Best Classic Books to Read (Part 2)
Picking up where Part 1 left off, here are ten more essential classics — Russian doorstoppers, British dystopia, an ancient Greek epic, and a couple of the sharpest satires ever written. As with Part 1, these are books that have stayed in print, in classrooms, and in arguments for a reason.
1. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1869)
Tolstoy's sprawling epic follows several aristocratic Russian families through the Napoleonic Wars, weaving personal stories of love, ambition, and disillusionment into one of the most ambitious meditations on history, free will, and fate ever attempted in fiction. Genuinely long, but far more readable in practice than its reputation suggests — Tolstoy is more interested in people than in battle logistics.
2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877)
Tolstoy's other masterpiece is tighter and more personal than War and Peace, following Anna's destructive affair with Count Vronsky alongside the quieter, more redemptive story of Levin's search for meaning in work, faith, and family. Famous for its devastating opening line about happy and unhappy families, and for treating its central "fallen woman" with more compassion than nineteenth-century convention usually allowed.
3. 1984 by George Orwell (1949)
The novel that gave us "Big Brother," "doublethink," and "thoughtcrime" — a vision of a totalitarian future where the state controls not just behavior but thought and memory itself, through Winston Smith's doomed attempt at rebellion and independent thought. Essential simply for how thoroughly its vocabulary has shaped modern political language, decades after publication.
4. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
Where Orwell imagined control through fear and surveillance, Huxley imagined control through pleasure, comfort, and engineered contentment — a future where dissent is neutralized not by punishment but by making everyone too satisfied to want to rebel. Often paired with 1984 precisely because the two books disagree about which kind of dystopia is more likely, a debate that's only gotten more relevant with time.
5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
A wild, often genuinely unpleasant story of obsessive, destructive love between Heathcliff and Catherine, told through nested narrators on the Yorkshire moors. It shocked contemporary readers with its violence and lack of a clear moral center, and remains one of the strangest, least conventionally "romantic" books to regularly get filed under romance.
6. The Odyssey by Homer (c. 8th century BCE)
The foundational epic of Western literature, following Odysseus's ten-year journey home after the Trojan War, past sirens, cyclopes, and a goddess who turns his men into pigs, while his wife Penelope fends off suitors back in Ithaca. Still gripping as pure adventure narrative nearly three thousand years later, and the direct ancestor of just about every hero's-journey story written since.
7. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (1862)
A sprawling story of redemption and justice in post-revolutionary France, following ex-convict Jean Valjean's attempt to build a moral life while pursued relentlessly by the police inspector Javert, against the backdrop of poverty, revolution, and social upheaval. Long and digressive — Hugo will happily pause the plot for fifty pages on the Battle of Waterloo or the Paris sewer system — but the emotional core remains one of literature's most powerful arguments for mercy over rigid law.
8. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1890)
A young man's portrait ages and corrupts in his place while he remains eternally youthful, pursuing pleasure and cruelty with no visible consequence — until the moral rot he's avoided catches up all at once. Wilde's only novel, sharp with the same wit as his plays, and a genuinely unsettling meditation on vanity, hedonism, and self-deception.
9. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)
Sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield wanders New York City after being expelled from prep school, narrating the adult world's phoniness with a voice so distinctive it's shaped how alienated teenage narrators have sounded in fiction ever since. Divisive — some readers find Holden's cynicism exhausting, others find it exactly right — but hard to ignore as a cultural touchstone.
10. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1856)
Emma Bovary, bored and unfulfilled in her marriage to a dull country doctor, pursues affairs and extravagant spending in search of the romantic life she's read about in novels — with ruinous consequences. Flaubert's famously precise, unsentimental prose style influenced generations of novelists after him, and the book remains a sharp study of the gap between romantic fantasy and lived reality.
Where to Find These Books in Kenya
All the titles above are in stock at Readers' Republik, with delivery across Nairobi and the rest of Kenya. Explore more in this collection:
Frequently Asked Questions.
Do I need to have read Part 1 before this list? No — each list stands on its own, and none of these books require having read the others first.
Which of these books is the longest commitment? War and Peace and Les Misérables are both well over a thousand pages in most editions, considerably longer than anything on this list.
Should I read 1984 or Brave New World first? Either works as a standalone, but reading them close together is worthwhile — they're often read as a pair because they imagine such different mechanisms of social control.
Which of these is the oldest? The Odyssey, dating to roughly the 8th century BCE, by a wide margin — everything else on this list was written within the last two hundred years.
Will there be a Part 3? Likely — there are still plenty of essential classics left uncovered, including more Dickens, the Brontës' other novels, and further twentieth-century staples.