Top 6 Books You Don't Want To Miss Reading

"Any gentleman or lady who does not like a fine story must be intolerably stupid," Jane Austen writes in Northanger Abbey. While there are many outstanding novels to read, some are undoubtedly greater or more essential than others, whether for their excellent prose, thought-provoking stories, or the boundaries they broke when they were published. 


To offer you a sound literary foundation, we've whittled down a few amazing books to read that everyone should read at least once in their lives, many of which are still on school reading lists today.


These are the interesting books to read- or add to your reading list, from Harper Lee's investigation of racial tensions in To Kill a Mockingbird to Emily Bront's gothic romance Wuthering Heights and F Scott Fitzgerald's masterwork The Great Gatsby.


1. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Harper Lee's classic story on racial tensions in the Deep South, set in 1930s Alabama, is possibly the seminal literature on the subject. The plot follows Atticus Finch, a white lawyer, as he tries to preserve the life of Tom Robinson, a Black man wrongfully accused of raping a white lady.  Scout, Finch's six-year-old daughter, narrates the story, emphasizing the unfairness and incomprehensibility of the situation from a child's perspective.


2. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

"If you want to know about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my dreadful childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap," begins JD Salinger's modern take on the coming-of-age story, The Catcher in the Rye. 


The author's unorthodox hero Holden Caulfield perfectly captures the disillusionment felt by many teens in 1950s America as he narrates his exploits in New York City over two days after running away from home.


3. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

If you only read one Dickens book, make it Great Expectations, usually regarded as the author's magnum opus. It depicts the story of Pip, an orphan who rises above his modest origins to earn the love of Estella, a girl from the upper class. 


It endures as a cautionary tale about the personal cost of misplaced social advancement, featuring some of the most recognizable characters in the literary canon, from escaped convict Magwitch to jilted bride Miss Havisham.


4. Lord of the Flies by William Golding

When an aircraft tragedy leaves a bunch of schoolboys left on a tropical island with no adults, it doesn't take long for their attempts at civilization to fail and their primal instincts to take control. While opponent Jack and his followers succumb to their darker tendencies and go feral, would-be leader Ralph strives to build a new civilization in the image of the one they've left behind. 


It's an excellent study of human nature that explores what would happen if we were left to our ways without the framework of civilization and how humans are, at their core, animals.


5. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid's Tale is set in a dystopian future in which an environmental disaster has rendered the bulk of the female population infertile. Fertile women are picked up and trained to be quiet, nameless 'handmaids,' forced to breed with the men in power when a fundamentalist religious sect seizes control of what was formerly the United States of America. 


Margaret Atwood's novel, which has since been adapted into a popular TV series, addresses the ramifications of a reversal of women's rights and is an essential feminist classic.


6. Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence

When Lady Chatterley's husband Clifford returns from the battlefields of France paralyzed from the waist down, his emotional isolation propels her into an explosive affair with their rough-talking gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors — a big taboo in interwar society. 


The novel's depictions of its heroine's sexual activities would hardly raise an eyebrow. Still, when it was first published in 1960, DH Lawrence's story of love and lust across social barriers was extensively banned and even exposed to an obscenity prosecution.