50 Masterpieces you have to read before you die is the book that everyone should read to understand themselves and each other. The authors and works for this book were selected, as a result of numerous studies, analysis of the texts over the past 100 years and the demand for readers. It must be read in order to understand the world around us, its history, to recognize the heroes, to understand the winged expressions and jokes that come from these literary works. Reading these books will mean the discovery of a world of self-development and self-expression for each person. These books have been around for decades, and sometimes centuries, for the time they recreate, the values they teach, the point of view, or simply the beauty of words. This volume includes famous works: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, Hamlet by William Shakespeare, The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Medea by Euripides, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, Ulysses by James Joyce and many others. Frances Hodgson Burnett Homer Charles Dickens Lyman Frank Baum Nathaniel Hawthorne Thomas Hardy Robert Louis Stevenson Henry Rider Haggard Wilkie Collins Herbert George Wells Walter Scott Lucy Maud Montgomery Louisa May Alcott Henry Fielding Mary Shelley Arthur Conan Doyle Herman Melville Leo Tolstoy Euripides Fyodor Dostoevsky Aleksandr Pushkin James Fenimore Cooper Daniel Defoe Joseph Conrad Jonathan Swift William Shakespeare Mark Twain Oscar Wilde John Bunyan Charles Darwin Alfred Tennyson Bram Stoker James Joyce Alighieri Dante Howard Pyle Jane Austen Emily Bronte Thomas Hardy Giovanni Boccaccio Rudyard Kipling.
Weight for the kite.
Stripped of ornament, plain.
Paraphrase of a famous remark Samuel Johnson made in a letter to Lord Chesterfield (Philip Dormer Stanhope, 1694-1773), an early patron of his dictionary, when Chesterfield sought credit for sponsoring it after having neglected Johnson for ten years.
Rascal.
Act like a schoolmarm.
In Dickens’s novel David Copperfield (1849-1850), the fisherman Daniel Pegotty is the brother of the Copperfields’ housekeeper; upon seeing David after many years, he repeatedly proclaims David and his companion “gentlemen growed.”
In Aesop’s fable “The North Wind and the Sun,” the sun and the wind vie to see which can make a man remove his coat; after the wind tries to blow the coat off the man, the sun wins through gentleness, warming the man until he removes the coat.
Ornamental chain or clasp worn at a woman’s waist to hold keys, charms, and so on.
At one’s pleasure (Latin).
Fine lace made with a needle.