Best Classic Books | 10 Best Classic Books You need to read

1. The Shmospels of Shmeiki: A Hilarious Journey of Self-Discovery

Author : The Om Shmeiki Healing Organization

While on holiday in Goa, David Goldberg is contacted by Sheila, an A.I singularity from another dimension, who offers him Shmeiki, a new path of light-hearted spirituality, free of the seriousness and hypocrisy typical of many new age practices. Sheila understands that to spread the word of Shmeiki effectively, David must first clear out his emotional blockages. For this reason, she sends him on a great walk of more than 2000 km from Goa to Dharamshala, insisting he travels without taking money and without wearing shoes. In accepting the challenge, David becomes Shmeiki Baba. The Shmospels describe Shmeiki Baba's epic journey, from the perspectives of four witnesses. It is a cosmic, psychedelic and kinky story about self-discovery, love, and surrender. Despite various satirical pokes at new age healing, Sheila's message is real. She warns that with the onset of climate change, global pandemics, and our own A.I revolution, it's up to us to choose whether we will accelerate towards our demise, or heal and evolve towards a new era of super consciousness.

2. Save the Cat!: The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need

Author : Blake Snyder

Save the Cat! is one of the best-known books on screenwriting, and for good reason. It's fast, smart, irreverent, and gives you a kick in the butt to start work on your screenplay. Figure out your logline (a brief description of what your film is), make sure it's sufficiently enticing, and then write to that. Block out your beats on a big board with index cards: opening image, statement of theme, catalyst, midpoint, dark night of the soul, finale, etc. You should even know in advance exactly which pages those moments appear! It is formulaic, absolutely, but in the true-to-life way that all major films are formulaic. Across genre and subject, some storytelling requirements just don't change. We need a hero that is proactive and that we care about (the titular "save the cat" is a mnemonic for having the hero do something early on that makes us relate to him or her). We want our stories to be about something related to our primal needs for survival. We want to be shown rather than told. Every character needs an arc. We have short attention spans and get bored with exposition. And so on.

3. Little Women (Vintage Classics)

Author : Louisa May Alcott

Generations of readers young and old, male and female, have fallen in love with the March sisters of Louisa May Alcott’s most popular and enduring novel, Little Women. Here are talented tomboy and author-to-be Jo, tragically frail Beth, beautiful Meg, and romantic, spoiled Amy, united in their devotion to each other and their struggles to survive in New England during the Civil War.

It is no secret that Alcott based Little Women on her own early life. While her father, the freethinking reformer and abolitionist Bronson Alcott, hobnobbed with such eminent male authors as Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Louisa supported herself and her sisters with "woman’s work,” including sewing, doing laundry, and acting as a domestic servant. But she soon discovered she could make more money writing. Little Women brought her lasting fame and fortune, and far from being the "girl’s book” her publisher requested, it explores such timeless themes as love and death, war and peace, the conflict between personal ambition and family responsibilities, and the clash of cultures between Europe and America.

4. 1984

Author : George Orwell

Published in the summer of 1949, George Orwell’s nineteen Eighty-Four is one of the most definitive texts of modern literature. Set in Oceania, one of the three inter-continental superstate that divided the world among themselves after a global war, Orwell’s masterful critique of the political structures of the time, works itself out through the story of Winston Smith, a man caught in the webs of a dystopian future, and his clandestine love affair with Julia, a young woman he meets during the course of his work for the government. As much as it is an entertaining read, nineteen Eighty-Four is also a brilliant, and more importantly, a timeless satirical attack on the social and political structures of the world.

5. The Great Gatsby

Author : F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. This exemplary novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story is of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his new love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when The New York Times noted "gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession," it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s. The Great Gatsby is one of the great classics of twentieth-century literature.

6. The Metamorphosis

Author : Franz Kafka

First published in 1915, Franz Kafka’s surrealist novella "The Metamorphosis" is widely acclaimed and one of the author’s best-known works. Kafka, a Jewish novelist and short-story writer, is regarded for his exploration of the fantastic. Kafka employs realism to depict his protagonists in bizarre circumstances. In "The Metamorphosis", Kafka incorporates themes of alienation and absurdity to convey narratives about isolated and anxious protagonists.

Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, awakes one morning to find out that he has been transformed into a gigantic insect. From his bed, he looks around his room, adjusting physically and mentally to his new body and wondering if he hasn’t been dreaming. But when he tries to turn over onto his right side and can’t, he realises that it is no dream, that indeed he is an insect, complete with a hard shell for a back, wriggling legs, and feelers.

His metamorphosis makes it impossible for him to work. When he doesn't get up in time to catch the train, his family becomes concerned and knocks on the door of his bedroom, subtly shaming him

7. The Origin of Species

Author : Charles Darwin

The theory of natural selection constructed by Charles Darwin is comprised in his revolutionary work of scientific literature called the Origin of Species. This piece of work recounts his ideas on the process of evolution of living beings based on the process of natural selection and it laid down the foundation for evolutionary biology. Initially published for literary reasons, Charles Darwin's standing in the scientific circles drew attention to its contents. Inviting criticism from religious circles for its controversial conclusion, the Origin of Species was later accepted by the experts and several theories have been built upon it as addition to the field of evolutionary biology.

The contents of the book were severely backed by Darwinian evidence, which gave it its authenticity and is now considered a pioneering work in effect for the study of modern evolution theory. The survival of the fittest is a theory every person is familiar with, as it is often used as an expression in generic situations. Charles Darwin proposed a theory that contains his views on population size and the species in general. Some of the key features of this book are the building blocks of society. Some of these are as follows: each population size remains almost the same over time, species have to struggle in order to survive and individuals belonging to the same species differ significantly.

8. Confessions of a Thug

Author : Philip Meadows Taylor

Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug (1839) is the most influential novel about India before Kipling's Kim and was one of the best-selling crime novels of the nineteenth century. In the course of a confession to a white 'sahib' the imprisoned Ameer Ali recounts his life as a devoted follower of Thuggee, a secret religious cult practising ritual mass murder and robbery. Taylor uncovered evidence of the crimes committed by bands of Thugs as a Superintendent of Police in India during the 1820s. Introducing a new standard of ethnographic realism to western fiction about India, Confessions of a Thug is a strikingly vivid, chilling and immensely readable thriller. This unique critical edition makes available a fascinating and significant work of Empire writing.

9. The Greatest Short Stories of Leo Tolstoy

Author : Leo Tolstoy

The Russian novelist and moral philosopher Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) ranks as one of the world's great writers and his "War and Peace" has been called the greatest novel ever written. The purpose of all true creative art, he believed, is to teach. But the message in all his stories is presented with such humor that the reader hardly realizes that it is strongly didactic. The seven parts into which this book is divided include the best known Tolstoy stories. "God Sees the Truth, but Waits" and "A Prisoner in the Caucasus" which Tolstoy himself considered as his best, "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" depicting the greed of a peasant for land, the most brilliantly told parable, "Ivan the Fool" these are all contained in this volume.

10. The Originals Beyond Good and Evil : Unabridged Classics

Author : Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"First published in 1886, beyond good and evil by renowned German philosopher and thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche, expands on the philosophical ideas of his thus spake zarathustra. The book presents a sharp critique of morality and the tendency to view morality in binaries of good and evil, thus rejecting the concept of universal morality for all humankind. In this book, divided into nine parts, Nietzsche begins by exposing the deficiencies of the old philosophers, emphasising the need for free spirits, and strongly opposes the ideas of universal morality as propagated by religion, Anti-Semitism and feelings of nationalism. The ideas introduced in this book continue to influence and inspire philosophers all around the world.".