Literacy day

I realized I missed International Literacy Day last week, so here I am with my quarantine reading list. I highly recommend every book here, both for reading and for stretching. List and descriptions below.

Fiction pile: 

Novels and Stories, by Shirley Jackson (Looking for an exploration of everyday evil and how we pass it or commit it without even noticing it? Look here.)
*
Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte
*
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Bronte (some awesome protofeminism by the Bronte sisters here)
*
41 Stories by O. Henry
*
The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson (If you've seen the TV adaptations, they were completely unfaithful and missed the point. Read the book.)
*
Strangers on a Train, by Patricia Highsmith
*
Gothic Tales, by Elizabeth Gaskell (Never heard of her? That's because she didn't write how women were supposed to write during the mid 1800s. She even dared to write from a man's perspective. Plus she wrote about an unwed mother. Jane Austen she is not.)
*
Einstein's Dreams: A Novel, by Alan Lightman (It will color how you see time forevermore.)

Nonfiction pile:

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal (Spoiler alert: we usually are not.)
*
The Ape and The Sushi Master, by Frans de Waal
*
American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant, by Ronald C. White (Travel through time—seriously, this book transports you and brings the man and his time to life better than any movie)
*
The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins, by Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell (Humans are far from the only animals with cultural lives.)