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Do you remember when you were in school and your English teacher announced that the class was going to read and discuss a classic novel for the next month or so? I was the kind of student who loved those announcements. While there were a few classics I ended up not liking at all, I did find something meaningful or thought-provoking in most of the ones we were assigned to read.

In fact, I ended up picking up many other classic novels on my own time because of how positive my experiences generally were with this genre. (No, I’m not Hermoine Granger, but I’d bet she and I would have gotten along well if we’d been classmates. Ha!)

1. Beowulf by Unknown.

As soon as my college literature professor told us that the author’s name of this poem is unknown, my ears perked up. I’m fascinated by orphaned creative works like this. There’s something mysterious about reading a story without knowing anything at all about the person or people who came up with it.

Finding out that Beowulf was going to attempt to slay a dragon in it only made me more interested in finding out how it ended.

2. The Pearl by John Steinbeck.

Wealth and power can corrupt people in all sorts of terrible ways that aren’t always clear in the beginning. Seeing those behaviors play out from the perspective of poor characters only made the author’s points stronger. While I can’t say much else about this without giving away spoilers, this is one of those stories that has stuck with me for years.

3. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. 

This is actually the first part of a trilogy about several generations of a Chinese family whose elders were born into poverty and whose later generations grew up in much more luxurious surroundings. I enjoyed getting to know each generation from childhood to adulthood and even old age in some cases. Honestly, I wished this series could have kept going much longer than it did. The character development was really well done.

4. Beloved by Toni Morrison. 

I’d studied slavery in the United States in school, of course, but this was the first book that really drove home how much those experiences affected not only former slaves but their descendants as well. I only wish that one of my teachers or professors had assigned this to us.

It’s something everyone should read, so I’m glad to see it’s been included on so many lists as an example of a more modern classic. I hope that the list of books that are considered classics grows much more diverse over time as well. Based on the amazing titles that are being released these days, I think it’s only matter of time before this happens.

5. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith.

Like Francie, the main character, I grew up in a family that really needed to pinch our pennies in order to make ends meet. Even though she and I were from different eras, I saw a lot of similarities between her life and my own, from the simple meals we rustled together from whatever was left in the kitchen when grocery funds grew low to how hard our parents worked to take care of us.

There’s something to be said for classics that look at the world from the perspectives of low-income and working class people.

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6. The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe.

Honestly, I wanted to pick everything that Edgar Allen Poe has ever written for choice number 6 on today’s list. The Raven is an excellent place to start, though. I loved the way it personified guilt in such a chilling way from the very first time I read it.

7. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

So, who else has ever felt incredibly angry with one or more of the characters in a story? The first time that happened to me was when Hester Prynn’s community discovered she was pregnant out of wedlock by a married man and shunned her and her baby. Meanwhile, the man who helped her make that child didn’t face any real repercussions for his choices at all.

I can’t tell you how many times I scowled at those characters for behaving so awfully to Hester. Yes, their society found this sort of thing deeply shameful, but it made me furious to see the father getting off scot-free while an innocent child suffered and her mother was abandoned by a community that claimed to be righteous.

The classroom discussions my teacher guided us through about sin, guilt, legalism, repentance, and the double-standards of that society were well worth my initial reaction to this plot twist, though.

8. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.

I hope things have changed since I graduated, but when I was a kid most of the classics we were assigned to read in school were about boys. The girls in these stories, if they existed at all, were often sidekicks or love interests. As much as I enjoyed the plots themselves, I often found myself wishing for more protagonists that were girls like me.

It was refreshing to find Little Women and read about the world from the perspectives of many different types of girls and women.

9. Animal Farm by George Orwell.

Allegories aren’t just for children. In fact, they can be an excellent way for adults to rethink, debate, and hopefully come to better understand the things they’ve been taught about the world, too.

I didn’t know the political history behind this book when I first read it. Looking back, it would have been really helpful to have a teacher explain topics like Stalinism to me before I started reading about a farm full of animals who decide to govern themselves.

10. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway.

I first read this when I was a little too young to understand what the author was trying to say, but the messages about persistence, bravery, and commitment mean more to me with every passing year. This is the sort of thing I’d recommend rereading every so often. It’s only become better and more meaningful as I’ve grown older, and I’m still nowhere near the age of the main character yet.

Did your literature instructors assign any of these titles to you when you were in high school, college, or university? Which classic novels or plays do you like?

