family, the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude recounts the rise and fall, birth, and death of the fictitious town of Macondo in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.
This work is a masterpiece in the art of fiction because it is inventive, funny, captivating, and sorrowful all at the same time; it is brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical charm that hits the soul; and it is alive with unforgettable men and women.
Generations of readers, authors, and thinkers have been pleased, motivated, and affected by Herman Hesse’s famous book. In this narrative, an affluent Indian Brahmin gives up a life of privilege in search of enlightenment. Hesse combines several philosophical perspectives—including Eastern faiths, Jungian archetypes, and Western individualism—into a singular interpretation of life as it is revealed through the pursuit of true meaning by one man.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.”
“We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.”
“What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.”
“I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins.”
“Your soul is the whole world.”
This is how Robert Fagles’ superb translation of the Odyssey gets started. The Odyssey is literature’s most grandiose depiction of the journey through the life of the average person if the Iliad is the world’s biggest war epic. A timeless tale of humanity, as well as a test of moral fortitude for each individual, Odysseus’ ten-year journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, required him to rely on his cunning and cunning to survive in the face of supernatural and natural forces.
We now have an Odyssey to read aloud, savor, and appreciate for its sheer lyrical skill. Fagles has caught the fire and poetry of Homer’s original in the stories and legends that are presented here in a bold, modern style. The excellent Introduction and textual analysis by famous classicist Bernard Knox provide the general readers and scholars alike with additional perspectives and background information, enhancing the power of Fagles’ translation.
This Odyssey is meant to enthrall both classicists and the general audience, as well as to enthrall a new generation of Homer scholars. In a striking new modern-verse translation, Robert Fagles, recipient of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and the 1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, gives us Homer’s most well-known and approachable poem.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man.”
“There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.”
“There is nothing more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.”
“A man who has been through bitter experiences and travelled far enjoys even his sufferings after a time”
“Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier;
I have seen worse sights than this.”
With its winning combination of heartfelt romance and bittersweet wit, this story of family life in Mexico at the turn of the century has become a best-selling phenomenon. It is earthy, enchanting, and completely charming. Like Water For Chocolate is a romantic, moving story with magical moments, graphic earthiness, bittersweet wit, and recipes. It was the number one book in Mexico and America for over two years before becoming a hit worldwide.
It recounts the peculiar history of the all-female De La Garza family and is a lavish feast of a book. Mexican tradition forbids Tita, the youngest daughter of the family, from getting married and forces her to care for her mother until she passes away. However, Tita develops feelings for Pedro, who is drawn to her by the entrancing meals she prepares. Pedro desperately marries Rosaura, her sister, to keep close to her, forcing Tita and Pedro to circle one other in unrequited desire. Only a bizarre series of misfortunes, misfortune, and fate manage to bring them back together despite all odds.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can’t strike them all by ourselves”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate
“You don’t have to think about love; you either feel it or you don’t.”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate
“Necesito una respuesta en este momento, el amor no se piensa, se siente o no se siente.”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate
“La mera verdad es que la verdad no existe, todo depende del punto de vista.”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate
“It was very pleasant to savor its aroma, for smells have the power to evoke the past, bringing back sounds and even other smells that have no match in the present. -Tita”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate