Study guides - Page 13 | Just Great DataBase

The “Iliad” is a great story of the battle of Troy written by Homer. It is a marvelous book and it doesn’t matter if Homer wrote it by himself or just collected the numerous poems and songs of vagarious artists of that time. It is often called the first work of world literature that talks about all problems of humanity.  Imagine a war between the Greeks (Achaians) and the...

“The Importance of Being Earnest” is a play written by Oscar Wilde and first performed in 1895. Despite its enduring popularity, this work of art was banned due to author’s social and personal preferences that couldn’t be accepted by the community he lived in. Reading Wilde books isn’t an easy thing. It feels like you are stealing from yourself. It’s a great...

“The Joy Luck Club” is the first book written by an American author of Chinese origins Amy Tan. The novel tells the story of four women and their daughters who talk about their lives as immigrants in San Francisco. Do you know anything in Chinese? Have you ever played a mahjong game? This could have greatly helped you in understanding the book better. It’s a challenge, but...

Rudyard Kipling carefully made, almost out of tropical lianas and vines, a story of times called “The Jungle Book”. It is about friendship, love, and betrayal. Yet it is easy to read due to all the exotic creatures and the celebration of life that takes place in a middle of an untouched jungle forest. Mowgli isn’t just a boy abandoned by a civilization and brought up by animal...

The Killer Angels is a novel about war. Though it is a fiction one, the events of the novel are depicted so realistically that for a long time the book was one of the essential literary pieces to read in many military institutions, like US Army Officer Candidate School, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina and many others. It is also one of the two fictional novels recommended in...

The Kitchen God’s Wife by Amy Tan is to some extent an autobiographical work. The main character, as the author, is also a daughter of Chinese immigrants to America, she lost her father and knew nothing about her mother’s previous life. So, The Kitchen God’s Wife may seem an attempt to reinterpret author’s own family story. The tale of mother and daughter, who live...

Not everybody likes historical novels. And not every story makes a good inspiration source for a book. But some events are best to learn about from the literary genre. The Afghan war is one of them. An American author of Afghan origins wrote “The Kite Runner” where he talks about the Soviet intervention, a fallen regime, and the establishment of a Taliban movement. The novel is fine...

One of the short stories by Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Little Dog” is considered one of the most famous and most brilliant. Like the majority of Chekhov’s works, this one tells us the story about relationships between the people, shortly but very precisely showing us the typical personalities and situations from the new angle. The plot of it seems trivial: the adultery...

“The Last of the Mohicans” is one part of a number of historical novels written by James Fenimore Cooper. The events of the book take place in the second part of the 18th century when the French-Indian War took place. It is a must read for most American high school students and one of the best books about this period all over the world.  In the beginning the reader finds himself...

The Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy the Gentleman is the book as long and descriptive as its name is. The name though is true to the core: Tristram Shandy depicts his life with the incredible accuracy, but he has his own opinion about each and every event of it including his own birth. This narrative style, that portrays an absent-minded gentleman who shifts from one topic to another so...

The Light in The Forest by Conrad Richter is a fiction novel telling us the story about the white boy, captured by Native Americans and raised as one of their tribe and then captured by the white people and re-assimilated. The book raises questions of cultural values and the general human values that are above any cultural differences - such as compassion and mercy. The author plays with the...

How many times have you heard people say they would only learn French for having the benefit of reading “The Little Prince” in original language? Published in 1943, the book remains a manifesto of childhood purity and simplicity of life seen through young eyes. Antoine de Saint-Exupery is a French aristocrat and aviator, who spent long time in North America exile after France had...

A legendary sequel written by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is now one of the most read and best sold books of all times. It’s hard to believe that such rich concepts were developed in 1937 and 1949 when Internet and cinematography wasn’t as much of an influence. It’s a mere product of imagination of a man who has always been fond of ancient history, philology, comparison studies...

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann is a philosophical novel that features a surrealistic setting of a sanatorium far away in Swiss mountains that, considering that the pace of time there isn’t constant at all, can be called magical. The protagonist, a man in his twenties named Hans Castorp, goes there to visit his relative, who has tuberculosis, but falls ill himself during the visit and...

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy is a social novel that shows the life and death of the aforementioned Mayor who managed to turn from a drunkard to a decent man, but still had to constantly face the consequences of his past deeds. At the beginning of the novel we see him as the poor and embittered man, who gets so drunk that he puts his wife and baby daughter to the auction. This...

“The Maze Runner” is the first of a series of dystopian books written by James Dasher in 2009. Despite being so young in age, the novel’s plot has become so popular that it was turned into a movie and is now one of the most popular books among young people around the world. The protagonist of the book, Thomas, wakes up to find himself in a metal box without any recollections of...

Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare is often classified as a romantic comedy, but it can’t clearly be defined as comedy due to its piercing dramatic scenes, especially with the character of the Jewish moneylender Shylock and Portia’s fiery speech about mercy. The other deep topics that are mentioned in the play are the value of friendship (the male friendship bordering with...

Franz Kafka wrote the “Metamorphosis” in 1915 and together with his other works it was supposed to be destroyed after his death. Luckily his wife and friends didn’t obey the orders of the writer and the world still praises him as a great modernist and master of the words.  The protagonist of the story, Gregor Samsa is a provider for his family of four. After his father...

The Mill of the Floss is the family drama novel written by George Eliot. Some of the parts of the story are considered autobiographical, but the plot shows us the relationships that can happen in every rural patriarchal family of that times. The story starts from the family that lives on the mill and consists of the miller, his wife and two children. From the very beginning we see that the...

The Misanthrope is a comedy of manners by Moliere that, as do his previous works, mocks the habits of the upper-class French society, so bright and magnificent at the first glance and so shallow inside. Because his previous works were already banned in France, the author had to tone down some accents in the story to the extent that we can’t understand if the main character, Alceste is a...