By George Orwell
Recommended By Amy B., Children's Librarian
With Jean Simpson, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, September 27, 2016. 1:30 PM.

Portrays a terrifying vision of life in the future when a totalitarian government, considered a "Negative Utopia," watches over all citizens and directs all activities, becoming more powerful as time goes by.

By Mark Twain

When Huck escapes from his drunken father and the 'sivilizing' Widow Douglas with the runaway slave Jim, he embarks on a series of adventures. Beneath the exploits, however, are more serious undercurrents - of slavery, adult control and, above all, of Huck's struggle between his instinctive goodness and the corrupt values of society, which threaten his deep and enduring friendship with Jim.

By Mark Twain

The adventures of a mischievous young boy and his friends growing up in a Mississippi River town in the nineteenth century.

Became numerous movies: Tom Sawyer (1907, 1917, 1930, 1936, 1973. 1973-TV movie, 1984, and 2000), Huck and Tom (1918), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938), The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944 and 1985), Back to Hannibal: The Return of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (1990-TV movie), and Tom and Huck (1995).

By Virgil
Recommended By Meghan F., Children's Services Librarian

Recounts the adventures of the Trojan prince Aeneas, who helped found Rome, after the fall of Troy.

By Ben H. Winters

When a secret cabal of radical scientific revolutionaries launches an attack on Russian high society's high-tech lifestyle, the classic love story's heroes--Anna Karenina and Count Alexei Vronsky--must fight back with all their courage, all their gadgets, and all the power of a sleek new cyborg model like nothing the world has ever seen.

By George Orwell
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager
With Jean Simpson, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, July 14, 2015. 7:30 PM.

A satire on totalitarianism in which farm animals overthrow their human owner and set up their own government.

Became the movie: Animal Farm.

By Leo Tolstoy
Recommended By Donna Burger, Readers' Services Librarian, Nathalie Levin, Children's Services Librarian

A translation of the classic Russian novel tells the tale of rebellious Anna and her ill-fated, adulterous romance with Count Vronsky amid the turmoil of nineteenth-century Russia.

By Jules Verne

In 1872 Phileas Fogg wins a bet by traveling around the world in seventy–nine days, twenty–three hours, and fifty–seven minutes.

By Ernest J. Gaines

An elderly woman recalls her struggle against bigotry and racial injustice from her childhood during the Civil War to her participation in the twentieth-century civil rights demonstrations.

By Kate Chopin

In turn–of –the century New Orleans, Edna Pontellier, a woman who feels trapped in her stifling role as wife and mother, falls passionately in love with another man.

By Sylvia Plath
Recommended By Meghan F., Children's Services Librarian , Kaye Spurrell, Readers' Services Librarian

Esther Greenwood, a talented and successful writer, finally succumbs to madness when the world around her begins to falter.

Recommended By Megan Kass, Systems Manager

Composed toward the end of the first millennium, Beowulf is the classic Northern epic poem of a hero’s triumphs as a young warrior and his fated death as a defender of his people.

Became the movie: Beowulf.

By Wallace Stegner

Bo Mason, his wife, Elsa, and their two boys live a transient life of poverty and despair. Drifting from town to town and from state to state, the violent, ruthless Bo seeks out his fortune in the hotel business, in new farmland, and, eventually, in illegal rum-running through the treacherous back roads of the American Northwest.

By Charles Dickens

Ester Summerson is the ward of Mr. Jarndyce whose case in Chancery Court seems to have no end.

By Aldous Huxley
With Lisa Caputo, Assistant Library Director

Tuesday, February 28, 2012. 1 PM & 7:30 PM.

The story of a futuristic World State where all emotion, love, art, and human individuality have been replaced by social stability.

Became the movie: Brave New World.

By Jack London
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

A classic novel of adventure, drawn from London’s own experiences as a Klondike adventurer, relating the story of a heroic dog caught in the brutal life of the Alaska Gold Rush.

By John Steinbeck

Vividly depicts the colorful, sometimes disreputable, inhabitants of a run-down area in Monterey, California.

By Joseph Heller
With Sonia Grgas, Health Reference Librarian

Tuesday, September 29, 2015. 1:30 PM.

Depicts the struggles of a U.S. airman attempting to survive the lunacy and depravity of a World War II base.

