Challenging Authority

The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan (Hyperion Books for Children, 2010) is the first installment in the middle-grade fantasy adventure Kane Chronicles series and is followed by The Throne of Fire (2011) and The Serpent’s Shadow (2012). The book follows siblings Carter and Sadie Kane on a journey across North America to stop the Egyptian god of chaos from destroying the world. The Red Pyramid won a School Library Journal Best Book Award and was... Read The Red Pyramid Summary

The Reptile Room is a middle-grade novel published by Daniel Handler under the pen name of Lemony Snicket in 1999. It is the second in the 13-book series A Series of Unfortunate Events, which chronicles the lives of the Baudelaire children (Violet, Klaus, and baby Sunny) after the untimely death of their parents. In the first book, a well-intentioned but oblivious man named Mr. Poe places the children under the care of their distant relative... Read The Reptile Room Summary

Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791) is one of the 18th-century’s most influential political treatises. It offers a spirited defense of the ongoing French Revolution and calls for dramatic reforms in Britain. Paine wrote Rights of Man as a direct response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), a conservative critique that professes skepticism and even horror at the course of events in France since the Revolution began in 1789. Rights of... Read The Rights of Man Summary

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The Roar by British novelist Emma Clayton was published in 2008. It is a middle-grade, post-apocalyptic science fiction novel set in the British Isles. Clayton’s world is rife with lies and conspiracies, with mutant children and authoritarianism, but at its core, it’s a story of the bond between siblings and the lengths to which they will go to remain together. The Roar is the first of a two-book series, the second of which, The Whisper... Read The Roar Summary

D. H. Lawrence published “The Rocking Horse Winner” in 1926, just four years before his death in 1930. He had written a story, “Glad Ghosts,” for inclusion in Lady Cynthia Asquith’s supernatural fiction anthology Ghost Book. She did not like the story, partly because of the celebration of male sexuality and other erotic undertones. Lawrence wrote “The Rocking Horse Winner” for her instead. Lawrence sets the story in a haunted house, appropriate for a “ghost”... Read The Rocking Horse Winner Summary

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The Secret Agent is a novel by British Polish writer Joseph Conrad, first published in 1907. Set in London in 1886, it portrays Adolf Verloc as the titular secret agent who works for a powerful but unnamed country, likely Russia. The novel has been adapted for film and television under various titles. This guide uses the 2008 Oxford World Classic’s edition of The Secret Agent. Content warning: This text discusses suicide, abuse, and ableism.Plot SummaryAdolf... Read The Secret Agent Summary

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The Selection is the first book in the titular romance trilogy by American author Kiera Cass. First published in 2012, The Selection was pitched as a dystopian interpretation of the hit television show The Bachelor, and as Publisher’s Weekly stated in their review, the Selection is “[a] cross between ‘The Hunger Games’ (minus the blood sport) and ‘The Bachelor’ (minus the blood sport).” In a future set in the land of Illéa (formerly the United... Read The Selection Summary

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The Shock Doctrine (2007) is a critique of neoliberalism by Canadian writer and activist Naomi Klein. Klein analyzes the history of neoliberalism and its relationship with crises to argue that neoliberal economics—as promoted by Milton Friedman and his acolytes—exploit and create crises to impose neoliberal policies on unwilling populations through undemocratic means. In Klein’s view, this happens through the mechanism of “shock therapy,” through which nations take advantage of crisis moments to strategically introduce new... Read The Shock Doctrine Summary