On the Road is considered the greatest book of the Beat movement and Jack Kerouac its unofficial spokesperson. Its tale of lost souls who dared to be free is timeless. Through its fascinating depictions of friendship, experiences on the road and the longing for ‘It’ – an expression that could signify anything from frenzy and exhilaration to salvation and bliss, the novel was way ahead of its time. The enormous impact of the book is as relevant today as it was groundbreaking then. Its tale of lost souls who dared to be free…

For The Cleft, Lessing was inspired by a scientific report claiming that women were the first human species, and that men came along much later. In a story where she depicts our early ancestors, she draws a lazy picture of the first females, the “Clefts” who idle around the seashore, swim through the waves and loll about the rocks living languid days doing nothing. Their lives are perfectly harmonious, until the day the boy children began to be born. Doris Lessing was announced as the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Big Sleep, along with books like Hammett’s Maltese Falcon, and Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, is considered a cornerstone where hard-boiled fiction is concerned. It is famous for its labyrinthine and deliciously convoluted plot, filled with complex character study. The befuddling and cynically laden narrative, which twists and turns like a serpent on marijuana, however, is just one of the numerous facets that have given this book such iconic status and high literary importance. It is a brilliant take on the dark underbelly of 1940’s L.A.

The Killing Joke is arguably the greatest Joker story ever told. It traces the history of Joker – how a simple-minded, innocent looking, God-fearing, struggling family man with a beautiful and loving wife turns into Batman’s greatest and most iconic foe. The theme propounded here is brilliant. The Joker believes that one really bad day can turn even the sanest person into the very reincarnation of devil and horror, since that’s all it took for him. And he is convinced that the same happened for Batman as well.

Wouldn’t we feel elated to know that all those dreamy knights and heavenly princesses, eternal lovers and magical soul mates were true and alive? That a life of love filled with adventure, pureness, and celebration can still be found? The Bridge across Forever is that flash of hope for those fierce romantics who’d always want to believe that there is such a thing as perfection in life and love, for those who trust that the capacity for divine joy and completeness in love can be found. Famed writer Richard Bach’s true life is one such beautiful autobiographical..

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s classic tale of murder, remorse and redemption set in the modern city of St. Petersburg follows the crime of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov and its consequences that haunt him to near insanity. What separates Dostoyevsky’s work from others is his ability to reproduce human psyche as it is and not cover it up with any kind of pretense. Aging almost 150 years, this fantastic work of Dostoyevsky only seems to get better and more appealing with time.

Writers often cannot reproduce the brilliance they exhibit in their masterpieces that give them a demigod-like stature in the literary world; a perfect case in point would be J.D Salinger, who went though an unenviable phase after his most famous creation became a worldwide phenomenon. After a book as revolutionary as Catcher in the rye, he probably tried too hard with his novella Franny and Zooey, but failed on most accounts –But all’s not lost. There are pleasant reminders for those of us who believe we have come too far too soon.

There are few masterpieces in classic English literature that are way out wacky, seemingly shallow, funnily defiant and yet emerge as ground-breaking in terms of their impact all the same. J. D Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye is one such terrific book. The book is amongst the first of its kind and time, presenting no rollicking plot or lyrical language to convey its message. Straightforward in a bewildering way, the author makes this a laughing riot that nudges streams of edgy resonance and earnest reflection.

When remorse becomes the fatal venom that rushes through our veins, slowly and silently killing our conscience, shrinking the skeleton of our souls- seeking redemption through goodness remains the only way to recovery. Khaled Hosseini pens his first novel with poignant strokes of brotherly bonding, unconditional love, agonizing betrayal, ingrained guilt and final redemption.

“There is a way to be good again” were the words that offered Amir, the protagonist of this novel his one chance to atone for his penitent past, to recover from the truth of his childhood culpability, to deliver him from the heavy shadows of life-long guilt, into a glint of light and liberation.

I’ve sometimes assumed that Rushdie is more in the news for the supernumerary amount of death threats that are leveled against him rather than for his literary talents. But Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the only book I’ve read by him (supposedly a children’s book!) is one that I read, enjoyed and kept aside [...]