Tess Of The D'Urbervilles Study Guide: Fill & Download for Free

I wrote a program that aggregates 80+ different lists from around the internet, from sources like the BBC, the New York Times, Goodreads, and a bunch of other places. All together, there are over 17,000 books in the list, all sorted and ranked based on how many lists they show up in and their rankings within those lists.Many of the books don’t come as a surprise, but there are some highly ranked books that I had never heard of. I have a goal to read the top 100 within the next year or so.The top 100 are as follows, aggregated from 89 different lists with a total of 17,519 unique books:The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell)To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)Lolita (Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov)The Catcher in the Rye (J. D. Salinger)The Lord of the Rings (J. R. R. Tolkien)Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)Ulysses (James Joyce)One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez)War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)Wuthering Heights (Charlotte Brontë)Lord of the Flies (William Golding)Beloved (Toni Morrison)The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra)The Hobbit (J. R. R. Tolkien)Animal Farm (George Orwell)The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)On the Road (Jack Kerouac)Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (George Eliot)Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)Moby Dick (Herman Melville)Crime and Punishment (Fyodor M Dostoyevsky)To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut)Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (Douglas Adams)Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)A Passage to India (E. M. Forster)A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)Emma (Jane Austen)Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor M Dostoyevsky)Charlotte's Web (E. B. White)Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)Rebecca (Daphne Du Maurier)Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame)A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess)The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)The Little Prince (Saint Exupery)The Chronicles of Narnia (C.S. Lewis)In Search of Lost Time (Marcel Proust)David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)Midnight's Children (Salman Rushdie)The Trial (Franz Kafka)The Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank)Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift)The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)Hamlet (William Shakespeare)Native Son (Richard Wright)The Call of the Wild (Jack London)The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)The Color Purple (Alice Walker)The Stranger (Albert Camus)Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston)For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway)The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne)A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce)Bible: King James VersionThe Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)Les Miserables (Victor Hugo)Anne of Green Gables (L. M. Montgomery)The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco)Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe)Dune (Frank Herbert)The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L'Engle)Winnie-the-Pooh (A. A. Milne)One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Ken Kesey)Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented (Thomas Hardy)Under the Volcano (Malcolm Lowry)The Odyssey (Homer)As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner)Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw (Jeff Kinney)Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (Evelyn Waugh)Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)Watership Down (Richard Adams)The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)Atonement (Ian McEwan)The Godfather (Mario Puzo)And Then There Were None (Agatha Christie)A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer)The Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton)The Portrait of a Lady (Henry James)The full list is available here. Note that the list itself is pretty bare-bones, but I often add more data, so the full list may change somewhat in the future as I incorporate more into it. Because the list is calculating scores in real-time, it may take a few seconds to load.

Recommending a book is like buying someone underwear. It’s a very personal thing to do for someone, especially if you don’t know them well. You always run the risk of buying a G-string aficionado a bland pair of cotton panties (or boxers). Or worse, purchase a pair three sizes too big. Such a gesture must be undertaken with caution and a big dose of humility.This is why I will only recommend categories of books instead of individual ones. Fair warning: My idea of self-improvement differs from the one that the self-help industry touts. The way I figure it, if you understand the world, the people who live in it, and yourself, you’re far better equipped to navigate today’s confusing times. Sounds more like self-improvement to me than some routine engineered to make you more productive.The books I mention are not recommendations. They are merely examples of books that have improved me. Since I’m a cotton panty gal, the books that tickle my “self-improvement” fancy might not do the same for you. Another book in the same category might, though.Category 1: Stepping Out of YourselfLike it or not, our world is growing increasingly diverse. We can no longer expect that the people we interact with on a deep level—at work, at school, online, even at home—are like ourselves. They come from different cultures, speak languages that are not our own, believe things we do not. Things you thought were common sense are apparently no longer as common.Such differences create strife. It creates friction. It leads to misunderstandings and conflict. Sometimes it ends in violence.One thing all of us can do to ease some of this strife is to build our empathy. The question becomes how? The answer lies, perhaps surprisingly, in reading fiction books. Specifically, well-written novels from the perspective of someone different from yourself. Don’t believe me? Studies show the power of fiction to build empathy.If you ask me, boosting your understanding of a diverse group of people makes you more prepared for our diverse world and, just maybe, a better person.Some books that helped me empathize with those different from myself:The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas - a story of an African American teenager who must reconcile the two worlds she lives in: the predominantly Black ghetto she lives in and the hoity-toity predominantly white prep school she attends.Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters- this gender- and sexuality-bending novel taught me, a tediously heteronormative and cisgender person, a thing or two.Kindred by Octavia E. Butler - this time-travel book about a Black woman who goes back to antebellum South helped me see all of the complexities of enslavement and oppression in a way that I could never truly appreciate as a light-skinned 21st-century woman.Category 2: Those Who Do Not Know Their History Are Doomed to Immaturity and IgnoranceMost of us leave school thinking that history is all boring facts. Dates of so-and-so treaty. Names of so-and-so general. Not a whit of anything valuable in sight, right?That’s where you would be wrong. History—real history, rather than the dry version they teach in school—is all about context. History gives you context for the world we live in. History disabuses our conceits by telling us how civilizations rise due to luck and fall thanks to hubris. History shows you that even though you believe yourself right today, you’ll be seen as wrong tomorrow.History humbles us all. It makes us realize that we—as individuals, as governments, as civilizations—are flashes in the stretch of time. A dose of humility goes a long way to self-improvement.Some history books I enjoyed.Lessons of History by William and Alice Durant - a great meta-view of historical trends and a fascinating peek at what someone from the 1970s thought we were going.Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach - explains how little we know about sex and why. Gives you ins perspective on our uptight attitudes toward copulation.A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn - a great grassroots view of American history. Tells you stuff that textbooks shy away from.Category 3: Some Healthy Head-ShrinkingUnless you live 50 miles away from your nearest neighbor, grow your own food, and have everything delivered, you probably interact with people every day. As such, it behooves us all to understand people a bit better.A better handle on emotions, both your own and others more grace and (hopefully) less damage. This means that you can maintain and even improve all of your relationships from the most platonic to the most romantic. Still, don’t think it’s valuable? Think about how a nasty dispute between you and your coworker might cost you your job or career. (Not to even mention divorce in the case of romantic relationships.)Choose wisely, however. In a society overrun by pop psychology books of questionable science, finding a good one is tough. They’re out there. I promise. When you discover one, it can make you more aware of how you might be hindering your relationships.My personal favorites:The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo: A great lesson in how easy our situation can influence our sense of morality and actions. It reminds me to always be on guard against slipping into amorality or even immorality.How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adas: Okay, this is a self-help book but has some of the most useful psychology tricks I’ve read. A practical guide to being “successful” and Scott Adams makes no bones about how luck plays into it.Category 4: The Art (or Science) of PersuasionYou need to persuade someone about something about every day. Maybe you want your boss to give you a raise. Or perhaps you need to convince your teenager to clean up her room where you think you smell a dead bird. Or just maybe, you need to persuade yourself to go to the damn gym. Persuasion makes the world go ‘round, so you might as well learn a thing or two about it.I’m old-school when it comes to the art of persuasion, so I’m partial to The Art of Rhetoric by Aristotle.Category 5: The Great Classics That Won’t DieMy answer to anyone who questions the value of reading classics is: These books have shaped our society in some way. So, shouldn’t you know how?We impart many of our ideas from these Big Classics.[1] The Great Gatsby has shaped our views of what shallowness and the American Dream mean. Anna Karenina whispers—okay, shouts—about the dances of idealized romantic love. Pride and Prejudice has influenced many generations’s idea of what romance means … for better or worse.Don’t worry. You don’t need to read ‘em all. One or two will suffice. Heck, you can just watch the movie if you’re that hard up.My personal favorites:Persuasion by Jane AustenHamlet by William ShakespeareTess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas HardyOne Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García MárquezCategory 6: Whatever in the Hell You’re IntoAll of the above categories notwithstanding, your strengths and obsessions help you more than being “well-rounded.” Excelling in specific areas can take you far both personally and career-wise. You must dive deep to do that.Really into physics? Read books about physics! Don’t know a quark from a quack (and don’t care)? Don’t read books on physics! Learn about something you’re into. Read deeply in subject matters that fascinate you and see where that’ll take you._______[1]: I often get comments on my answers about classics claiming that the term classics only pertain to the ancient Greek and Roman tales. Alas, this definition only gets it half right. As Encyclopedia Britannica defines it:Classical literature, the literature of ancient Greece and Rome (see Greek literature; Latin literature). The term, usually spelled “classical,” is also used for the literature of any language in a period notable for the excellence and enduring quality of its writers’ works. (emphasis added).Basically, the term “classics” refers to ancient Greek and Roman literature and hoity-toity books of all languages and time periods.

