The Lord of the Rings
1954 · 1178 pages
Frodo the hobbit inherits a ring that could rule the world and carries it across a continent to destroy it. Tolkien invented its languages first, and modern fantasy still works inside his world.
★ 8.9
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1954
Showing 8 books from 1954
The Collected Poems
1954 · 583 pages
Stevens sold insurance in Hartford and wrote sumptuous poems about what the imagination makes once God is gone. Read "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" aloud and the sound arrives before the sense.
★ 8.6
Lord of the Flies
1954 · 192 pages
English schoolboys are marooned on an island without adults, hold a vote, and are soon hunting each other. Golding tells it so plainly that you believe every step of the descent.
★ 7.8
The Art of Eating
1954 · 784 pages
Fisher wrote about oysters, wartime rationing, and eating alone, and made food a way of writing about hunger of every kind. The poet W.H. Auden said nobody in America wrote better prose.
★ 7.0
Lucky Jim
1954 · 264 pages
Jim Dixon loathes lecturing in medieval history, his professor's madrigal weekends, and the colleague trapping him with fake suicide threats. His drunken Merrie England lecture is the great set piece of English comedy.
★ 6.3
The Sound of Waves
1954 · 182 pages
Shinji fishes off a Japanese island and loves Hatsue, the pearl diver whose father owns the boats. Mishima set the Greek romance Daphnis and Chloe in postwar Japan and left the darkness out.
★ 6.2
The Doors of Perception
1954 · 208 pages
Eight hours on mescaline in 1953, and a vase of flowers turns into the whole universe. The brain filters reality to what keeps us alive, Huxley argues, and the drug lifts the filter.
★ 5.3
Bonjour Tristesse
1954 · 240 pages
On the Riviera, seventeen-year-old Cécile sets out to break up her widowed father's engagement to an elegant, exacting woman, and finds she is good at it. Sagan wrote it at eighteen.
★ 5.0