The days of reading on the beach are numbered, but here are two of my top recommendations from a great season. Both happen to be Pulitzer Prize-winning novels that I never had a chance to read in high school or college. But their messages are striking—and both are worthy to end up in your backpack for some leisure reading between classes or after work.

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

I had to put the “The Good Earth” down one evening because it made me furious. I couldn’t stand how apathetic, scornful, and ungrateful the main character was toward his wholly devoted, submissive, servant-like wife. I was angry at the social mores in pre-Revolution China when the book was written. I was angry at the idea of a loveless marriage.

But a great book can stir you up like that. Pearl S. Buck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, 1931 novel set in the Chinese countryside starts with a simple premise, but ends up making some powerful statements about the deception of wealth and the consequences of letting lust guide your way.

The book starts out on the wedding day of Wang Lung, a Chinese peasant whose father arranges for him to marry a slave woman he’s never met. His wife, O-Lan, is plain and has big feet, but Wang Lung is just happy to be married. She’s an excellent cook, and makes his shoddy house a home without a word of complaint.

She soon becomes pregnant, and performs the astounding feat of giving birth to her child alone, then returning to the fields the same day to help her husband plow. O-Lan does everything else right—including bearing him several more children—and it prepares them better than others for years when famine comes.

Gradually, the family becomes very prosperous. And Wang Lung starts to look at his plain, quiet wife with contempt. He starts visiting a shady “tea house” (brothel) and starts a chain of events that promises to bring his family down from its pedestal of self-made success and into a destructive spiral of decadence.

The Good Earth is an underrated, moving classic that will have you rooting for an unloved underdog – and thinking about its unforgettable characters for weeks.

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The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novella tells the story of a poor, aging fisherman discouraged that he hasn’t made a catch for exactly 84 days. He musters his resolve and sets sail in the Gulf Stream alone, and he’s supremely lucky this time around—he hooks a marlin, and can tell by the tug and the pull of the line that it’s the catch of a lifetime.
Patiently, he waits for the fish to lose its strength and die so he can tow it up into his skiff. But minutes turn to hours, and hours turn to days, and the old man is still holding the line while the marlin tows the tiny boat further and further in the sea.

Thus ensues a life-and-death contest between man and marlin. The old man reveres the unearthly creature and considers the fish a worthy contender. He wrestles in his mind whether he has a right to take the life of such majestic animal, and he finally decides that after his days of near-starvation at sea and his sleepless nights holding the line, he must kill the fish in self-defense. “Everything kills everything else in some way,” he tells himself. “Fishing kills me exactly as it keeps me alive.”

Hemingway’s parable ends with a twist, and asks the question, “What’s the point of trying anything in life if you know you’re going to die in the end?” The old fisherman’s response to his life-sapping battle with nature is one of great reverence and fear toward creation. In turn, it makes a statement on how we can both fear and love a Creator  who can—and often does—bring us to our knees.

A quick read of little more than 100 pages. Bring it on your next plane ride.

Confession: I only stumbled upon this book because I was looking for something akin to Twilight.

I heard there was an original vampire tale and in my ill-fated search for Count Dracula, I ran into another, far more interesting Count — The Count of Monte Cristo, the 1,300-page masterpiece published in 1844 by Frenchman Alexandre Dumas, better known as author of The Three Musketeers.

It’s one of those good versus evil battles that sends chills up your spine every few pages. Dumas weaves a complex web of deceit and treachery, revenge and redemption that is triumphant at the same time it leaves an unsettling question: Can justice go too far?

The year is 1815, and Edmund Dantes, a young French sailor with a promising future and an impending marriage with the love of his life, is falsely accused of treason by jealous rivals. The police burst into his wedding reception and drag him away from the head table, charging him with conspiring to bring banished Napoleon Bonaparte back to the throne. Dantes languishes in a dungeon for 14 years until he finally escapes and follows his wise cellmate’s direction to a treasure trove beyond his wildest dreams. [...]