Simplified books (also called graded readers, easy readers or learner literature) are books written in simple English especially for English learners. They use only the most basic English words and grammar.a page out of a simplified bookExample page from a simplified book (Bad Love, Cambridge University Press) • click to zoomSimplified books are the ideal solution for people who are just starting to read in a new language. When I was studying German for my college exam, I spent a few months reading a series of simplified detec­tive stories about Helmut Müller, a detective from Berlin, and his secre­tary, Bea Braun. For me, these little books were a perfect way to learn: much easier to understand than “real” German texts and so gripping I couldn’t stop reading!After reading a few simplified books (maybe about 120 pages in total), I noticed I was beginning to get a feel for basic German grammar. For example, I started to “feel” that you should say der Flug, not die Flug, von dir, not von dich, Leute, die uns helfen können, not Leute, die können uns helfen, Ich kenne einen Ort, not Ich kenne ein Ort. The incorrect phrases simply sounded weird to me, while the correct phrases sounded familiar. When writing, useful phrases like das heißt (that means) or eigentlich nicht (not exactly) appeared in my head.It was a very exciting experience for me. For the first time, I could write something in German in a natural way, instead of trying to recall grammar rules (“Let’s see... the preposition von takes the dative case and the dative form of du is dir”).Simplified books are available in different levels of difficulty — the simplest ones are written only with a few hundred most common English words (e.g. make, when, hear, look). Which levels should you choose? I do not recommend the lower levels (below 500 basic words) because they sound very artificial and can teach you some very unnatural English, for example water in eyes instead of tear (tear is not one of the 500 most common English words). If you can read this article, you should definitely start with intermediate or advanced books (over 1,000 words).How to choose a simplified book that you will like:The best way is to go to a bookstore which sells simplified books in English, pick up a few books, and look at the first pages. The first page of a book usually tells you if the book will hold your interest.If you don’t know what you’ll like, try detective stories. People have different tastes in books, but almost everybody likes detective stories. That’s why they are one of the best choices for an English learner. Recently, many detective books have appeared on the market, and they’ve become quite popular. Click on each link to see all of the author’s books on Low Prices in Electronics, Books, Sports Equipment & more. Among the best authors of original detective stories for English learners are: Richard MacAndrew, Philip Prowse and Sue Leather. Besides original stories (written especially for learners), you can get simplified versions (adaptations) of “real” detective novels by authors such as Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Arthur Conan Doyle or Alexander McCall Smith.FICTIONGeneralDavid Copperfield by Charles DickensGreat Expectations by Charles DickensAdam Bede by George EliotThe Mill on the Floss by George EliotMiddlemarch by George EliotSilas Marner by George EliotNorth and South by Elizabeth GaskellTo Kill a Mockingbird by Harper LeeMoby-Dick by Herman MelvilleA Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty SmithGulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift ~ A satirical workThe House of Mirth by Edith WhartonAction/AdventureThe Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore CooperThe Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre DumasThe Three Musketeers by Alexandre DumasKing Solomon's Mines by H. Rider HaggardThe Scarlet Pimpernel by Emmuska OrczyTreasure Island by Robert Louis StevensonThe Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David WyssChildren'sPeter Pan by