Reading

Short Stories (7 days)

  • The Plague (Albert Camus)
    • The comfortable lives of a North Algerian town are disrupted by a deadly plague.
  • The Yellow Wallpaper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman)
    • A doctor’s wife is isolated in the attic and begins to see something in her wallpaper.
  • The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)
    • Gregor wakes up as a giant cockroach, but all he can think about is being late for work.
  • Erostratus (Jean-Paul Satre)
    • A cruel act seems like the only way to leave an imprint on the world for a man struggling with his own identity.
  • The Fall of the House of Usher (Edgar Allen Poe)
    • The final hours of a family tormented by tragedy and the legacy of the past.
  • The Colour out of Space (H. P. Lovecraft)
    • Things become progressively more unnatural after an unknown entity crash lands on a family farm.

Good Reads (14 days)

  • Notes from Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
    • An alienated man expresses his utter distaste towards his society.
  • Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
    • A scientist creates consciousness, and it disastrously backfires.
  • The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera)
    • The story of four lives and a dog during the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
  • Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)
    • The tragic fall of Okonkwo, a respected leader of a tribe in Eastern Nigeria.
  • War of the Worlds (H. G. Wells)
    • A strange arrival from outer-space lands in Surrey. No one panics until it is too late.

Adventurous Readers

  • A Journal of the Plague Year (Daniel Defoe)
    • Inspired by the Diary of Samuel Pepys. The fictional memoir details the devastation of the Bubonic Plague (1665) and the Great Fire of London (1666).
  • The Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank)
    • The Diary of a young Jewish girl in hiding during the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands.
  • King Lear (William Shakespeare)
    • An old British king descends into madness after handing the kingdom to his daughters.
  • The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe)
    • A young romantic falls madly in love with a betrothed woman, and becomes trapped in a love triangle.
  • Dune (Frank Herbert)
    • The last heir of a fallen dynasty must claim revenge and forge a new path for mankind, in a conflict spanning the universe.
  • Popular Hits of the Showa Era (Ryu Murukami)
    • A group of unhinged youths and six elderly women engage in a conflict across Tokyo that quickly blows out of proportion.