What is your favorite classic novel?

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

30. Uncle Tom's Cabin.

I read it some time back when Talk of the Nation on NPR had a Book Club on the Air. One time they made Uncle Tom's Cabin the choice, and so I decided to read it, figuring it was about time. I assumed that it would be a slog, like any book assigned in high school Let me tell you, the first fifty pages were a bit slow, and after that it picked up and I simply could not put it down.

Early on there is a scene where a woman is asked to get clothes for some one, and this

And oh! mother that reads this, has there never been in your house a drawer, or a closet, the opening of which has been to you like the opening again of a little grave? Ah! happy mother that you are, if it has not been so.

just broke my heart. No, I don't have a drawer or closet like that, but what is so striking about that passage is that when Stowe wrote it, the loss of a child was universal.

Plus, later on, when one of the slaves is sold South, and you learn about what happens to him (I've really forgotten all the details) it reads like a description of the death camps during the Holocaust.