ML Rio's new book If We Were Villains is released today- so to celebrate she shares her favourite classic novels with us.
ML Rio
- The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas. Dumas can be daunting. Most of the man’s books run towards 800 pages (probably because the more he produced, the more he got paid). But despite the occasional narrative detour, nobody swashbuckles like Dumas. Whenever I get a craving for some swordplay, I turn to The Three Musketeers, which is as delightful as it is ridiculous.
- Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brönte. I have never enjoyed Jane Austen. That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate a good romance—I just prefer mine with difficult heroes and a hint of danger. Brönte gives you both; Edward Fairfax Rochester may be ugly and manipulative and have some serious skeletons in his closet—or attic—but he is still, somehow, hard to resist.
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde. Never was there a sharper wit than Oscar Wilde, or a better mouthpiece than Lord Henry Wotton. Watching him corrupt Dorian is like watching a car accident—it’s awful but impossible to look away.
- Dracula, by Bram Stoker. Forget everything you think you know about vampires. Stoker’s gothic drama eschews the sparkles and his bloodsuckers have real bite. Yes, it is dripping with melodrama—Why else would I have loved it so much at fifteen?—but there’s a lot of depth here, too. The human soul is at stake (pun intended).
- Peter Pan, by J. M. Barrie. I love island stories, adventure stories, and children’s stories that aren’t really for children. Peter Pan is surprisingly dark, and bears more resemblance to Lord of the Flies than Mother Goose. There’s no clear moral code here; Pan is often wicked, Hook often charming, and in Neverland something fatal is always waiting right around the corner.
- Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell. Mitchell’s magnificent Civil War epic will sweep you off your feet faster than a mustachioed Clark Gable. But, like Jane Eyre, it’s so much more than a romance: it’s a devastating family drama, an incisive character study, and a vivid history of the South in the turbulent years before and after the collapse of the Confederacy.
- The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson. Shirley Jackson should be required reading for any feminist bookworm. The story of her life is just as compelling as her fiction, but if you don’t know much about either this is a good place to start. The Haunting of Hill House is deeply weird and weirdly deep. It will probably keep you up at night, wrestling with imaginary monsters.
- A Separate Peace, by John Knowles. Somehow this book ends up on almost every recommended reading list I write. It is a gorgeous, gut-wrenching read that in about 200 pages raises questions about life, death, love, war, friendship, and everything in between.
- The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov. The Master and Margarita is what you might have gotten if F. Scott Fitzgerald had been Russian and done a lot of drugs. It’s bizarre, bewildering, and bitingly funny. But like every other book on this list, there’s a lot lurking beneath the surface. If you can get past the talking cat and the vanishing dresses, you’ll find an uncompromising examination of humanity, and what makes people weak.
- Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut. I’ve loved everything I’ve ever read by Vonnegut. Slaughterhouse isn’t my favorite (that would be Hocus Pocus), but it is essential reading. Billy Pilgrim is modern fiction’s most convincing Everyman, and Vonnegut’s portrait of the human condition as tragic as it is hopeful. (So it goes.)
