Best Classic Books to Read (Part 3)
Part 3 delivers on what we promised at the end of Part 2 — more Dickens, a Brontë sister who doesn't get nearly enough credit, and a couple of essential twentieth-century American classics — alongside an ancient epic, a gothic horror staple, and one of the great adventure novels of all time.
1. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Set between London and Paris before and during the French Revolution, Dickens's most famous opening line ("It was the best of times, it was the worst of times") introduces a story of sacrifice, doubles, and redemption built around the guillotine-era Terror. Tighter and more plot-driven than most of Dickens's sprawling social novels, making it one of his more approachable entry points.
2. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
The least famous Brontë sister wrote what may be the most quietly radical of the three sisters' novels — the story of Helen Graham, a mysterious woman who flees an abusive, alcoholic husband to protect her son, told partly through her own diary. Shockingly frank for its era about marital abuse and a woman's right to leave, it was considered scandalous on publication and remains sharper and more socially pointed than its more famous sibling novels.
3. Beloved by Toni Morrison
Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman living in post-Civil War Ohio, is haunted — literally — by the ghost of the daughter she killed rather than see returned to slavery. Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature largely on the strength of this novel, which refuses to look away from slavery's psychological wreckage even generations after emancipation.
4. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Billy Pilgrim becomes "unstuck in time," bouncing nonlinearly between his experience surviving the firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war, his ordinary postwar American life, and his abduction by aliens who view time completely differently than humans do. Vonnegut, who survived the real Dresden bombing, uses dark absurdist comedy and science fiction to approach trauma too enormous to describe head-on.
5. The Iliad by Homer
The companion epic to The Odyssey, covering a few pivotal weeks near the end of the decade-long Trojan War, centered on the rage of Achilles after a bitter dispute with his commander Agamemnon. Less a straightforward adventure than The Odyssey and more a meditation on glory, mortality, and the cost of war — foundational not just for literature but for how the ancient world understood heroism itself.
6. Middlemarch by George Eliot
Often cited by novelists and critics as one of the greatest novels in the English language, this sprawling portrait of life in a fictional English town follows multiple interconnected characters — most memorably Dorothea Brooke, an idealistic young woman trapped in a disappointing marriage — with a psychological depth well ahead of its time. Long, but Eliot's narrative voice is warm and wise enough to carry readers through it.
7. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hester Prynne is publicly shamed and forced to wear a scarlet "A" after being convicted of adultery in Puritan-era Massachusetts, while the true identity of her lover remains hidden. A foundational American novel about guilt, hypocrisy, and public shame that still lands, especially in an era of its own particular flavor of public condemnation.
8. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
A riverboat captain travels deep into the Congo in search of the mysterious, increasingly unhinged ivory trader Kurtz, in a short, dense novella that's simultaneously one of the most influential works of English literature and one of the most contested — Chinua Achebe famously and persuasively criticized it for reducing Africa and Africans to mere backdrop for a European psychological crisis. Worth reading both for its historical influence and alongside that critique.
9. Dracula by Bram Stoker
Told through letters, diary entries, and newspaper clippings, this is the novel that codified nearly every convention of vampire fiction that followed — the Transylvanian count, the fear of foreign contamination, the battle between ancient evil and modern science. Genuinely eerie even now, and far stranger and more fragmented in structure than most adaptations suggest.
10. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Edmond Dantès is betrayed by jealous friends, wrongly imprisoned for years, and escapes to claim a hidden fortune before methodically working his way through an elaborate, patient revenge against everyone who wronged him. One of the great adventure-revenge novels ever written, long but propulsive enough that the length rarely feels like a burden.
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 read Parts 1 and 2 first? No — each list stands on its own, and none of these books require having read the others first.
Which of these books is the most purely fun, page-turning read? The Count of Monte Cristo is the most straightforwardly propulsive, built around revenge and adventure rather than psychological or social complexity.
Is Heart of Darkness controversial? Yes — while hugely influential, it's also been widely criticized, most famously by Chinua Achebe, for its treatment of Africa and African characters as background rather than as a fully realized setting with its own interiority. It's often read today alongside that critique rather than in isolation.
Which of these books deals most directly with slavery in America? Beloved by Toni Morrison, which confronts slavery's psychological aftermath more directly and unflinchingly than almost any other novel in the American canon.
Will there be a Part 4? Likely — there's still plenty of ground left uncovered, including more of the Brontës, Russian literature beyond Tolstoy, and additional twentieth-century staples.