30 Books You Should Read Before You're 30. The best books aren't static stories, but living entities with meanings that change and grow along with you.
That's why we strongly recommend rereading the classics that were assigned to you in high school; you may find that they're nothing like they were before. Still, some books are best experienced at a certain age, like, say, "Catcher in the Rye. " If you pick it up for the first time when you're far beyond puberty, you'll likely wonder what all the hype is about. Likewise, there are certain books you should read in your 20s, due to the age of the characters or the intended audience -- books like Donna Tartt's "The Secret History" or Christopher Hitchens' "Letters to a Young Contrarian.
" There are also fantastic classics that may not have been assigned to you in school but that you should pick up ASAP simply because you're missing out -- books like Doris Lessing's "The Golden Notebook" or "A Collection of Essays" by George Orwell. "How Should a Person Be? " Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Uglies. Time Traveler's Wife, The. Giver, The. Snow White and the Huntsman. Lightning Thief, The. Inkheart. I am America (and so can you!) 1984. The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary.
This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speak-write which was of course impossible for his present purpose.
April 4th, 1984. He sat back. For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The Great Gatsby. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the room; then she put them up and looked out under them.
She seldom or never looked THROUGH them for so small a thing as a boy; they were her state pair, the pride of her heart, and were built for ‘style,’ not service — she could have seen through a pair of stove-lids just as well. She looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but still loud enough for the furniture to hear: ‘Well, I lay if I get hold of you I’ll —‘ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. ‘Well, I’m puzzled.
Is something the matter?’ ‘Please take it,’ says I, ‘and don’t ask me noth-ing — then I won’t have to tell no lies.’ He studied a while, and then he says: ‘Oho-o! I think I see. Tender is the Night. On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rosecolored hotel.
Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; a decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April. Now, many bungalows cluster near it, but when this story begins only the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the massed pines between Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers and Cannes, five miles away. The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one.