This time we have a mixture of suggestions, and their suitability will partially depend on whether we take a summer break now or meet again in a month.
While we often consider contemporary books, reading classics can give us perspective on what has changed with time, what likely hasn't, and what we believe has.
Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary (1856) {329pp} [Goodreads link]
Set amid the stifling atmosphere of 19th-century bourgeois France, Madame Bovary is at once an unsparing depiction of a woman’s gradual corruption and a savagely ironic study of human shallowness and stupidity. According to the literary theorist Kornelije Kvas, "in Flaubert, realism strives for formal perfection, so the presentation of reality tends to be neutral, emphasizing the values and importance of style as an objective method of presenting reality".
Stendhal - The Red and the Black (1830) {577pp} [Goodreads link]
Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer. Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism. The current novel is about handsome, ambitious Julien Sorel is determined to rise above his humble provincial origins. Soon realizing that success can only be achieved by adopting the subtle code of hypocrisy by which society operates, he begins to achieve advancement through deceit and self-interest.
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina (1878) {964pp} [Goodreads link]
A vast panorama of life in Russia and of humanity in general at the time of writing.
Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Idiot (1869) {667pp} [Goodreads link]
Said to be Dostoyevsky’s most personal work, The Idiot is an uncompromising look at a corrupt world where moral men and women are sometimes limited to immoral choices.
George Eliot - Middlemarch (1872) {912pp} [Goodreads link]
Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. Her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside. The current book is said to be the author's most ambitious novel and is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community.
Anne Brontë - The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) {576pp} [Goodreads link]
Anne Brontë was an English novelist and poet, the youngest member of the Brontë literary family. Anne's two novels, written in a sharp and ironic style, are completely different from the romanticism followed by her sisters, Emily Brontë and Charlotte Brontë. She wrote in a realistic, rather than a romantic style. Mainly because the re-publication of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was prevented by Charlotte Brontë after Anne's death, she is less known than her sisters. However, her novels, like those of her sisters, have become classics of English literature. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a powerful depiction of a woman's fight for domestic independence and creative freedom.
Elizabeth Gaskell - Wives and Daughters (1866) {679pp} [Goodreads link]
Gaskell was an English novelist and short story writer during the Victorian era. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of society, including the very poor, and as such are of interest to social historians. Wives and Daughters, Elizabeth Gaskell's last novel, is regarded by many as her masterpiece. Molly Gibson is the daughter of the doctor in the small provincial town of Hollingford. Her widowed father marries a second time to give Molly the woman's presence he feels she lacks, but until the arrival of Cynthia, her dazzling stepsister, Molly finds her situation hard to accept. Intertwined with the story of the Gibsons is that of Squire Hamley and his two sons. As Molly grows up and falls in love, she learns to judge people for what they are, not what they seem. Through Molly's observations the hierarchies, social values, and social changes of early-19th-century English life are made vivid in a novel that is timeless in its representation of human relationships.
E.M. Forster - Howards End (1910) {318pp} [Goodreads link]
Edward Morgan Forster, generally published as E.M. Forster, was an novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. His humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect". This novel is considered by many to be his masterpiece. First published in 1910, this beguiling and completely captivating tale explores social conventions, codes of conduct, and relationships in turn-of-the-century Edwardian England.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) {253pp} [Goodreads link]
Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts. This is thus 100+ year old LGBTQ+!
Octavia E. Butler - The Parable duology (1993 & 1998) {665pp} [Goodreads link #1] [Goodreads link #2]
Actually a somewhat "contemporary" story (and perhaps not yet a classic); not because it was very recently written. but because the story is set in our time and our immediate future. This future is thus described as a post-apocalyptic earth heavily affected by climate change and social inequality. According to reveiws the books gets some stuff eeriely right, indicating that the author had a good insight into human nature. The first book, in which society in the United States has grown unstable due to climate change, growing wealth inequality, and corporate greed, takes the form of a journal kept by Lauren Oya Olamina, an African American teenager. The second book, which won the Nebula Award for Best Novel, is set in a near future where United States that has come under the grip of a Christian fundamentalist denomination called "Christian America" led by President Andrew Steele Jarret. Seeking to restore American power and prestige, and using the slogan "Make America Great Again", Jarret embarks on a crusade to cleanse America of non-Christian faiths.
Domenico Starnone - The House on Via Gemito (2000) {480pp} [Goodreads link]
Ever since I read Elena Ferrante I've been wanting to explore more famous Italian writers. A supposedly well-crafted story of a childhood, a neighbourhood and an unforgettable father. Longlisted for the 2024 Booker price.
Adrian Tchaikovsky - Service Model (2024) {376pp} [Goodreads link]
A new sci-fi by the Children of Time author, telling a satirical story of a robotic valet who murders his own master. A comical exploration of the robot's journey to discover a reason for existence during the collapse of human society.