The 8 Best Classic Books to Get Lost In

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For many readers, the phrase classic literature is synonymous with homework. But the classics are all around us. For proof, just look at the contemporary stories you know and love, from bestsellers and word-of-mouth hits to award winners and Oprah’s Book Club picks. (Not to mention film adaptations like Greta Gerwig’s take on Little Women and the recent film version of The Color Purple musical.)

If you’re looking to level up your reading game and keep your bookish FOMO at bay, check out these classics that inspired some of today’s most popular titles.

If You Loved James, by Percival Everett, You Should Read Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

It would be easy to call Percival Everett’s newest novel, James, a rewriting of Mark Twain’s classic, but it would also be incorrect. By telling the story from the perspective of Huckleberry Finn’s enslaved companion—one of the most controversial figures in American literature—Everett doesn’t revise the original story; he deepens it, diving into the horror, the humor, and the humanity that was always right there beneath the book’s surface, just out of view of both Huck and his inventor.

In Twain’s telling, a mischievous white 13-year-old boy runs away from home with a Black man who is referred to as Jim—that is, when he is referred to by a name and not by a slur. Since the moment it was published in 1885, Huckleberry Finn has been widely criticized and banned, not just for its racist language and depictions of Black characters, Jim especially. In later decades, some have tried to rescue the work by editing out the racial epithets or—in the case of a 1955 TV adaptation—omitting the character entirely. Everett (whose earlier novel Erasure was adapted into the Oscar-winning film American Fiction) takes a defiantly different tack; rather than leaning away from the character’s stereotyped presentation, he leans into it. In Everett’s telling, Jim, or James, as he christens himself, acts and speaks in a stereotyped way not out of ignorance but out of cunning self-protection: “White folks expect us to sound a certain way,” James explains, “and the better they feel, the safer we are.” While you don’t have to have read Huckleberry Finn to slip, fully, into James’s world, you will want to; the two books, like the two characters they are named for, are at their best in conversation with one another.

If You Loved The Vaster Wilds, by Lauren Groff, You Should Read Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe

Three-time National Book Award finalist Groff’s latest novel is narrated by Zed, a young servant girl who slips through the palisade wall of Jamestown and escapes from the colonial settlement during the “starving time” of 1609. For years before she wrote The Vaster Wilds, Groff had been troubled by an article in Smithsonian magazine about cannibalism at Jamestown, then had the idea to write a “female Robinson Crusoe” who gets away and must survive the mid-Atlantic winter. Robinson Crusoe, of course, is the protagonist of Daniel Defoe’s eponymous 1719 adventure story about a castaway who must hunt and gather while marooned alone on a desert island. (He encounters a few cannibals, too.) Both books are set in vivid natural worlds and explore the search for spirituality outside society, but—spoiler alert—they have very different endings.

If You Loved The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett, You Should Read Passing, by Nella Larsen

So many of us have read The Vanishing Half, the story of Stella Vignes, who abandons her identical twin sister, Desiree, to move to Los Angeles and start a new life as a white woman. Looking for a follow-up? Try Nella Larsen’s novel Passing—adapted into an Academy Award–nominated film by Rebecca Hall in 2021—which explores a similar premise and themes. Living in Harlem during the Jazz Age, the main character, Irene, runs into her old childhood friend Clare. While Irene, a light-skinned Black woman, occasionally passes as white when she needs to, Clare passes all the time. More confusingly, she’s married to a vehement racist. How their lives collide makes for a riveting, thought-provoking read.

If You Loved Hello Beautiful, by Ann Napolitano, You Should Read Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott

Early on in Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful, the 100th pick for Oprah’s Book Club, Julia Padavano and her three sisters debate their similarities to the March sisters in Louisa May Alcott’s classic Little Women. Both novels are anchored by warm, boisterous families whose ambitious, artistic sisters’ relationships change with the arrival of a love interest. In Hello Beautiful, it’s William, a stoic college basketball player who marries Julia; in Little Women, it’s Laurie, the neighbor’s grandson, who proposes to aspiring writer Jo before marrying her sister, Amy. If you need more convincing about the parallels between the two, watch this.

If You Loved Vladimir, by Julia May Jonas, You Should Read Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier

A smash hit of 2022, Vladimir is about a college professor who becomes obsessed with her younger colleague Vladimir after her husband is accused of sexual misconduct on campus. While Rebecca isn’t set on a campus, an obsession also drives this whole story. A young woman marries the wealthy Maxim de Winter, an Englishman twice her age. After moving to his Manderley estate, she becomes fixated on his late wife, Rebecca. Just as the professor’s crush on Vladimir haunts her semester, the presence of Rebecca’s absence haunts the Manderley estate—and everyone who lives there. Expect to be equally enthralled.

If You Loved Conversations with Friends, by Sally Rooney, You Should Read Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger

On the surface, Conversations with Friends is a novel that explores the nature of romantic relationships, including an affair between Frances, a young poet, and Nick, a 30-something married actor. But at the story’s heart is the porous, intimate friendship between Frances and Bobbi, her former girlfriend and current roommate. Around the time Conversations launched, author Sally Rooney named Franny and Zooey as having the greatest influence on her writing. J.D. Salinger’s novel is a portrait of two siblings as they come of age in the 1950s, and it was originally published as two (very long) short stories in The New Yorker. “Franny” takes place during an ambivalent date between college student Franny and her long-distance boyfriend. “Zooey,” on the other hand, picks up her story via her 25-year-old brother Zooey, who helps Franny work through her mid-semester existential crisis with a life-changing phone call. Both books are crowd-pleasers for anyone, especially 20-somethings obsessed with the question: “Beautiful world, where are you?”

If You Loved If I Survive You, by Jonathan Escoffery, You Should Read The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros

The stories in the collection If I Survive You, by Jonathan Escoffery, are linked by Trelawny—a Jamaican American man raised in Miami—and his family. During his college years at Florida International University, Escoffery read Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street and, soon after, started experimenting with short pieces that build toward a “bigger, novel-esque world,” he told The New York Times. Throughout her novel, Cisneros, who is also a poet, uses lyrical vignettes to hopscotch between perspectives and trace Esperanza Cordero’s hilarious and heart-wrenching coming-of-age in Chicago’s diverse Humboldt Park neighborhood. Both books use inventive structures and a kaleidoscopic chorus of voices to capture their protagonists’ search for identity.

If You Loved Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver, You Should Read David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens

Perennial bestseller and author of Oprah’s Book Club pick The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver has long been a Dickens evangelist. But her 2023 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Demon Copperhead (also an Oprah's Book Club selection) is her most explicit homage, using the structure of David Copperfield as a North Star and featuring characters with 1:1 stand-ins for the Dickens cast. David Copperfield is the loosely autobiographical saga of a 19th-century British orphan’s education, loss of innocence, and rise to novelistic celebrity. (At the time, novelists were the equivalent of today’s A-list actors, and Dickens was a major public figure.) Meanwhile, Kingsolver’s main character, Demon Copperhead, named for his red hair and fiery personality, pinballs through a series of homes—first the neighbors, then a foster family, then his high school football coach—searching for both family and meaning after his mother dies of an overdose. Despite doomed relationships and his own addiction, Demon invents his own superhero in the popular “Red Neck” comics he publishes anonymously. Our advice? Read both epics about lost children who find themselves.

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