Books (I Think) Everyone Should Read Part II

Last time I published the books that didn't fit onto my should read list for one reason or another. This list is the 10 books I would say everyone should read.

• Frankenstein - Mary Shelley This book is embedded in our culture mainly through movies. You could argue that Dracula is as well, but I think this book has more universal appeal with the theme of there are some things man was just not meant to know.
• Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift Gulliver's first journey to the land of the Lilliput gave us a word, Lilliputian. If giving us a word and providing iconic images of a man tied down by thousands of strings isn't enough, the satire in all four is still valid today. We've still got countries going to war over things just as foolish as which end of the egg to open. Also, it was someone who was not at all familiar with this book that got me thinking about a must read list.
• The Oddessy of Homer The fact that people are still reading this after over 2000 years speaks for itself. I think this is the more readable of the first part of the story, the Illiad. You couldn't go wrong reading any of the major classic epics, but I think this one is a must read.
• A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle How can you not put a book on the list which starts with: "It was a dark and stormy night." Many books have stories about a secret struggle between good and evil, The Dark Is Rising comes to mind, but I think that this is a particularly well written one. It was also the first book I ever read that used a four dimensional construct known as a tesseract . Traveling through one is the namesake wrinkle.
• A Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin Long before J. K. Rowling had ever gone into the coffee shop to write about Harry Potter, Le Guin wrote this book to answer the question: Where do wizards come from. When I was in second grade, this book was featured in a Reading Rainbow type show. Several of the boys in the class with me had been excited by the excerpt of the book which featured the Wizard's battle with a family of hatching dragons. We worked out a plan to get a copy of the book and the order in which we would read it. As far as I know, I'm the only one who ever got a hold of the book and read it. Rereading the book as an adult, I realized I that I had absorbed much of the philosophy of the book without even realizing it.
• Dune - Frank Herbert I've lost track of the number of times I've read this book. There are so many ideas contained in it. Politics, religion, planning, revenge, loyalty, hero worship, human thought vs. thinking machines, ecology. Forget the David Lynch movie, this is one of the finest books ever written.
• Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams Usually I don't want too much humor in my novels, but this is an exception. In what other book can you learn the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything?
• Brave New World - Aldous Huxley In some ways, I feel like we're living in the dystopian world predicted by this novel. It's amazing that it was written in the 1930's, it feels like a book that could have been written today.
• Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkein I know this is a trilogy, but that's because the publisher wouldn't put it out as a single volume. There is probably a big section at your favorite bookstore that wouldn't exist if Tolkein hadn't written this tale of middle earth. While it is a work of fiction, the world of Middle Earth is so well thought out, it reads like a history of another world. While inventing languages for the people of world to speak isn't a prerequisite for great literature, it does add something to this story.
• Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll This is another story with imagery embedded into the culture. The rabbit in a waist coat, the Cheshire cat, and little bits of food and drink with the labels eat me and drink me should be familiar to everyone.

One thing that struck me after I had assembled this list is how many of the must reads I've picked are often put in the young readers section of a bookstore.