Book Lists

After a cyclone transports her to the land of Oz, Dorothy must seek out the great wizard in order to return to Kansas.

While en route from Syria to Paris, in the middle of a freezing winter's night, the Orient Express is stopped dead in its tracks by a snowdrift. Passengers awake to find the train still stranded and to discover that a wealthy American has been brutally stabbed to death in his private compartment. Incredibly, that compartment is locked from the inside. With no escape into the wintery landscape the killer must still be on board. Fortunately, the brilliant Belgian inspector Hercule Poirot is also on board, having booked the last available berth.

The story of the tragic Caddy Compson, as seen through the eyes of her three brothers--the idiot Benjy, the neurotic Quentin, and the monstrous Jason.

Jay Gatsby had once loved beautiful, spoiled Daisy Buchanan, then lost her to a rich boy. Now, mysteriously wealthy, he is ready to risk everything to woo her back.

Anne Frank and her family, fleeing the horrors of Nazi occupation, hid in the back of an Amsterdam warehouse for two years. She was thirteen when she went into the Secret Annex with her family. Her diary remains a beloved and deeply admired testament to the indestructible nature of the human spirit.

Zane Grey's most enduring classic--the book that invented the myth of the American West. In the little village of Cottonwoods, Utah, Mormon rancher Jane Withersteen endures persecution, religious zealots, and cattle rustlers trying to prey on her land. Aided by Lassiter, the famous gunman, Jane and her friends must escape the clutches of her most dangerous enemies.

A novel about black Americans in Florida that centers on the life of Janie and her three marriages.

Cry, the Beloved Country is a beautifully told and profoundly compassionate story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set in the troubled and changing South Africa of the 1940s.

The classic protest novel that exposed harsh working conditions and unsanitary practices in the meatpacking industry.

Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Richard Wright's novel is just as powerful today as when it was written -- in its reflection of poverty and hopelessness, and what it means to be black in America.