Five books for the pregnant Kate Middleton

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog, Amy Wilkinson tagged five books Kate Middleton should read while waiting to give birth, including:

Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

Besides the fact that Great Expectations is an awful pun for the media furor surrounding the royal baby’s arrival, the book is rich with themes like good versus evil, the rich versus the poor, and love and rejection—all of which the future leader of England should think about.

Read about the other books on the list.

Great Expectations appears on Kate Clanchy's top ten list of novels that reflect the real qualities of adolescence, Joseph Olshan's list of six favorite books, John Mullan's lists of ten of the best clocks in literature, ten of the best appropriate deaths in literature, ten of the best castles in literature, ten of the best Hamlets, ten of the best card games in literature, and ten best list of fights in fiction. It also made Tony Parsons' list of the top ten troubled males in fiction, David Nicholls' top ten list of literary tear jerkers, and numbers among Kurt Anderson's five most essential books. The novel is #1 on Melissa Katsoulis' list of "twenty-five films that made it from the book shelf to the box office with credibility intact."

Read an 1861 review of "Great Expectations".

--Marshal Zeringue