J.M. BarrieThe Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank BaumCharlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald DahlThe Wind in the Willows by Kenneth GrahameThe Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson BurnettA Little Princess by Frances Hodgson BurnettA Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'EngleWinnie-the-Pooh by A.A. MilneAnne of Green Gables by L.M. MontgomeryBlack Beauty by Anna SewellThe Prince and the Pauper by Mark TwainCharlotte's Web by E.B. WhiteComedyCatch-22 by Joseph HellerThree Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K. JeromeA Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy TooleThe Most Of P.G. Wodehouse by P.G. WodehouseCrime/MysteryMurder on the Orient Express by Agatha ChristieThe Complete Sherlock Holmes: All 4 Novels & 56 Short Stories by Arthur Conan DoyleRebecca by Daphne Du MaurierFantasyThe Barsoom Series by Edgar Rice Burroughs by Edgar Rice BurroughsAlice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis CarrollA Christmas Carol by Charles DickensThe Iliad & The Odyssey by HomerThe Chronicles of Narnia by C.S LewisThe Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. TolkeinThe Sword in the Stone by T.H. WhiteThe Once and Future King by T.H. WhiteHistoricalA Tale of Two Cities by Charles DickensI, Claudius by Robert GravesThe Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel HawthorneIvanhoe by Walter ScottWar and Peace by Leo TolstoyThe Color Purple by Alice WalkerThe Age of Innocence by Edith WhartonLes Misérables by Victor HugoHorror/GothicFrankenstein by Mary ShelleyDracula by Bram StokerWe Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley JacksonThe Haunting of Hill House by Shirley JacksonPsychological/PhilosophicalThe Plague by Albert CamusCrime and Punishment by Fyodor DostoyevskyThe Trial by Franz KafkaDarkness at Noon by Arthur KoestlerRomanceLittle Women Louisa May AlcottEmma by Jane AustenPersuasion by Jane Austen ~ Forbidden romancePride and Prejudice by Jane AustenAgnes Grey by Anne BronteJane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte ~ Forbidden romanceThe Professor by Charlotte BronteVillette by Charlotte BronteWuthering Heights by Emily BronteTess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas HardyLady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. LawrenceA Town Like Alice Nevil ShuteScience FictionThe Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams ~ A comic novelFahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury ~ DystopianLord of the Flies by William Golding ~ Dystopian1984 by George Orwell ~ DystopianAtlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand ~ DystopianTwenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea: WITH The Mysterious Island AND Journey to the Centre of the Earth AND Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules VerneThe Invisible Man by H.G. WellsThe Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. WellsThe Time Machine by H.G. WellsThe War of the Worlds by H.G. WellsThe Chrysalids by John WyndhamThe Day of the Triffids by John WyndhamThe Midwich Cuckoos by John WyndhamShort StoriesStories of Anton Chekhov by Anton ChekhovThe Metamorphosis by Franz KafkaComplete Stories and Poems by Edgar Allen PoePoetryThe Complete Poems by William BlakeThe Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor ColeridgeParadise Lost by John MiltonComplete Poems by Banjo PattersonAriel by Sylvia PlathPlaysThe Plays of Anton Chekhov by Anton ChekhovThe Crucible by Arthur MillerTwelve Angry Men by Reginald RoseThe Complete Works by William ShakespeareComplete Works of Oscar Wilde by Oscar Wilde ~ Includes the novel 'The Picture of Dorian Gray', poems, and essaysNON-FICTIONMy Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell ~ A comic autobiographyOthersBrideshead Revisited by Evelyn WaughBleak House by Charles DickensAnimal Farm by George OrwellDr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis StevensonCat’s Cradle by Kurt VonnegutThe Fall by Albert CamusAnna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy