These literary masterpieces continue to shape our culture.
Who doesn’t enjoy a good book? An entertaining, gripping, enthralling, emotional read can both make us feel all kinds of emotions as well as educate, illuminate, entertain and edify. There really is no comparison to a fantastic book we simply can’t put down and whose considerable virtues we excitedly relate to other people in the hope they elicit the same experience as we had.
But some books have far transcended their literary source and become cultural, societal, social, and even historical touchstones. Bedrocks of culture, both popular and otherwise, that have not only touched lives but actively changed them. These masterpieces of literature have endured for decades, centuries, in some cases even millennia, precisely because they hold an inherent power in their words that far exceed them being a mere page-turner.
Where do you start then in listing a mere 5 books of true greatness? I’ve used the criteria for this article based on their overall social, cultural, and historical impact. So get comfy, make yourself a beverage of your choice, and let’s dive in…
1. The Holy Bible
No ‘best of’ book list can be considered credible without the Bible’s inclusion. The most sold, read, distributed, discussed, debated, controversial, comforting book in all of human history. You simply cannot overestimate both the importance and impact the Bible has had on human civilization. It has indelibly shaped our history, culture, our language, our laws, our government, our literature, our entertainment, and just about everything in our daily lives. It is quite literally the foundation stone of our entire modern civilization.
Consisting of 66 universally-recognized books, written by 40 different authors across 3 continents over 2,000 years and incorporating history, poetry, parables, mysticism, allegory, and even future predictions of events still to be, the Bible ultimately is a story of hope, beginning with Creation and ending with mankind’s Redemption with God through his Son Jesus Christ. Whether you believe it’s claims or not, no-one can dispute the sheer unparalleled impact the Bible has had.
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2. The Iliad
The definitive mythic tale of all time, without which, we simply wouldn’t have many of the most popular stories we hold dear to this day. Committed to papyrus probably around the late 8th or early 7th century BC but likely told in oral form for many years beforehand, the book’s author was supposedly Homer, a Greek poet, who wrote both The Iliad and its sequel, The Odyssey, although when is unknown precisely.
One of the oldest extant pieces of literature, certainly one of the most enduring and influential, The Iliad is a poetic work of 24 books and containing 15,963 lines, it details vividly the background and ultimate end of the Trojan War, a Bronze Age conflict in what is now north-west Turkey, wherein a coalition of Greek states besieged the city state of Troy over a ten-year period before finally breaching its walls thanks to the famous trick of the wooden horse and sacking the city thoroughly. The book has become the national myth of its home country and enthralled countless readers through the millennia and it’s easy to see why.
3. The Lord of the Rings
Probably the definitive modern mythology of our time, The Lord of the Rings virtually created the high-fantasy genre of storytelling, influenced just about every fictional adventure story since its staggered publication in 1954-55, was the basis for filmmaker Peter Jackson’s acclaimed and wildly popular movie trilogy adaptation in 2001-03, and is the best-selling fantasy novel of all time, shifting some 150 million copies to date.
Written by JRR Tolkien and acting as a sequel to his 1937 children’s book The Hobbit, it tells the epic story of the quest to destroy a malevolent magic Ring before the evil non-corporeal entity who first created it gets it back and plunges the prehistoric world of Middle Earth under his dark rule forever. Whereas The Hobbit was a relatively simple fairytale, The Lord of the Rings is an altogether darker, broader, more expansive, and mature story of a world plunged into war, not of conquest or for riches but for survival against all odds and an army of darkness unlike anything seen before. It is a story that continues to inspire millions to date and will continue to do so while books exist.
4. Dracula
The definitive and best-selling horror story ever written. Published in 1897 and written by the Irish author Bram Stoker, Dracula single-handedly created the vampire genre at a stroke, has influenced countless books, plays, television series, and films, has sold a reported 100 million copies to date worldwide, and continues to be a touchstone of gothic literature.
Telling the story of young English lawyer Jonathan Harker who travels to the eastern European region of Transylvania to finalize a property deal with the mysterious Count Dracula, only for Harker to discover his new client is an immortal, blood-drinking, creature of darkness who imprisons him and heads off to England to continue his bloody reign of terror. Harker must escape, enlist the help of his old professor Abraham Van Helsing, and eliminate the Count once and for all. Told as an epistolary, Dracula has endured because of its gripping narrative and vivid characters, and will continue to be reinterpreted in each generation as it retains its inherent relevance despite its age, the hallmark of a true masterpiece.
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5. Dune
Considered by many as the greatest science-fiction novel ever written, Dune has proven to be a major and highly seminal work of literature that has directly influenced (some would say whose ideas have been brazenly stolen from) countless authors and filmmakers since its publication in 1965, selling in excess of 20 million copies to date.
Dune is a complex and expansive work set in the year 10,191 and telling the tale of young regent Paul Atriedes and his family’s journey to the planet of Arrakis, source of the mystical spice known as Melange. When the Atriedes family are attacked and nearly wiped out by their bitter rivals, the Harkonnens, Paul and his mother escape to the desert and unite with a reclusive tribe, where Paul begins his transformation into the predicted Messiah who will liberate Arrakis from their Harkonnen oppressors. Dune may be a dense novel but the story it weaves through its 896 pages has literally changed the face of fantasy storytelling, a legacy that endures to this day.