Into the Unknown

The greatest American epic. Captain Ahab's monomaniacal hunt for the white whale is a ferocious battle against God, fate, and the indifferent cruelty of nature. Narrated by Ishmael, a wandering sailor, the novel takes us aboard the whaling ship Pequod, whose crew is a microcosm of humanity. Melville combines high adventure with deep philosophical meditation. The book is a genre-bending masterpiece that includes encyclopedic chapters on whale anatomy, stage plays, sermons, and soliloquies. At its center is the white whale itself, Moby Dick—a blank canvas onto which the characters project their own fears and obsessions. It is a story about the danger of seeing the world only through the lens of your own ego.

The book that invented the modern novel. What begins as a slapstick satire of chivalry evolves into a profound meditation on the power of dreams and the nature of reality. Alonso Quixano, an aging gentleman, reads so many books about knights that he loses his mind and decides to become one. Renaming himself Don Quixote, he recruits a simple farmer named Sancho Panza as his squire and sets out to right wrongs. The novel is built on the contrast between Quixote's idealism (he sees windmills as giants) and Sancho's realism (he sees them as windmills). As their journey continues, the two characters influence each other: Quixote becomes more grounded, and Sancho becomes more of a dreamer. It is a story about the friendship that bridges the gap between who we are and who we want to be.