Became the movie: Catch 22.

By J.D. Salinger
Recommended By Amy B., Children's Librarian

In an effort to escape the hypocrisies of life at his boarding school, sixteen–year–old Holden Caulfield seeks refuge in New York City.

By E. E. Cummings

"This centennial edition of E. E. Cumming's Complete Poems, published in celebration of his birth on October 14, 1894, contains all of the poems published or designated for publication by the poet in his lifetime.At the time of his death in 1962, E. E. Cummings was, next to Robert Frost, the most widely read poet in America. Combining Thoreau's controlled belligerence with the brash abandon of an uninhibited bohemian, Cummings, together with Pound, Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, helped bring about the twentieth–century revolution in literary expression. He is recognized on the one hand as the author of some of the most beautiful lyric poems written in the English language, and on the other as one of the most inventive American poets of his time–in the worlds of Richard Kostelanetz, "the major American poet of the middle–twentieth–century." –from the Publisher

By Emily Dickinson

"The verses of Emily Dickinson belong emphatically to what Emerson long since called "the Poetry of the Portfolio," - something produced absolutely without the thought of publication, and solely by way of expression of the writer's own mind. Such verse must inevitably forfeit whatever advantage lies in the discipline of public criticism and the enforced conformity to accepted ways. On the other hand, it may often gain something through the habit of freedom and the unconventional utterance of daring thoughts." - from the Publisher

By Mark Twain

A blow on the head transports a Yankee to 528 A.D. where he proceeds to modernize King Arthur's kingdom by organizing a school system, constructing telephone lines, and inventing the printing press.

Became numerous movies: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1921, 1949, 1989-TV movie), A Connecticut Yankee (1931, 1955-TV movie), A Connecticut Rabbit in King Arthur’s Court (1978- TV movie), Unidentified Flying Oddball (1979), A Kid in King Arthur’s Court (1995), A Kid in Aladdin’s Palace (1998-TV movie) *spin-off*, A Young Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1996), A Knight in Camelot (1998-TV movie), and Black Knight (2001).

By Alexandre Dumas

Edmund Dantes, unjustly convicted of aiding the exiled Napoleon, escapes after fourteen years of imprisonment and seeks revenge in Paris.

By Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A desperate and impoverished student named Raskolnikov commits a murder, thinking he is above moral law, but eventually must confront his inner mind and consequences. This is an intense psychological study, terrifying murder mystery, and fascinating detective thriller, instilled with philosophical, religious and social commentary.

By Arthur Miller
Recommended By Megan Kass, Systems Manager

As a wave of anti-communist investigations swept across American society during the 1950s, Miller exposed the horror of such witch-hunts by retelling the story of the infamous Salem witch trials in Massachusetts in 1692.

By Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton’s second full-length work is a scathing personal examination of the exploits and follies of the modern upper class.

By Willa Cather
Recommended By Brenda Cherry, Reference Librarian

“In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour becomes the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico, and over the next forty years he faces the lawlessness and loneliness of the frontier as he tries to spread his faith (From the Publisher).”

By Leo Tolstoy

The first major fictional work published by Tolstoy; this short novel reflects the author’s struggle to find the meaning of life.

By Dante Alighieri

Presents a translation of Dante’s allegorical poem. In the first part of Dante's epic poem about the three realms of the Christian afterlife, a spiritual pilgrim is led by Virgil through the nine circles of Hell.

By George Orwell

This unusual fictional account, in good part autobiographical, narrates without self-pity and often with humor the adventures of a penniless British writer among the down-and-out of two great cities. In the tales of both cities we learn some sobering Orwellian truths about poverty and society.

By Bram Stoker

Having discovered the double identity of the wealthy Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula, a small group of people vow to rid the world of the evil vampire.

By Jane Austen

Emma Woodhouse imagines that she dominates those around her in the small town of Highbury, but her inept matchmaking creates problems for herself and others.

By Edith Wharton
Recommended By Meghan F., Children's Services Librarian

Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious, and hypochondriac wife, Zeenie. But when Zeenie's vivacious cousin enters their household as a "hired girl", Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent. 

By Ray Bradbury
Recommended By Meghan F., Children's Services Librarian

A totalitarian regime has ordered all books to be destroyed, but one of the book burners suddenly realizes their merit, in a chilling novel of a frightening near-future world.

