The Sun Also Rises is, in its own way, a story about not much at all, and those are honestly often my favorite stories. Our hero is a journalist ex-pat living in Paris. He and some friends go south to Pamplona to see the bullfights, of which he is a fan. There is a lot of drinking, quite a bit of arguing, some fishing, and a couple bullfights, and then he goes back to Paris. The entirety of the story is about the small-scale social interactions of himself and his group of friends on this trip, not all of whom get along well (or at all). That’s it. That’s all there is.
classics
War and Peace
Why War and Peace? I honestly don’t know. It was the most impressive option, perhaps. It’s not a novel I’ve ever particularly aspired to reading, and as someone who was relatively out of the habit of reading , it was, on the surface, an absolutely terrible choice. Sure, let’s pick one of the longest books in the Western classic canon to get you back into reading, why not? Irritatingly, it worked like a charm.
Heart of Darkness
I mean, I didn't particularly expect a book dealing with colonialism and race in the Victorian era to be a fun read, per se, but I didn't expect it to be so utterly dreadful, either.
Jude the Obscure
Jude the Obscure is similar to several other books on the list in that it was originally published as a serial; was later revised several times in the process of putting it into book-form; is making un-subtle points about society at the time of writing; and is definitely, absolutely, in no way about the author himself, why would you ever say such a thing?
Idlewilde 