I read The Catcher in the Rye a few years ago for school, and it remains my favourite school reading book of all time. Although considered a classic, it's really easy to read as the language is simple. The story is relatively straightforward, but it can be understood at so many levels - probably depending on the age you are when you read it. The main character is Holden Caulfield, who gets expelled from his posh boarding school and makes his way home to New York - along the way he has various encounters with people and thinks most of them are phonies. The plot is simple, but the reason why The Catcher in the Rye is so popular is because it deals with so many themes relevant to teenagers, such as identity, loss, alienation, depression and rebellion. In my opinion there is really no excuse for not having read it, as it's just so wonderfully quirky and totally accessible - if you liked The Perks of Being a Wallflower then I'd really suggest you read it, as Perks has been described as a modern version of Catcher.

Stop. Stop thinking what you're thinking, because there's a high chance you have totally the wrong impression of this book. Which is fair enough, thanks to society's self-righteous condemnation of Lolita that meant it was banned in the UK when it was published in 1956. It's definitely one of those books which you have to read before passing judgement on it, so forget what you've heard and give it a try. The story is narrated by Humbert Humbert, a literature professor in his late 30s who has an obsession with 12-year-old Dolores Haze, the daughter of the woman whose house he's lodging in. After her mothers death they travel around the US as father and daughter, but someone is following them - and the plot thickens... Now if anyone ever objects to you reading Lolita or having an interest in it, just remind them that 1) it's considered by many to be one of the finest novels written in the 20th century and 2) there is really nothing in it that can be considered erotic - immoral yes, in terms of themes, but it's not nearly as lewd as people like to make out. What I especially love about Lolita is Nabokov's absolutely beautiful prose, and I also fell in love with the picture it paints of America in 1949. I actually did a (fairly amateur) film review of the 1962 film here on my blog a while back, so to see that click here.

Although I said these books would as a rule be easy to read, Nineteen Eighty-Four is possibly the exception to this. I first tried reading it when I was about 11, but gave up after a couple of chapters and since then I have read it a few times. Despite the effort, I do think it's very much worth it, as it really is one of the best-known classics of the 20th century and you can find references to it everywhere. It's probably the bets known of all dystopian novels, which is why I was so keen to read it when I was going through my sci-fi/dystopian fiction phase a few years back. Anyway, the book was written in 1949, and is set in the year 1984 in a country formerly known as Great Britain. The world is one of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and public manipulation, dictated by a totalitarian political system under the control of a privileged Inner Party elite, that persecutes individualism and independent thinking as "thoughtcrimes" - alright so that last bit was from Wikipedia but I haven't read it in a while! What I actually love most about 1984 is the invented language they have going on, called Newspeak - the aim is basically to reduce the English language's vocabulary, for example by negating words instead of using a totally different word to express the opposite of something. I found that utterly fascinating, which is probably why it's stuck in my mind so much! I'd really recommend 1984, for its status as such an iconic 20th novel as much as anything else.