H ere are the ten classic works of English literature that have been most frequently recommended on Five Books. They naturally reflect our interview interests—philosophy , journalism , politics , science fiction , to name just a few—so we can’t speak for how they’d be rated from a purely literary perspective, but they’re all really good reads. Especially for the 19th-century novels, if the English feels a little alien at first, keep going: it sometimes takes a few chapters to adjust to the language.
“Not only is Eliot a great moral thinker—you feel the movement of a philosophically sophisticated ethicist moving behind the scenes of Middlemarch—but it’s also about the use of literature in moving us morally forward…It’s not only my favourite philosophical novel, it’s my favourite novel. I teach it again and again and each time I am flabbergasted by what she’s able to accomplish and what my students get out of it.” Read more...
The Best Philosophical Novels
Rebecca Goldstein ,
Philosopher
“This is the ultimate dystopia written by someone who wasn’t just one of the greatest of all journalists, but one of the most prescient…He wrote this book in 1948, when he was dying of tuberculosis, in a great burst of passionate determination, because he could see long before other people where totalitarianism and communism were heading. Animal Farm had told it as a kind of dark fairy-tale, but this was the culmination. The intellectual dishonesty of the Left, which refused to see how evil Stalin was, is despicable, and Orwell was brave enough to stand up to his friends as well as his enemies…His hero Winston, named, of course, after Winston Churchill, is betrayed even by the one person he thinks he can totally love and trust” Read more...
Books that Changed the World
Amanda Craig ,
Journalist
“Jane Eyre in some respects…is the original domestic noir…there’s a sense of building threat and building crisis in the book. But I also love the social commentary and the feminism. It’s my favourite book of all time…I read it out loud to my daughter when she was about 15 and it’s just an incredible book” Read more...
The Best Classic Thrillers
Lucy Atkins ,
Novelist
“It is one of the most perfect novels ever written.It’s got a wonderful plot. It’s about good and bad money, you don’t know who Pip’s benefactor is, you’re wrong-footed—as he is—all the time. It’s about terrible damage. It’s got this fantastic suspense about what happens to Magwitch. It’s sad, but also it’s got wonderful humour in it and wonderful characters. It’s got Wemmick, one of the first commuters. It’s just brilliant.” Read more...
The Best Charles Dickens Books
Jenny Hartley ,
Biographer
“I have read Pride and Prejudice , I would guess, 40 or 50 times. I’ve taught it at every level of college, of graduate school…I think it’s always been my favourite, as it’s many people’s favourite among Austen’s novels…I loved it because it’s a fairy tale; it’s about the poor girl growing up and marrying Prince Charming. But I was always vaguely embarrassed by that as a scholar, because I didn’t think it was the best…When I was asked to annotate it, I wasn’t very enthusiastic about the idea. I was finally persuaded because I thought I could annotate it out of my head – I know the book practically by heart. I was so wrong” Read more...
The Best Jane Austen Books
Patricia Meyer Spacks ,
Literary Scholar
“It wasn’t published till 1830, but she had the idea and wrote the story when she was nineteen years old, 200 years ago, in 1816…Frankenstein has a reach of imagination that is almost hysterical. She was able to pluck this idea both from her imagination and her understanding of science. She understood what Erasmus Darwin—Charles Darwin’s grandfather—was doing: experiments with electricity and the re-animation of dead objects. She was fantastically well-read, she was terribly intellectual, she was a political radical. She had no truck with modesty and restraint, or doing what was expected of her. She was going to let her imagination go as far as it possibly could. Then she defended it.” Read more...
The Best Gothic Novels
Sarah Perry ,
Novelist
“I like to read Dracula as one of the great novels of London. Stoker himself was an Irish immigrant to London. The Count is a central European immigrant to London. He initially moves to Carfax Abbey, in the suburbs, before gentrifying himself and moving to Piccadilly.” Read more...
The Best Horror Stories
Darryl Jones ,
Literary Scholar
“I think it is the best description of a foreign correspondent’s career, and I doubt it will ever be bettered. It’s still very relevant to this rather ridiculous life. When I was covering the early days of the Congo, a group of us were there, maybe five or six correspondents, and somebody had a battered copy of Scoop that we passed around. It just read straight – the life we were living was hardly exaggerated.” Read more...
The best books on Spies
Richard Beeston ,
Foreign Correspondent
“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy – they always call it a trilogy even though there were four and then five books – obviously they’re classics, especially the first four, everyone loves them. The casual way in which Adams treats the universe as a whole – as something you can just sort of run around in – conveys a sense of excitement about the universe that really appeals to a lot of people… They’re novels, not textbooks. Good books on cosmology, astrophysics, or outside of my field for that matter, get people excited about the topic…There’s a lot in this trilogy that’s subtle and buried. For example, there’s a lot of talk about the bigness of space that really gives you a sense of the actual size of space in a way that a textbook typically doesn’t. The books play a lot with things like the Big Bang or the end of time in a fun way. I would obviously not even remotely suggest this as a textbook, but it goes part and parcel with the more serious side of physics.” Read more...
The best books on Cosmology
David Goldberg ,
Physicist
“This is about the perfectibility of mankind. He posits the idea that the political system actually does perfect things for people and it turns out to be nearly as scary as the horror shows actually created in the 20th century…So Huxley was showing us that this is a rum goal however ‘well’ it turns out. Even if our dreams of utopia were to come true it would be a horror show.” Read more...
The Best Political Satire Books
P. J. O’Rourke ,
Political Commentator
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