Random Ten Classic Novels to Read This Summer

Today, we are posting ten classic novels that might make for good summer reading. I haven't read all the books on this list, but I did get a chance to read "Lord of the Flies" while spending time on the island of Buyukada, off Istanbul,Turkey, in the summer of 2008. Stephen King said that William Golding's novel was a major influence on him.

There is another list on our other blog "The Daily Vampire" which lists ten contemporary novels which might be worth reading. We deliberately placed two books that were made into Tim Burton films. On the other list, we featured "The Big Fish" by Daniel Wallace. Here, we include "Alice in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll. We found out why reasearching this that there is a nerological condition called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome which affects human perception.

Though we did not include a novel from science-fiction Orson Scott Card, who is perhaps the most famous living writer here in the Greensboro, NC, area, on our other list, we do feature "Treasure Island," which he mentioned as one of his favorite classic novels on the WUNC-FM talk show "The State of Things" a few months ago.

Turkish-American writer Elif Batuman got me interested in someday reading Leo Tolstoy's epic novel "War and Peace," which is over a thousand pages long. I noticed that it has not been checked out of one local community college library since 2003! I imagine the length of the novel has something to do with that.

Here is this list:

1. "Gulliver's Travels" (1726) by Jonathan Swift

2. "1984" (1948) by George Orwell

3. "War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells (1898)

4. "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley (1932)

5. "Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson (1883)

6. "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy (1869)

7. "Lord of the Flies" by William Golding (1954)

8. "Old Man and the Sea" by Ernest Hemingway (1952)

9. "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison (1952)

10. "Alice in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll (1865)