Join with fellow book lovers as we look at books with a timeless place in our history of literature.  

December 

Walden by Henry David Thoreau 

This series of 18 essays published in 1854 was a record of Thoreau’s experiment in simple living on the northern shore of Walden Pond in eastern Massachusetts (1845–47). Walden is viewed not only as a philosophical treatise on labour, leisure, self-reliance, and individualism but also as an influential piece of nature writing. It is considered Thoreau’s masterwork. 

January  

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse 

A 1922 novel by Hermann Hesse that deals with the spiritual journey of self-discovery of a man named Siddhartha during the time of the Gautama Buddha. 

February 

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison 

A Black man's search for success and the American dream leads him out of college to Harlem and a growing sense of personal rejection and social invisibility. 

March 

Erewhon by Samuel Buter (1872; 272 pgs) 

Setting out to make his fortune in a far-off country, a young traveller discovers the remote and beautiful land of Erewhon and is given a home among its extraordinarily handsome citizens. He soon learns that the ideal community has its faults. Inspired by Samuel Butler's years in colonial New Zealand and by his reading of Darwin's Origin of Species, Erewhon is a highly original, irreverent and humorous satire on conventional virtues, religious hypocrisy and the unthinking acceptance of beliefs. 

 April 

Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell (1853; 256 pgs) 

A vivid and affectionate portrait of a provincial town in early Victorian England. The town of Cranford is taken over by refined and independent women when the men must move to nearby Drumble to work, uprooting the long-standing gender dynamics and changing the social landscape indefinitely. 

May 

Moll Flanders (Daniel Defoe (1722; 304 pgs) 

The novel follows the life of heroine, Moll Flanders, which includes her early seduction, careers in crime and prostitution, conviction for theft and transportation to the plantations of Virginia, and her ultimate redemption and prosperity in the New World.