Became the movie: Fahrenheit 451.

By Thomas Hardy

Gabriel Oaks observes Bathsheba Everdene, the young mistress of Weatherbury Farm, fall victim to bad decisions and romantic impulses, unaware of the stroke of fate that will finally bring about their union.

Became numerous movies: Far From the Madding Crowd (2015), Far From the Madding Crowd (1967), and Tamara Drew (2010)

Became the TV Movie: Far From the Madding Crowd

By Ernest Hemingway

An American's love for an English nurse during the First World War ends in tragedy.

Became the movie: A Farewell to Arms (original in 1932, remake in 1957)

Became the Mini-Series: A Farewell to Arms (1966)

By Daniel Keyes

After being mentally retarted for all of his thiry–two years, Charlie Gordon undergoes an operation designed to change his life.

By Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Recommended By Megan Kass, Systems Manager
With Sonia Grgas, Health Reference Librarian

Tuesday, September 25, 2018. 1:30 PM.

A monster assembled by a scientist from parts of dead bodies develops a mind of his own as he learns to loathe himself and hate his creator. Includes illustrated notes throughout the text explaining the historical background of the story. 

By Jules Verne
With Barney Levantino, Reference Librarian

Tuesday, July 9, 2019. 7:30 PM.

Lacking any urgent assignments at the close of the Civil War, the members of the elite Baltimore Gun Club decide to build a gun big enough to shoot a manned rocket to the moon.

By Lois Lowry

Given his lifetime assignment at the Ceremony of Twelve, Jonas becomes the receiver of memories shared by only one other in his community and discovers the terrible truth about the society in which he lives.

Became the movie: The Giver (2014)

By Pearl S. Buck
Recommended By Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions, Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

A slave bride of a Chinese laborer devotes herself to her husband's family, but when civil war in China brings wealth to the family, her happiness is endangered as her husband brings home a second wife.

By John Steinbeck
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services

Tuesday, June 24, 2014. 1:30 PM.

The landmark novel about the plight of American farmers who were forced off their farms by drought and foreclosure during the 1930's.

Became the movie: The Grapes of Wrath.

By Charles Dickens
Recommended By Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian

A young orphan, Pip, receives a fortune from a mysterious benefactor and travels to London in order to become a gentleman.

By F. Scott Fitzgerald
Recommended By Josephine Amoia, Children's Librarian
With Jean Simpson, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, September 26, 2017. 1:30 PM.

A classic novel portrays the Jazz Age and all its decadence and excess as it follows the life of Jay Gatsby, a newly rich man obsessed with money, power, and glamour.

Became the movie: The Great Gatsby.

By Jonathan Swift

The unusual voyages and travels of Englishman Lemuel Gulliver carry him to such strange locales as Lilliput, where the inhabitants are six inches tall; Brobdingnag, a land of giants; an island of sorcerers; and a nation ruled by horses. Beneath the surface of this enchanting fantasy lurks a devastating critique of human malevolence, stupidity, greed, vanity, and short-sightedness. It is a brilliant combination of adventure, humor, and philosophy.

By Charles Dickens

Classic Dickens tale containing themes of class struggles between working men in factories and upper classes who exploit them.

By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Recommended By Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian
With Sonia Grgas, Health Reference Librarian

Tuesday, June 10, 2014. 7:30 PM.

When Sir Charles Baskerville is murdered, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson investigate the eerie howling on the moor.

By Edith Wharton

The tragic story of Lily Bart, a beautiful young woman caught up in the shallow and corrupt world of New York society at the turn of the century, where wealth and social status are everything.

Became the movie: The House of Mirth.

By E.M. Forster

A strong-willed and intelligence woman refuses to allow the pretensions of her husband’s smug English family to ruin her life.

Became the movie: Howard’s End

By William Butler Yeats

"At once a marvelous visual record, a valuable introduction to the poet's work, and a stimulating companion for those who already know and love it, Images of Ireland, with the superb photographs of Alain Le Garsmeur, makes Yeats' Ireland come to life. The photos accompany a succession of key extracts from the poet's verses, plays, essays, and memoirs––passages that evoke the landscape he loved. Includes a brief chronology of Yeats' life. 44 color photographs, 53 duotones. " –from the Publisher