Novels, Deep-Read

01The Three-Body Problem — one person answered on behalf of everyoneLiu Cixin · 2008 02The Dark Forest — why the universe is silent, and one man's deterrenceLiu Cixin · 2008 03Death's End — when love becomes a civilization's fatal flawLiu Cixin · 2010 04Ball Lightning — how one obsession eats a whole lifeLiu Cixin · 2005 05Supernova Era — the planet handed to everyone under thirteenLiu Cixin · 2003 06Of Ants and Dinosaurs — brute strength wedded to precise little handsLiu Cixin · 2010 07The price of civilization — what truth and beauty cost in lives3 short stories 08Fleeing with the Earth — what the survivors turn into3 short stories 09When a higher civilization arrives — two arrivals, both about distribution2 novelettes 10The tender Liu Cixin — an iron writer doing tenderness3 short stories 01Journey to the West — How a monkey gets absorbed into the institutionWu Cheng'en · 1592 02The Lord of the Rings — The Ring must be destroyed, not usedJ. R. R. Tolkien · 1954 03One Thousand and One Nights — Tell a story, live another nightAnonymous · c.9–14C 04The Decameron — Plague outside; ten people survive by telling storiesGiovanni Boccaccio · 1353 05The Little Prince — The time you wasted on her made her the only oneAntoine de Saint-Exupéry · 1943 01Nineteen Eighty-Four — Change the language and you change what can be thoughtGeorge Orwell · 1949 02Brave New World — You don't need tyranny; pleasure will govern themAldous Huxley · 1932 03Blindness — A whole city goes blind; one woman still seesJosé Saramago · 1995 04The Handmaid's Tale — Every rule in it has already happened somewhereMargaret Atwood · 1985 05Never Let Me Go — Children raised to donate organs — why don't they run?Kazuo Ishiguro · 2005 01One Hundred Years of Solitude — What destroys Macondo is somebody finishing the bookGabriel García Márquez · 1967 02Midnight's Children — A midwife swapped two name-tags at midnightSalman Rushdie · 1981 03The Master and Margarita — The devil audits Moscow and breaks no lawMikhail Bulgakov · 1967 04Pedro Páramo — The narrator dies halfway throughJuan Rulfo · 1955 05The Tin Drum — He threw himself down the stairs at three and stopped growingGünter Grass · 1959 06Red Sorghum — Grandma was traded at sixteen for a black muleMo Yan · 1987 07The House of the Spirits — Three generations of women meet a military coupIsabel Allende · 1982 08The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle — The bat he swings in a dream has killed beforeHaruki Murakami · 1995 01The Trial — You are charged; nobody will say with whatFranz Kafka · 1925 02The Metamorphosis — The last to agree he should go is GregorFranz Kafka · 1915 03The Stranger — He didn't cry at his mother's funeral, so he was condemnedAlbert Camus · 1942 04Catch-22 — Only madmen may be grounded, and asking proves you saneJoseph Heller · 1961 05The Good Soldier Švejk — Playing the idiot to defeat an entire war machineJaroslav Hašek · 1923 06The Unbearable Lightness of Being — Lightness, weight and kitsch, settled in one bookMilan Kundera · 1984 07The Golden Age — Keeping freedom by sheer frankness in an absurd eraWang Xiaobo · 1994 01Ulysses — One ordinary day expanded into the whole human mindJames Joyce · 1922 02In Search of Lost Time — How one pastry gives back an entire vanished lifeMarcel Proust · 1927 03The Sound and the Fury — Told four times, and its center never speaksWilliam Faulkner · 1929 04Don Quixote — Nobody refutes him, everyone plays along to the endMiguel de Cervantes · 1615 05The Magic Mountain — Seven years in a sanatorium, all of Europe's case notesThomas Mann · 1924 06Ficciones — He wrote no novels, only reviews of books that never existedJorge Luis Borges · 1944 07To the Lighthouse — Ten years and three deaths, all inside bracketsVirginia Woolf · 1927 08If on a Winter's Night a Traveler — Ten broken titles that spell one sentenceItalo Calvino · 1979 09Hopscotch — Read it in two orders — the reader pulled into authorshipJulio Cortázar · 1963 102666 — Five books circle one city, none of them entersRoberto Bolaño · 2004 11The Man Without Qualities — His year off expires in August 1914Robert Musil · 1943 12The Green House — A desert brothel painted the green of the jungleMario Vargas Llosa · 1966 01Dream of the Red Chamber — The ending is handed over in chapter fiveCao Xueqin · 1791 02War and Peace — History's flood and a family dinner stitched into one clothLeo Tolstoy · 1869 03Call to Arms — Is it worth waking a few people inside a sealed iron house?Lu Xun · 1923 04The Great Gatsby — The American dream at its prettiest and emptiestF. Scott Fitzgerald · 1925 05Romance of the Three Kingdoms — One private oath burns down a kingdomLuo Guanzhong · c.14C 06Water Margin — The hand that drove them out finally collected themShi Nai'an · c.14C 07Les Misérables — Two silver candlesticks buy a man's whole lifeVictor Hugo · 1862 08The Red and the Black — He could have lived, and named his real crimeStendhal · 1830 09Great Expectations — He had the wrong patron for ten yearsCharles Dickens · 1861 10The Grapes of Wrath — The milk meant for her baby went to a strangerJohn Steinbeck · 1939 01To Live — After burying everyone he lovesYu Hua · 1993 02Things Fall Apart — Before the colonizers arrived, Africa was not a blankChinua Achebe · 1958 03White Deer Plain — Who may pass through the ancestral hall's doorChen Zhongshi · 1993 04Taipei People — Not old; their era died without themPai Hsien-yung · 1971 05All Quiet on the Western Front — The day he died, the report said nothing happenedErich Maria Remarque · 1929 06Disgrace — He admits every charge, and will not say he is sorryJ. M. Coetzee · 1999 07The God of Small Things — Who may be loved, and how much, is governed by lawArundhati Roy · 1997 01Pride and Prejudice — In the marriage market, what does it take to see someone?Jane Austen · 1813 02Madame Bovary — Fantasy versus the bills, and a scalpelGustave Flaubert · 1857 03The Brothers Karamazov — If there is no God, is everything permitted?Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1880 04The Tale of Genji — What he did returns in the same shape twenty years onMurasaki Shikibu · 1010 05No Longer Human — "Disqualified from being human," put so no one can unhear itOsamu Dazai · 1948 06Anna Karenina — Her crime isn't the affair, it's refusing to lieLeo Tolstoy · 1877 07Crime and Punishment — He confessed, served eight years, never repentedFyodor Dostoevsky · 1866 08Wuthering Heights — He never hit the boy, he just kept him illiterateEmily Brontë · 1847 09Lolita — The most beautiful prose pleading the least forgivable caseVladimir Nabokov · 1955 10The Catcher in the Rye — Adolescence in total non-cooperation with the adult worldJ. D. Salinger · 1951 01The Name of the Rose — The murderer is a book; the motive is laughterUmberto Eco · 1980 02The Legend of the Condor Heroes — He gave everything he owned to a filthy strangerJin Yong · 1957 03Murder on the Orient Express — Twelve people, one knife each, a juryAgatha Christie · 1934 04Moby-Dick — How one obsession drags an entire crew into its depthsHerman Melville · 1851 05The Old Man and the Sea — He won the fish and brought home a skeletonErnest Hemingway · 1952 06My Name Is Red — When a way of seeing is worth killing forOrhan Pamuk · 1998