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I’m going to need to mention some minor spoilers in today’s post in order to explain my selections. Most of the books I picked are older. I did this in large part so that I don’t ruin the plot twists of more recent fiction for anyone. Still, I thought I should warn all of you of this in advance in case your TBR lists include stuff that was predominantly published a few decades or even centuries ago.

Oh, and I was feeling extra chatty today, so this post is going to be longer than usual for me.

1. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.

I’m a huge Jane Eyre fan, but one of the things that always bothered me about the conclusion of her tale was how little attention was paid to the fate of Bertha Mason, the hidden and severely mentally ill wife of Jane’s employer, Mr. Rochester. Bertha had such a sad character arc that I half-expected her to show up again after her death. If Wilkie Collins’ tale had been mashed into this one, we could have gotten the vengeful spirit scenes I was waiting for.

2. The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling and The Magicians trilogy by Lev Grossman. 

Grossman’s series was marketed as Harry Potter for adults at one point. Both of these writers created worlds where magic was present everywhere and could easily go wrong if you didn’t know what you were doing with it.

While I’m still not sure that marketing The Magicians in this way was a good idea, I am intrigued by the thought of magicians going to graduate school. It never made sense to me that Harry Potter and his friends would have all of the practical knowledge they needed to make it as magicians at the tender age of 18. They really should have talked about higher education for whatever it was they wanted to specialize in after leaving Hogwarts.

3. Watership Down by Richard Adams and The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. 

There were so many other magical creatures running around in The Hobbit that I think it would have made perfect sense to include a family of rabbits on the search for a safe, new home. Since this was a world where all kinds of non-human creatures could talk, I’d like to see Hazel and all of the other rabbits be able to speak human languages fluently. Imagine the look on Bilbo’s face if he ran across this group and realized all of the rabbits before him could understand every word he was saying!

4. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery.

Mary and Anne were both orphaned at young ages in societies that didn’t do a particularly good job of protecting orphans. They also had to learn how to thrive in families that weren’t happy to have them and didn’t do much of anything to help them adjust (at least at first). If only these two characters could have been neighbours. I think they would have been the best of friends.

5. The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams and Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls. 

Both of these books are about love, loss, and death. One of the things that really bothered me about Where the Red Fern Grows was how dark its ending was after Billy’s beloved dogs died. It would have been nice for there to have been a scene to show the reward every good dog gets in the end. The supernatural twist in The Velveteen Rabbit would have worked nicely in this case, especially since Billy’s pets died when they were both still very young. I’d much rather have them living free and happy somewhere away from the main character than not being alive at all.

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Both of these stories were about what happened to humanity after society collapsed and the vast majority of people forgot how their ancestors used to live. The Book of Dave focused on how that collapse destroyed families. A Canticle for Leibowitz was more concerned with how such a disaster would destroy literature, history, education, and knowledge in general.

Combining all of these factors together would make for a fascinating – if also sometimes frightening- read.

7. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and Unwind by Neal Shusterman.

Both of these series portray worlds where some people are murdered so that their organs can be used to improve or save the lives of strangers.

Never Let Me Go showed it happening to childless and unmarried folks in their 50s and 60s. Unwind showed it happening to teenagers, especially teens who didn’t have the protection of loving parents. Honestly, I think any society willing to do this wouldn’t care how old their victims were. They could easily target both groups in order to make sure that the folks deemed worthy by the powers that be would always have the organs and other body parts they needed to survive.

8. The Road by Cormac McCarthy and Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. 

The never-ending hopeless of The Road unnerved me. Like Earth Abides, it was set in a post-apocalyptic world where extinction for humankind seemed imminent. These tales would have worked well together when it came to their descriptions of the lengths desperate and starving people will go to in order to survive for another day.

I’d want to stick with the more optimistic ending of Earth Abides, though.

9. The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill and Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. 

Gone with the Wind would have been a much better story if one of the main characters in it had been a slave, especially since Scarlett, the actual protagonist, never came across to me as someone who was particularly empathetic or interested in what was happening to those around her. The Book of Negroes was filled with scenes that showed just how harsh slavery was. It would have rounded out what this era was actually like quite well.

10. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank and Book Thief by Mark Zusak. 

The first time I read Anne Frank’s diary, I assumed she had somehow survived World War II and published her memoir after being liberated from a concentration camp. The fact that this wasn’t her fate made me incredibly sad.

Mixing the true story of what happened to her with the fictional, and much happier, events of Book Thief would be wonderful. I desperately wish we could have known who Anne would have become as an adult. She would have written a lot of amazing stories for sure, and who knows what else she could have accomplished!