The Elements of Style
by William Strunk | 
A Night to Remember
by Walter Lord | 
Beowulf on the Beach
by Jack Murnighan | 
Emile
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau | 
84, Charing Cross Road
by Helene Hanff | 
The Complete Maus
by Art Spiegelman | 
Letters to a Young Poet
by Rainer Maria Rilke | 
The Imitation of Christ
by Thomas a Kempis | 
Speak, Memory
by Vladimir Nabokov | 
Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass
by Isak Dinesen | 
Speak Memory
by Vladimir Nabokov | 
The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music
by Friedrich Nietzsche | 
Aspects of the Novel
by E. M. Forster | 
Diaries, 1910-1923
by Franz Kafka | 
A Journal of the Plague Year
by Daniel Defoe |
The Critique of Practical Reason
by Immanuel Kant | 
I Can Jump Puddles
by Alan Marshall | 
The War That Killed Achilles
by Caroline Alexander | 
Atlantis: The Antedeluvian World
by Ignatius Donnelly |
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
by Edward Gibbon |
The book that established Thomas Carlyle's reputation when first published in 1837, this spectacular historical masterpiece has since been accepted as the standard work on the subject. It combines a shrewd insight into character, a vivid realization of the picturesque, and a singular ability to bring the past to blazing life, making it a reading experience as thrilling as any novel. As John D. Rosenberg observes in his Introduction, The French Revolution is "one of the grand poems of [Carlyle's] century, yet its poetry consists in being everywhere scrupulously rooted in historical fact."