The Classics

What usually makes a book a classic?

All the reasons we don’t read the classics

All the reasons to read the classics

The following is a partial list of world classics available at the St. Charles Public Library. Many of these titles are also available in audio format. Please check at the Readers Services or Information Services Desks for further information. 

Ancient World

Bhagavad Gita: A New Translation.  294.592 BHA (India)
The Arabian Nights =Alf Laylah Wa-Laylah.  398.2 ARA (Persia)
Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition.  829.3 BEO  (Anglo Saxon)   
The Aeneid.  Virgil.  873.01 VIR  (Roman)
The Iliad.  Homer.  883.01 HOM  (Greek)
The Odyssey.  Homer.  883.01 HOM  (Greek) 
The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian.
892.1 EPI  (Babylonia)

Africa

Things Fall Apart.  Achebe, Chinua
Cry, the Beloved Country.  Paton, Alan

Australia

On the Beach.  Shute, Nevil

Canada

Fifth Business.  Davies, Robertson

Eastern Europe

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.  Kundera, Milan  (Czech)
Quo Vadis.  Síenkiewicz, Henryk  (Poland)
Night; Dawn; the Accident: A Trilogy.  Wiesel, Elie.  843.914 WIE  (Romania)

England

Pride and Prejudice.  Austen, Jane
Lorna Doone.  Blackmore, R. D. (on order)
The Way of All Flesh.  Butler, Samuel
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  Carroll, Lewis
The Death of the Heart.  Bowen, Elizabeth
Jane Eyre.  Brontë, Charlotte
Wuthering Heights.  Brontë, Emily 
The Moonstone.  Collins, Wilkie
The Heart of Darkness.  Conrad, Joseph
The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.  Defoe, Daniel
Bleak House.  Dickens, Charles
Middlemarch.  Eliot, George
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling.  Fielding, Henry
A Passage to India.  Forster, E. M. 
The Vicar of Wakefield.  Goldsmith, Oliver
The Power and the Glory.  Greene, Graham
The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character.  Hardy, Thomas
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  Joyce, James
The Chronicles of Narnia.  Lewis, C.S. (J Fiction)
The Magician’s Nephew
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
The Horse and His Boy
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Prince Caspian
The Silver Chair
The Last Battle
How Green Was My Valley.  Llewellyn, Richard
A Bend in the River.  Naipaul, V. S.
Nineteen Eighty-Four.  Orwell, George
Atlas Shrugged.  Rand, Ayn
The Lord of the Rings.  Tolkien J.R.R.
The Fellowship of the Ring
The Two Towers
The Return of the King
Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus.  Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
Gulliver’s Travels.  Swift, Jonathan
Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero.  Thackeray, William Makepeace
Barchester Towers.  Trollope, Anthony
Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder.  Waugh, Evelyn
The Once and Future King.  White, T. H.
The Picture of Dorian Gray.  Wilde, Oscar
To the Lighthouse.  Woolf, Virginia
Utopia.  More, Thomas.  335.02 MOR 
The Canterbury Tales.  Chaucer, Geoffrey  821.1 CHA
Le Morte D’Arthur.  Malory, Thomas.  823.2 MAL 
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  Gibbon, Edward.  Vols. 1, 2, 3.  973.06 GIB

Egypt

Palace Walk.  Mahfuz, Najib

France

Eugénie Grandet.  Balzac, Honoré de 
The Stranger.  Camus, Albert
Gigi: and, the Cat.  Colette
The Three Musketeers.  Dumas, Alexandre
Madame Bovary: Patterns of a Provincial Life.  Flaubert, Gustave
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.  Hugo, Victor
Man’s Fate= (La Condition Humaine).  Malraux, André
Remembrance of Things Past.  Proust, Marcel
The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century.  Stendhal
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.  Verne, Jules
Wind, Sand, and Stars.  de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine.  849.912 SAI

Germany

The Sorrows of Young Werther.  Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 
The Tin Drum.  Grass, Günter 
Siddhartha.  Hesse, Hermann
The Magic Mountain.  Mann, Thomas
All Quiet on the Western Front.  Remarque, Erich Maria
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.  Werfel, Franz
Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales.  Grimm, Jacob.  398.2 GRI

Hungary

The Castle.  Kafka, Franz

Italy

If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler.  Calvino, Italo
The Name of the Rose.  Eco, Umberto
The Leopard.  Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe
The Prince.  Machiavelli, Noccolò.  320.1 MAC
The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri.  Alighieri, Dante.  851 DAN

Japan

The Tale of Genji.  Murasaki Shikibu
The Sound of the Mountain.  Kawabata, Yasunari

Latin America

The Old Gringo.  Fuentes, Carlos

Russia

Crime and Punishment.  Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
Dead Souls.  Gogol, Vasil’evich Nikolai
  Lolita.  Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich
And Quiet Flows the Don.  Sholokov, Mikahil Aleksandrovich
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.  Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isayevich
Anna Karenina.  Tolstoy, Leo
Fathers and Sons.  Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich
Eugene Onegin and Other Poems.  Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich.  891.713 PUS

Scandinavia

Under the Glacier.  Laxness, Halldór
Kristin Lavransdatter.  Undset, Sigrid

Scotland

Ivanhoe: A Romance.  Scott, Sir Walter
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  Spark, Muriel 

South America

One Hundred Years of Solitude.  García  Márquez, Gabriel  (Colombia)

Spain

Don Quixote.  Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de

United States

Little Women.  Alcott, Louisa May
Go Tell It On the Mountain.  Baldwin, James
Fahrenheit 451.  Bradbury, Ray
The Good Earth.  Buck, Pearl S.
Tarzan of the Apes.  Burroughs, Edgar Rice
My Ántonia.  Cather, Willa
The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War.  Crane, Stephen
The Invisible Man.  Ellison, Ralph
The Sound and the Fury.  Faulkner, William
Tender Is the Night.  Fitzgerald, F. Scott
The Scarlet Letter.  Hawthorne, Nathaniel
The Sun Also Rises.  Hemingway, Ernest
The Turn of the Screw.  James, Henry
To Kill a Mockingbird.  Lee, Harper 
Main Street.  Lewis, Sinclair
The Natural.  Malamud, Bernard
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.  McCullers, Carson
Moby Dick, Or, the Whale.  Melville, Herman
The Violent Bear It Away.  O’Connor, Flannery
The Moviegoer.  Percy, Walker
The Jungle.  Sinclair, Upton
East of Eden.  Steinbeck, John
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  Twain, Mark
The Friendly Persuasion.  West, Jessamyn
Ethan Frome.  Wharton, Edith
The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains.  Wister, Owen
O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life.  Wolfe, Thomas
Native Son.  Wright, Richard
The Education of Henry Adams.  Adams, Henry.  B Adams