EplusL Edu
Curated Library
Every book selected with intention — vocabulary spotlights, editorial hooks, and thematic collections.
51 books
Animal Farm
George Orwell
A barnyard fable about power, corruption, and the slow erosion of freedom.
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
A dazzling portrait of wealth, longing, and the American Dream's beautiful lie.
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
A world where everyone is happy — and that is exactly the problem.
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
A child's eye view of justice, prejudice, and the courage it takes to do what is right.
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens
Love, sacrifice, and revolution — set against the bloodiest chapter in French history.
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
A witty and timeless story about love, judgment, and the courage to change your mind.
The Odyssey
Homer (translated by Emily Wilson)
The original hero's journey — and the source of half the archetypes on your AP exam.
The Giver
Lois Lowry
A perfect world with no pain, no color, no choice — and one boy who begins to remember what was lost.
Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck
Short, devastating, and impossible to forget — the perfect introduction to literary tragedy.
Lord of the Flies
William Golding
When the adults disappear, the boys don't build a paradise — they build a nightmare.
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
The original feminist protagonist — and one of literature's most precisely observed moral voices.
Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
In a world where books are burned, one fireman begins to wonder why.
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
America's first great psychological novel — and still its most demanding.
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
The first science fiction novel — and still the most philosophically serious.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis
The wardrobe is a door. What lies beyond it is the question every reader carries for life.
The Hobbit
J.R.R. Tolkien
The reluctant hero who changed what heroism means in literature.
A Wrinkle in Time
Madeleine L'Engle
Science, faith, and love — in a universe stranger and larger than any textbook describes.
The Outsiders
S.E. Hinton
Written by a sixteen-year-old. Read by every generation since.
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
Mildred D. Taylor
The land is theirs. So is the story. So is the dignity.
Number the Stars
Lois Lowry
Courage, it turns out, does not always look like what we expect.
The Phantom Tollbooth
Norton Juster
A novel about a boy who was bored — until language became an adventure.
Anne of Green Gables
L.M. Montgomery
Island of the Blue Dolphins
Scott O'Dell
Alone on an island for eighteen years — and never once defeated.
My Ántonia
Willa Cather
The prairie, the immigrant experience, and a friendship that outlasts everything.
Ghost
Jason Reynolds
Running from the past — and discovering it's the only thing that can save you.
The Pearl
John Steinbeck
Under 100 pages. One of the most morally serious novels in American literature.
The House on Mango Street
Sandra Cisneros
A neighborhood, a name, and a girl who knows she is more than where she comes from.
Esperanza Rising
Pam Muñoz Ryan
From wealth to labor camps — and the dignity that survives the fall.
Hatchet
Gary Paulsen
Alone in the wilderness with nothing but a hatchet — and everything he needs to survive.
Refugee
Alan Gratz
Three refugees. Three eras. One urgent question: what does it cost to belong somewhere?
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
The story of colonialism told from the inside — and the one every student needs to read.
The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini
Guilt, friendship, and the long road back — set against the fall of Afghanistan.
Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi
A revolution, a childhood, and a country — in black and white.
A Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry
One family. One check. One dream. And a country that doesn't want them to have it.
The Good Earth
Pearl S. Buck
A Chinese farmer, the land he loves, and the wealth that slowly destroys everything he built.
Flowers for Algernon
Daniel Keyes
The Watsons Go to Birmingham
Christopher Paul Curtis
The funniest family in literature — until the summer that changes everything.
Walk Two Moons
Sharon Creech
A road trip, a mystery, and a girl learning to say goodbye.
Tuck Everlasting
Natalie Babbitt
What would you give for eternal life? And what would you lose?
The Witch of Blackbird Pond
Elizabeth George Speare
A Barbados girl in Puritan New England — and the town that couldn't understand her.
Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton
The Awakening
Kate Chopin
Published in 1899. Banned immediately. Still unsettling. Still essential.
Siddhartha
Hermann Hesse
A young man leaves everything to find himself. The search takes a lifetime.
Cannery Row
John Steinbeck
A street full of misfits who have chosen a different kind of life — and are content.
The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
The most famous teenager in American literature — and the one who still makes adults uncomfortable.
Death of a Salesman
Arthur Miller
The American Dream, as experienced by the man it destroyed.
Beloved
Toni Morrison
Memory, trauma, and motherhood collide in Morrison's most haunting and necessary novel.
A Separate Peace
John Knowles
Two boys, one friendship, one moment of jealousy that changes everything.
A Room with a View
E.M. Forster
A young Englishwoman abroad discovers that propriety and passion cannot coexist.
1984
George Orwell
A chilling vision of a world where truth is whatever those in power say it is.
Thematic collections
4 curations
Power of Language
One Word at a Time
Books where language is the story. These authors chose every word with precision — reading them is a masterclass in how vocabulary shapes meaning, character, and power.
Before High School
5 books every rising 9th grader should read
These books don't ease you in — they ask you to think harder, feel more precisely, and read between the lines. By the end of this list your child will walk into 9th grade already thinking like a literary analyst.
Adolescence
5 books for the years that change everything
These are the years when everything shifts — friendships, family, identity, belonging. These five books put middle schoolers at the center of that experience and tell the truth about it. Not the tidy version. The real one.
Identity
Identity — 5 books that ask who you really are
High school is where the question stops being abstract. These five books follow characters who are forced — by circumstance, by loss, by love, by the world — to decide who they are and what they will not compromise. Each one is a different answer to the same question.
Coming next
The Vocabulary Builder · Fall 2026