Pride and Prej­u­dice is kind of a lit­er­ary Rosetta Stone, the in­spi­ra­tion, ba­sis, and model for so many mod­ern nov­els. You’re prob­a­bly more fa­mil­iar with its plot and char­ac­ters than you think. For a book writ­ten in the early 19th cen­tury, it’s moder­nity is sur­pris­ing only un­til you re­al­ize that this is the novel that in many ways de­fined what a mod­ern novel is.

Pride and Prej­u­dice

Ulysses did “stream of con­scious­ness” be­fore the term ex­isted, and it’s also a sprawl­ing novel dense with al­lu­sions, word­play, ob­scure jokes, and in­tensely, opaquely per­sonal ru­mi­na­tions by the char­ac­ters.  Moby-Dick has an un­earned rep­u­ta­tion for be­ing, well, dull. Melville’s novel was­n’t re­ceived well on pub­li­ca­tion (it took decades be­fore peo­ple re­ally started to 'get' how great it is), and the neg­a­tive sen­ti­ment is echoed every year when groan­ing stu­dents are forced to read it.

To Kill A Mock­ing­bird

t’s rare for a novel to re­main as on-point as Mock­ing­bird for more than five decades. If you want to know how Harper Lee man­aged the trick, you’re gonna have to read it. At about seven hours to read, you can to­tally squeeze it in.

258

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All over the city 

699

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Mu­si­cian

1991

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Found­ing year

2166

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Na­tional patent 

The Big Sleep

It’s true that the book is writ­ten in what seems to mod­ern au­di­ences like a self-con­sciously tough style, pep­pered with old-fash­ioned slang, and the plot is fa­mously com­plex, even for a mys­tery, and ac­tu­ally has sev­eral loose ends that never get re­solved, but it does­n’t mat­ter.

In short, learn­ing a for­eign lan­guage is an im­mer­sive process, and you can only mas­ter a lan­guage in the con­text where you ac­tu­ally have its use.And read­ing a clas­sic work in the lan­guage, must be the most cost-ef­fec­tive ap­proach.Try these 5 books. They are not only qual­ity lan­guage learn­ing ma­te­ri­als, but also bring you good cul­tural lit­er­acy.