Ancient & 19th Century

Apology, Plato (c. 399 BC) This work records the speech Socrates gave at his trial, where he was charged with impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens. Socrates famously defends his life of questioning, asserting that “the unexamined life is not worth living” before being sentenced to death. It serves as a foundational text on the importance of integrity, logic, and standing by one’s principles even in the face of death.

The Idea of a University, John Henry Newman (1852) This collection of lectures argues that the primary purpose of a university should be “liberal education,” the cultivation of the mind for its own sake rather than for professional training. Newman champions the idea of a universal knowledge base that fosters critical thinking and intellectual fellowship among students. It teaches that true education is about developing a well-rounded character and the ability to think clearly across disciplines.

Carmilla, Sheridan Le Fanu (1872) Predating Bram Stoker’s “famous vampire novel” Dracula, this novella follows young Laura, who becomes the object of affection and prey for the mysterious, seductive vampire Carmilla. The story explores themes of repressed female sexuality, loneliness, and the supernatural within a Gothic European setting. It is a crucial text for understanding the “vampire” as a metaphor for societal anxieties and the “other.”

The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1830-1890, Robin Gilmour(1993) This scholarly work provides a comprehensive overview of the social and cultural forces in the 19th century such as Darwinism and the Industrial Revolution that shaped Victorian writing. It analyzes the tension between traditional faith and emerging scientific progress. It teaches us that literature is never created in a vacuum but is a direct response to the “growing pains” of its era.

Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, Isobel Armstrong (1993) A scholarly pillar focused on the 19th century, Armstrong examines how Victorian poets used their craft to engage with radical politics and social change. She looks at how language itself was used to challenge or uphold the status quo during the reign of Queen Victoria. The book reveals that poetry can be a powerful, complex tool for political and social critique.

20th Century

A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess (1962) Set in a dystopian future, the story follows Alex, a teenager who leads a gang in acts of “ultra-violence,” which specifically include brutal unprovoked beatings, home invasions, and sexual assaults. After being arrested, he is subjected to the “Ludovico Technique,” a state-sponsored conditioning treatment where he is injected with nausea-inducing drugs and forced to watch films of horrific violence with his eyes strapped open. The purpose of the treatment is to create a Pavlovian response that makes Alex physically ill at the mere thought of violence, effectively stripping him of his humanity. The core message is that it is better to be a human who chooses wrongly than a “clockwork” toy who is forced to be good.

The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin (1972) Joanna Eberhart moves to a seemingly perfect suburb, only to discover that the Men’s Association is systematically murdering their wives and replacing them with compliant animatronic doubles. The husbands spend months recording their wives’ voices and measuring their bodies to create high-tech robots programmed to be obsessed with housework and male subservience. The novel serves as a chilling satire on the backlash against the feminist movement and the male desire for domestic control, showing the literal erasure of a woman’s identity to ensure total domestic compliance. It warns against the dangers of a society that prizes mindless conformity over individuality.

Sula, Toni Morrison (1973) This novel follows the intense and complicated friendship between two women, Nel and Sula, as they grow up in a Black community in the fictional town of Medallion, Ohio. While Nel chooses a life of conventionality, staying in town to become a traditional wife and mother, Sula leaves for ten years to navigate the city of New York, eventually returning as a fiercely independent pariah with no desire for domesticity or a “respectable” career. Morrison uses their contrasting paths to explore how trauma, community standards, and the search for self can define and sometimes destroy a life. It teaches that the choices we make to survive, whether through conformity or rebellion, carry profound consequences for our relationships and our sense of belonging.

Orientalism, Edward Said (1978) This highly influential academic work examines how the “West” (the Occident) has historically misrepresented and romanticized the “East” (the Orient), specifically focusing on the Middle East, North Africa, and the Levant, to justify colonial rule. Said specifically details how these regions are stereotyped as inherently irrational, depraved, and stagnant, contrasted against a West that is portrayed as rational, moral, and progressive. He argues that these tropes are not just harmless myths but are deliberate tools used to maintain power and dominance. It teaches readers to critically analyze the cultural biases embedded in literature, art, and media to see how “knowledge” can be constructed to serve political ends.

