The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was the first collection of Sherlock Holmes short stories Conan Doyle published in book form, following the popular success of the novels A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, which introduced the characters of Dr. John Watson and the austere analytical detective Sherlock Holmes. The collection contains twelve stories, all originally published in The Strand Magazine between July 1891 and June 1892. Narrated by the first-person voice of Dr. Watson, they involve him and Holmes solving a series of mysterious cases. Some of the more well-known stories in this collection are “A Scandal in Bohemia,” in which Holmes comes up against a worthy opponent in the form of Irene Adler, whom Holmes forever after admiringly refers to as the woman; “The Redheaded League,” involving a bizarre scheme offering a well-paid sinecure to redheaded men; and “The Speckled Band,” in which Holmes and Watson save a young woman from a terrible death.

Everyone’s familiar with Lewis Carroll’s famous children’s classic and the huge influence it’s had on modern culture. The Mad Hatter, the Duchess, the Cheshire Cat, the White Rabbit, the Caterpillar—all of these strange and familiar creatures appear in Alice, and the nonsensical style, memorable poems, and colorful set pieces are just as influential. The book was originally written as gift to Alice Liddel, the daughter of one of Carroll’s friends. Carroll had told the story to Alice during a rainy-day boat trip up a river. It stuck in his mind, and a few years later the completed manuscript was published in 1865. More than 150 years later, it’s just as popular as it ever was.

A doctor is released from the Bastille after being falsely imprisoned for almost eighteen years. A young woman discovers the father she’s never known is not dead but alive, if not entirely well. A young man is acquitted of being a traitor, due in part to the efforts of a rather selfish lout who is assisting the young man’s attorney. A man has a wine shop in Paris with a wife who knits at the bar. These disparate elements are tied together as only Dickens can, and in the process he tells the story of the French Revolution. Charles Dickens was fascinated by Thomas Carlyle’s magnum opus The French Revolution; according to Dickens’ letters, he read it “500 times” and carried it with him everywhere while he was working on this novel. When he wrote to Carlyle asking him for books to read on background, Carlyle sent him two cartloads full. Dickens mimicked Carlyle’s style, his chronology, and his overall characterization of the revolution; although A Tale of Two Cities is fiction, the historical events described are largely accurate, sometimes exactly so. Even so, Dickens made his name and reputation on telling stories full of characters one could be invested in, care about, and despise, and this novel has all of those and more. It also, in its first and last lines, has two of the most famous lines in literature. With the possible exception of A Christmas Carol, it is his most popular novel, and according to many, his best.

The Odyssey is one of the oldest works of Western literature, dating back to classical antiquity. Homer’s epic poem belongs in a collection called the Epic Cycle, which includes the Iliad. It was originally written in ancient Greek, utilizing a dactylic hexameter rhyme scheme. Although this rhyme scheme sounds beautiful in its native language, in modern English it can sound awkward and, as Eric McMillan humorously describes it, resembles “pumpkins rolling on a barn floor.” William Cullen Bryant avoided this problem by composing his translation in blank verse, a rhyme scheme that sounds natural in English. This epic poem follows Ulysses, one of the Greek leaders that brought an end to the ten-year-long Trojan war. Longing for home, he travels across the Mediterranean Sea to return to his kingdom in Ithaca; unfortunately, our hero manages to anger Neptune, the god of the sea, making his trip home agonizingly slow and extremely dangerous. While Ulysses is trying to return home, his family in Ithaca is also in danger. Suitors have traveled to the home of Ulysses to marry his wife, Penelope, believing that her husband did not survive the war. These men are willing to kill anyone who stands in their way.

