Beautiful and useful: 10 novels that will increase your intelligence

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The suffering of young Werther

The novel, written in 1774, is Goethe's early work. The central character of the story is the young Werther, who confesses his feelings to the reader in the form of letters he writes to his friend Wilhelm. The novel also contains Rousseau's thoughts on nature and Goethe's criticism of society, which prevents the individual from free will and emotions. This is the first story about a new type of romantic man - noble and loving, but unhappy and tragic in life.

Jane Austen

pride and Prejudice

This might be the best love story ever. Instead of falling in love with a stranger in the middle of the room (the idea of love at first sight), love between two people develops gradually as they are forced to be in the same space. And as they learn about themselves, their love for each other also grows. Austen was a very skilled writer: the reader gets to know the characters at the same time and in the same way that these characters get to know themselves.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The scarlet mark

Puritan society from the 17th century condemns the young Hester Prynne, who must wear a scarlet mark on her forehead as a sign of shame for being an adulteress with an illegitimate child. This is the first true heroine of American literature, and the story is a depiction of the invisible divide between privacy and public, and man's division between these spheres.

Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary

The theme of the novel is the emptiness of marriage and petty-bourgeois life. The main character, bored in her stuffy, small-town marriage, seeks solace in love adventures. In this novel, his masterpiece, Flauberte allows the reader to see the world through Emma's eyes, as well as through the eyes of an outside observer.

George Eliot

Middlemarch

Virginia Woolf called this work "one of the few English novels written for adults". This is a story about how the quality of our emotions is responsible for the quality of our relationships. It intertwines several stories with a large number of heroes, and despite the fact that the narrator distances himself from the heroes, he follows many sub-themes such as the position of women in society, idealism and selfishness, religion and hypocrisy, political reforms and the educational system.

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

Anna Karenina

One of Tolstoy's most important works is about the tragic love of the title character, the married Anna Karenina, with the officer Vronsky. Anna Karenina engages us completely by introducing us to all the emotions and actions of the main character and making us understand that even though love seems to be stronger than anything, it may not be enough to keep the main character alive.

Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway

The short novel, set in London during the First World War, is a wonderful stream-of-consciousness dive. In Clarissa Dalloway's mind, we can sense her sense of companionship, her concern for her daughter, memories from her youth, and thinking about the man she chose not to marry, and at the same time we can understand her connection to people around London.

Toni Morrison

Beloved

After the American Civil War, Seth, a runaway slave, is haunted by the ghost of her daughter Denver, whom she had to kill to prevent her return to slavery. The scene of the novel is house 124, which is also a kind of concept of life. Eventually, a young girl appears at the house, claiming that her name is Ljubljena, but no one knows for sure who she is and what she wants in the house.

John Maxwell Coetzee

Shame

Davdi Lurie is a white professor of literature and communication studies in Cape Town who becomes involved in an erotic relationship with a black student. Because of the scandal, he loses his job and moves to the countryside to live with his daughter, who runs a farm and a dog hotel. Just when he thinks he's finally recovered, a brutal attack occurs where his daughter is raped and he is injured. Now they both find themselves in an extreme life situation that they have to deal with as best they can.

Mohsin Hamid

The conscientious objection of a fundamentalist

This is the story of Changez, the top student in his class at Princeton, who after 9/11 and the attacks on the twin towers cannot continue his work at the company where he achieved great success, but must return to Lahore, Pakistan. A fundamentalist's conscientious objection speaks to conflicts of ideologies where perception and doubt have the power to decide life and death.