The Secret History, Donna Tartt (1992) In the mid-1980s, Richard Papen joins an elite group of eccentric classics students at the fictional Hampden College in Vermont, only to become entangled in the murder of their fellow classmate, Bunny Corcoran. The conflict begins when four of the students successfully induce a Bacchanal, a frenzied ancient ritual involving extreme sensory deprivation and hallucinogens intended to achieve a state of animalistic transcendence; during this blackout state, they encounter a local farmer and, in a blind panic of “divine madness,” brutally beat him to death. When Bunny discovers their secret and begins a relentless campaign of psychological blackmail, the group, led by the charismatic Henry Winter, concludes that he is a threat to their safety and pushes him off a cliff in a snowy ravine. The book tracks the slow unraveling of the group’s sanity and loyalty as they deal with the guilt of their actions and the investigative pressure that follows. It serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of intellectual elitism and a moral vacuum where “beauty” refers to an obsession with aesthetic ideals, where achieving a “sublime” ancient experience is valued more than human life or basic morality.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson (1985) This semi-autobiographical novel follows Jeanette, a girl raised in a strict Pentecostal household (Pentecostal is a high-energy, evangelical branch of Christianity that emphasizes the literal truth of the Bible and divine healing) in the industrial town of Accrington, England, during the 1960s. From a young age, Jeanette is groomed by her mother to become a missionary and preacher, but after her sexuality is discovered and she is forced out of the church, she must survive by taking on various working-class jobs, including working at an ice cream van and even a funeral parlor. The story uses magical realism and biblical themes to depict her struggle for independence as she transitions from a religious prodigy to a self-reliant adult. It teaches that the “mainstream” or prescribed path is not the only way to live a meaningful or spiritual life.

Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami (1987) Toru Watanabe looks back on his college years in 1960s Tokyo, a time defined by his struggle to choose between two women: Naoko, the fragile and emotionally distant girlfriend of his late best friend, and Midori, an outgoing, vivacious, and fiercely independent classmate. The plot is set in motion by the sudden suicide of Toru’s best friend, Kizuki, who, without warning or explanation, killed himself by carbon monoxide poisoning in his sealed garage at age seventeen. While Toru eventually grows up to find work in the publishing industry, the novel remains a melancholic meditation on grief, loss, and the transition into adulthood. It suggests that while death is a permanent and inseparable part of life, we must find a way to keep living and choose the “vibrant” path represented by the living, rather than being pulled into the shadows of those we have lost.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky (1999) Written as a series of letters (an epistolary novel), the story follows a shy, sensitive freshman named Charlie as he navigates high school in a suburb of Pittsburgh during the early 1990s. Charlie is struggling to process the recent suicide of his best friend and the buried memory of sexual abuse he suffered as a child at the hands of his beloved Aunt Helen. With the help of his older friends Sam and Patrick, Charlie learns to “participate” in life by engaging in school dances, experimenting with music, and forming his first romantic relationship rather than just observing from the sidelines. The book’s core message is “we accept the love we think we deserve.” This serves as a realization that a person’s self-worth dictates who they allow into their life, and that healing requires moving toward those who truly value us. It encourages finding strength through community and the courage to stop being a “wallflower.”

21st Century

A Companion to the History of the English Language, Momma and Matto (2008) This academic volume tracks the evolution of English from its Germanic roots to its status as a global lingua franca, detailing specific transitions like the Norman Conquest of 1066, which flooded Old English with French vocabulary (e.g., the shift from the Germanic pig to the French-derived pork for meat). It explores the linguistic, social, and political shifts that changed our speech, such as the Great Vowel Shift between 1400 and 1700, which fundamentally altered the pronunciation of long vowels (changing the sound of “feet” from sounding like “fate” to its current sound). The text highlights that language is a living entity reflecting history and migration, showing how British colonialism and the digital age have introduced thousands of loanwords and structural changes from around the globe. It teaches that English is not a fixed set of rules, but a constantly evolving map of human movement and cultural exchange. If that sounds interesting to you, definitely check out Elia Kazan’s Words: An Encyclopedic Dictionary for the 21^st Century. 

The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion (2005) In this memoir, Didion chronicles the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, who died of a massive coronary event at the dinner table in 2003; at the time, Didion was 69 years old. Simultaneously, their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, was suffering from septic shock which led to a medically induced coma and several life-threatening complications. Didion explores “magical thinking,” the irrational belief that her thoughts or actions could reverse death such as her refusal to give away her husband’s shoes, because she obsessively felt he would need them when he returned. She also describes the “vortex effect,” where a small, everyday memory would physically pull her back into a state of paralyzing grief. It is a raw, honest look at the nature of mourning and the way it fundamentally alters one’s perception of reality. The author herself passed away in 2021 due to complications from Parkinson’s disease.

