The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

Via Audiobooks

Summer is still at its prime, and you must be ruminating all the things you never had the chance or time to do. One of those things is being immersed in a long book. Sure, you pick up a beach read every summer, which is usually short, but as pleasurable as those are, few things can live up to those long, rich books that you get so invested in, so moved by the thrill and adrenaline that when you’re finished you look up dazed and delirious at the world. We got four great books of those for you! 

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Classics can be intimidating; they can look daunting and promise a boring task. And while that is the case for some classics, it’s absolutely not for the Russian maestro’s eversweeping masterpiece. Anna Karenina is a story that aims and succeeds at capturing life in its 900 pages. It mainly follows the titular character, a sophisticated woman of high society, who abandoned her life, husband, and child for her lover, and lives to suffer the consequences.

My Brilliant Friend/The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante

My Brilliant Friend is the first book in the four-novel series encompassing the Neapolitan Novels. The books that caused such a craze in their readers that the term ‘Ferrante Fever’ was created. You can imagine then, the rich, imaginative, decades-sweeping story this series holds. The story follows Elena and Lila, two close friends from their early childhood to their sixties, and through them tells the story of the city and the country, and the intense nature of friendships as a whole. 

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Arguably the best and most influential Magical Realist novel ever written, One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the most interesting and most demanding novels you’ll ever read. For every ounce of time and effort you put in, you’ll get rewarded ten folds with an incredible reading experience. A multigenerational novel, it follows the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founded the town of Macondo, weaving extreme realism with magic.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

From one of the simplest premises, one of the most complex stories of world literature was created. Moby Dick follows Captain Ahab and his obsession with capturing one specific fish, an obsession so blinding that leads his ship and team to horrific ends. But, the adventure and whale-lore aren’t all there is to this story, Moby Dick dives deep and with no safety net into obsession, faith, love and myths. It’s time well invested.