The 306 Greatest Books #8 - Hamlet

I am going back and posting all of my previous book reviews so that they are listed on my site in chronological order. The reviews are dated for the time when I read the book, hence the reason many of them will be listed for times before this website existed. 

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is Hamlet by William Shakespeare. This book can be found on the Sybervision, Norwegian, and the Zane Top 10 Book Lists.

Hamlet is often considered to be Shakespeare's best play, and this is a rating I can get behind. The tale is about a man trying to find the murderer of his father, while dealing with the slowly ensuing madness of most of the characters around him. Unlike Macbeth, I found Hamlet to be intriguing and quotable. Several of the scenes are memorable, even now, many years after having last read/seen the play. If I had to point people to only one Shakespeare's play to read or watch, this would be the one.

The 306 Greatest Books #7 - Macbeth

I am going back and posting all of my previous book reviews so that they are listed on my site in chronological order. The reviews are dated for the time when I read the book, hence the reason many of them will be listed for times before this website existed. 

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is Macbeth by William Shakespeare. This book can be found on the Sybervision Book List.

Shakespeare has never really been my thing and this is only the first of several Shakespeare plays that can be found on the list. Macbeth is the story of a man who commits murder in order to become king. However classic the story may be, it just didn't grab me. This is one of the weaker of Shakespeare's famous plays and one that I probably won't be going back to, unlike Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet. In general though, the language is what holds me back. I just can't get immersed in the world like I want to. I would prefer to see this play, and most of the other plays, actually acted out. Unfortunately I do need to read them for me to feel I can cross them off the list. 

The 306 Greatest Books #6 - The Catcher in the Rye

I am going back and posting all of my previous book reviews so that they are listed on my site in chronological order. The reviews are dated for the time when I read the book, hence the reason many of them will be listed for times before this website existed. 

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. This book can be found on the Observer and BBC Book Lists.

The Catcher in the Rye seems to have been relegated to "cult" status stemming from the obsessive love of the book that Mark David Chapman had for the book. Chapman is well known as being the murderer of the beloved John Lennon. Whether the book deserves this cult status is up for debate but I personally don't understand it. The book is a rather depressing novel about a 16 year-old adolescent, just kicked out of prep school, and learning to deal with the adult world of "phonies." It's a very well written book and really enjoyable to read. However, it has been a long time since I have read the book, so I will place this on my must reread list to hopefully be able to solve this cult classic mystery for myself.

The 306 Greatest Books #5 - Animal Farm

I am going back and posting all of my previous book reviews so that they are listed on my site in chronological order. The reviews are dated for the time when I read the book, hence the reason many of them will be listed for times before this website existed. 

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is Animal Farm by George Orwell. This book can be found on the BBC and My Book Lists.

I had read Animal Farm in high school, like so many other great books, but I was able to go back and reread it as part of my official 100 Greatest Books read through. I find this novel fantastic and insightful, especially knowing what I know now about communist Russia and society as a whole. The book is very fast paced (I read it in about 2 hours) and it's a fun read. The story is like a children's book, which had been forced through a harsh realism filter. In essence, the story is about a group of farm animals who find that their Master has gone over the line one too many times and they take over the farm. They run the farm well as equals (at first), but then dissension starts to appear when the two "leaders" start to fight and one ousts the other from the farm. Orwell's portrayal of communistic society is chilling and he makes it understandable both to the point of how this can happen and why people let it happen. The concept of the book can be generalized in these famous lines near the end: "All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others." Definitely on my must read list.

The 306 Greatest Books #4 - The Great Gatsby

I am going back and posting all of my previous book reviews so that they are listed on my site in chronological order. The reviews are dated for the time when I read the book, hence the reason many of them will be listed for times before this website existed. 

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. This book can be found on the Sybervision, Observer, BBC, Zane Top 10, and My Book Lists.

I had originally read The Great Gatsby sometime in high school, but it was a book that I felt the urge to at some time revisit. This past year (2026), I have both seen the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio and seen the Broadway musical. So I undertook to revisit the novel because both of those stories, were surprisingly nearly identical, and very different from the story that sat in the dustbins of my memory. Listening to the audiobook of the story I discovered that this is a very, very short novel and that the reason that the movie and Broadway musical were so nearly identical is because there isn't much extra fluff to the story. They adapt the story nearly flawlessly, minus some addendums towards the end that were skipped or glossed over, and some characterizations that were altered. The story is amazingly poignant, especially today. It is a dual story, where one of the stories is about the glitter and glam of the 1920's and how the rich were overly "stuffed" and detached from the working class people of the world. And while they sometimes entered into the everyday suffering of the lower classes, they always stood apart. And Gatsby was that crossover, a kid of the lower classes who was determined to raise himself up, and eventually found a girl, Daisy, for which he strived to do it for. But the second story line is about everyone's past and trying to live in it while the future moves on around us. Gatsby could never let go of the past. He spent his life trying to regain what was lost, to the point that he wanted to reset his relationship with Daisy to their historical point of separation. It is what ended up getting him killed in and leaves a note that the past is the past for a reason, and we all need to live in the present. I liked this book upon revisiting it far more than I expected to. The story is well written and the language used evokes the sophistication that Gatsby was trying to evoke. The story was also very tight, that sometimes I would miss a line while listening to the book and have to jump back because the story wasn't making sense. In one instance, someone had shown shown up that wasn't there before, but I had missed two words in a sentence that heralded his arrival. This story, at times, moved at a lightning pace. Overall, I greatly enjoyed this one and have placed it on my Must Read List.