Five Classics You Should Have Read but Probably Haven’t Yet

Whether you’re an undergraduate, graduate student, working professional or a retired one, the summer is a season that we greet with relief. The summer is when we catch up with friends in enjoyable weather, when we catch up on work around the house and in the yard, and, most importantly, when many Americans pump the breaks, take a deep breath and, finally, relax.

Attractive as spending a few months sitting on the beach or lounging out by the pool is — donning our favorite sunglasses, probably getting sunburned — the summer’s relaxed climate is perfect for catching up on your reading list; restive, but still contemplative is an ideal day in the sun. Here are five classic, short novels that can be read in a day or two, on the beach or not. What’s more, they’re all essential reads for those concerned with individual autonomy and freedom. 

Herman Hesse | Siddhartha: A Novel | Bantam | 1982 | 160 Pages

Hesse’s most famous novel, Siddhartha, is a story of self-discovery and actualization published in 1922 amid the chaos and confusion following the horror of World War I. The novel’s name is that of its protagonist, Siddhartha, a young Nepalese man who leaves home with his best, and deferential, friend, Govinda, in the pursuit of finding spiritual growth through physical discipline, and in so doing becomes a poor wandering monk — a member of the Samanas. 

What follows is Siddhartha’s journey into and out of commercial urban society, a love affair with a woman of unparalleled beauty, the loss and rediscovery of his spiritual foundation, and his eventual enlightenment. We all can learn something from the natural and human philosophy Siddhartha adopts at the end of the novel. 

James Baldwin | If Beale Street Could Talk | Vintage | 1974, 2006 reprint | 197 Pages

Baldwin’s fifth novel, set in Harlem in the 1970s, was adopted on the silver screen to critical and popular success in 2018. The story’s two protagonists are Fonny — a talented sculptor — and Tisch, two African American childhood friends turned lovers, whose youthful crushes grow into a love central and defining in their lives, a love that produces a child. 

Yet this love is not nurtured but bludgeoned by the state when a prejudiced police force allows Fonny to be falsely accused of rape. Baldwin’s short but harrowing novel is a reminder of that love, even if ultimately unbreakable, can be bruised by power. 

Virginia Woolf | Mrs. Dalloway | Harcourt | 1925, 1981 reprint | 194 Pages

One of Woolf’s most well-known novels, Mrs. Dalloway is a story about class, culture, and gender in the United Kingdom following World War I as told through the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an elite Englishwoman who’s deepest and most fleeting thoughts both are brought before the reader. 

Woolf’s memorable and wondrous prose aside, this novel is notable for its portrayal of human agency within cultural constraints. When Mrs. Dalloway decides to buy the flowers herself, after all, she chooses to define herself in an otherwise controlling world for women. 

William Golding | The Lord of the Flies | Penguin | 1954, 2003 reprint | 224 Pages

Golding’s great, short novel — his first, too — has been rightly noted as a must-read in the English language. Set amid the fracas of an undefined conflict, the novel takes place on a remote island upon which a British airplane carrying evacuated schoolboys crashes. Many of the schoolboys, still of an early age, survive. Two of the boys, Raph and an overweight boy dubbed “Piggy,” find a conch shell that is used to gather the other survivors. 

The boys attempt to remake civilization, but they quickly, and predictably, fall into chaos. Animating the novel are questions that we must interrogate and keep present on the mind: What separates civilization from crude savagery? Can an individual overcome that which those around him think? What they call him to do? 

Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn | One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 1962, 2014 reprint | 208 Pages

Solzhenitsyn’s tour de force of a novel, clocking in at just over 200 pages and capturing only one day in a Soviet prisoner’s fictional life, contributed in no small part to the author’s 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature. 

The novel described the imprisonment of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, who was sentenced to a term in the Soviet gulag system because he had briefly been a prisoner of war in Germany during World War II. His capture by the Germans made his Soviet contemporaries concerned that he became a spy. Though innocent of treason, he nonetheless must serve a ten-year term of brutal labor in a prison system so brutal that it killed tens of thousands of its inmates. 

One Day in the Life is a timeless testament to the scale of individual destruction possible at the hands of the state, and, equally important, of the myriad ways in which men and women respond to tyranny.