Imagining Anglo-Saxon England, Catherine Karkov (2011) Karkov examines how early medieval England used material culture to construct a national identity, specifically focusing on the Bayeux Tapestry (c. 1070s), a 230-foot-long embroidered cloth that depicts the events leading up to the Norman Conquest, including the Battle of Hastings and the death of King Harold. She also analyzes the architecture of St. Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury (founded c. 598) as a physical manifestation of religious and political authority. For literature, she explores how the epic poem Beowulf (written c. 700–1000) was used to imagine a heroic, Germanic past to justify contemporary social hierarchies. Karkov further illustrates the manipulation of history in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (begun c. 890), a collection of annals documenting the history of the Anglo-Saxons; it wasn’t a single book, but a series of manuscripts updated by various monks to frame the West Saxon kings as the rightful rulers of England. The book teaches that our understanding of history is a deliberate construction rather than objective truth. We see this same behavior in modern American culture through the way we curate our national identity in monuments; the specific framing of history in school textbooks (the traditional story of the First Thanksgiving (1621) is often framed in textbooks as a harmonious meal of “Pilgrims and Indians” to emphasize a narrative of cooperation and religious freedom, frequently omitting the subsequent decades of colonial conflict and displacement of Indigenous peoples), and even the “origin stories” we emphasize in film and media to reinforce our current social values (we emphasize the “Founding Fathers” and the Revolutionary War (1775–1783) as our primary origin story, focusing on the pursuit of liberty to reinforce American values of individualism and democracy. This often overshadows other “origins,” such as the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in 1619, which would tell a very different story about the nation’s foundations).

The Handbook of English Linguistics, Aarts, McMahon, and Hinrichs (2012) This is a technical deep dive into the structures of the English language, covering syntax (the arrangement of words, such as why we say “the big red barn” instead of “the red big barn”), phonology (the study of speech sounds, like why the “p” in “spin” sounds different than the “p” in “pin”), and semantics (the study of meaning and how it changes in context). It provides a roadmap for how we communicate and why certain rules exist—for example, explaining Negative Polarity Items, which is why we can say “I don’t have any money” but not “I have any money.” It underscores the complexity of human communication and the systematic beauty behind our everyday speech, showing that even a simple sentence relies on a massive, invisible architecture of logic.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari (2011) Harari surveys the expansive history of our species, beginning with the Cognitive Revolution (c. 70,000 years ago), which provided the linguistic framework to discuss non-physical concepts, and continuing through the Agricultural Revolution (c. 10,000 BCE), the era where we transitioned from foraging to farming wheat and domesticating cattle, and the Scientific Revolution (c. 500 years ago). He argues that the primary reason humans dominate the world is our unique capacity to believe in “shared myths,” such as money, which has no inherent value yet functions because of collective belief, and nations, which exist as legal fictions to organize vast groups of strangers across invisible borders. He also classifies human rights as a powerful social construct rather than a biological reality found in DNA, or, the way gravity is an objective force. The big takeaway is that much of what we perceive as objective reality is actually an intersubjective reality, a social construct that persists only as long as we maintain a collective belief in it.

The Idiot, Elif Batuman (2017) Selin, a daughter of Turkish immigrants, enters Harvard in the mid-1990s as a Linguistics major, specifically focusing her studies on Russian language and literature. She meets Ivan, a Hungarian mathematics student, in her introductory Russian class, and the two quickly fall into a relationship conducted almost entirely through cryptic, intellectual emails. These messages highlight the profound difficulty of communication; while they can masterfully debate the nuances of foreign grammar, they are fundamentally incapable of expressing their actual feelings for one another. This tension leads Selin to spend her summer teaching English in a rural Hungarian village, choosing Hungary specifically to be near Ivan during his time home. This illustrates the widening gap between academic theory and real-life experience, as her deep knowledge of Sapir-Whorf linguistics offers no help in navigating the visceral awkwardness of her summer or the confusing end of her connection with Ivan. The novel finishes without a traditional resolution; Selin returns to Harvard for her sophomore year, having realized that life, much like the sprawling Russian novels she admires, is often messy and lacks a predictable plot.

The Illusion of Choice, Richard Shotton (2023) Shotton explores how our decisions are shaped by psychological shortcuts. For example, the Checklist Effect, which demonstrates that people are more likely to complete a task if it is presented as a series of small, manageable steps rather than one large goal. He illustrates the power of Precision, noting that a specific price like $19.84 feels more honest and calculated to a consumer than a rounded figure like $20.00. He discusses the Cocktail Party Effect, where our brains are hardwired to tune out background noise but immediately snap to attention when we hear our own name or something personally relevant. It also examines the Gaze Cueing phenomenon, where advertisements are more effective if the person in the image is looking toward the product or the “Buy Now” button rather than directly at the viewer, effectively pulling the reader’s attention where it needs to go. These subtle environmental cues pre-determine our “choices.” Shotton encourages readers to become more intentional and better-informed about the invisible forces that influence their everyday behavior.

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This project was a joint effort by the author, Elia Kazan, and Google Gemini. Gemini found the research based on Elia’s specific questions, and Elia functioned as the editor.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll love my latest book, English Studies, released Feb 2026.