Madame Bovary, often ranked among the greatest novels of all time, is Flaubert’s first novel, and considered to be both his masterpiece and one of the most influential works in literary history, with authors from Henry James to Proust to Nabokov heaping it with praise. The novel tells the story of Emma Bovary, a commoner wife of a country doctor, and her attempts to escape the drudgery of day-to-day mediocrity by engaging in adulterous affairs and overspending on luxuries. She remains unsatisfied even though her husband adores her and they want for little, and her shallowness eventually leads to their ruin. The story was first serialized in Revue de Paris, where prosecutors tried to have it censored for obscenity, arguing that not only is the story immoral, but that realism as a literary style is an offence against art and decency. The trial only served to increase the story’s fame, and when it was published as a single novel it quickly became a bestseller. The novel is groundbreaking in its emphasis on the psychological and emotional lives of its characters. Literature up to then had mostly focusing on the external events that make characters react, instead of focusing on the internal thought processes of those characters. Madame Bovary changed that forever. It was also revolutionary in its criticism of the middle class, which at the time was a still-new social class vying for elbow room between the working poor and hereditary aristocracy. Flaubert critiqued the middle class as being ambitious, shallow, greedy, materialistic, and totally without culture; Emma’s burning desire to reach even higher social strata, contrasted against that satisfaction being fundamentally denied to her by her middle-class nature, is an early echo of Marx’s theory of alienation in industrial societies. Today Madame Bovary, with its careful but charming description of the banality of everyday life, is considered the first great example of literary realism in fiction novels. Eleanor Marx-Aveling’s translation, though over a hundred years old, is remarkably fresh and smooth, and is a pleasure even for modern readers.

Dmitri Karamazov and his father Fyodor are at war over both Dmitri’s inheritance and the affections of the beautiful Grushenka. Into this feud arrive the middle brother Ivan, recently returned from Moscow, and the youngest sibling Alyosha, who has been released into the wider world from the local monastery by the elder monk Zossima. Through a series of accidents of fate and wilful misunderstandings the Karamazovs edge closer to tragedy, while the local townspeople watch on. The Brothers Karamazov was Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final novel, and was originally serialised in The Russian Messenger before being published as a complete novel in 1880. This edition is the well-received 1912 English translation by Constance Garnett. As well as earning wide-spread critical acclaim, the novel has been widely influential in literary and philosophical circles; Franz Kafka and James Joyce admired the emotions that verge on madness in the Karamazovs, while Sigmund Freud and Jean-Paul Satre found inspiration in the themes of patricide and existentialism.

Esmeralda is a breathtaking beauty and attracts the attention of men all around her, including an actor, a captain, and an archdeacon, to whom she is of course forbidden. But because of a kindness she paid to him, there is one whose love for her is pure: the archdeacon’s bellringer. The actions of the archdeacon, who cannot control his lust for the young woman, ultimately draws all four men into her orbit, and his, with tragic consequences. Hugo’s tragic novel is an ode to gothic architecture in general and that of Notre-Dame de Paris in particular. Hugo was upset both at the neglect of buildings like Notre-Dame, and the modernization of those that weren’t being neglected. By centering on the building, he was able to bring all classes into his story: from kings and nobles to bellringers and sewer rats. The first American translation changed the title to “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” shifting attention to the bellringer, but Hugo’s focus was always on Notre-Dame and the beautiful gothic architecture of Paris.

White Fang is Jack London’s companion novel to The Call of the Wild. In The Call of the Wild we follow a dog’s journey from domestication to wilderness, but in White Fang we see the opposite: a wild wolf-dog captured by men and eventually domesticated. White Fang’s journey isn’t an easy one; both the wild and civilization have their share of brutal violence. But he eventually seems happy in a home with a loving family. When read side-by-side with The Call of the Wild, White Fang poses an interesting question: is wilderness really an improvement over civilization? Is there one right way to live?

The Adventures of Pinocchio is a story that has reached many people across the globe since it was first penned by Carlo Collodi in 1883. The adventures were originally published in serial format in an Italian weekly magazine for children. In 1940, Disney released an animated film adaptation of the story that has solidified the fable in popular culture. A wooden puppet is crafted out of a magical piece of wood by Geppetto, a humble woodworker. To Geppetto’s surprise, the puppet comes to life. Thus begins the adventures of this magical puppet, Pinocchio. Geppetto takes the role of father to Pinocchio, and tries to stress the importance of his education. Pinocchio, however, is drawn into many mischievous adventures by his peers and others.

The Jungle Book is a short collection of stories published by Kipling in various magazines between 1893 and 1894. Kipling spent both his early years and his late teenage years in India, and that upbringing is front and center in these stories—despite them being written while he was living in Vermont, in the United States. The stories are fable-like, with most of them centering on the lives of anthropomorphised jungle animals and a few focused on human characters in India. The stories were popular from the start, and have since been adapted in countless ways in print, screen, and other media.