I sat in my living room talking with five of our campus’s brightest men; engineers, scholars and mathematicians. The elephant in the room was the tragic fact that not a single one of them knew the name Oscar Wilde.

Depressed and exasperated, I began to pry further. Tennyson? Joyce? Fitzgerald? Nope. Apparently, these titans of our spoken and written language, these captors of our daydreams, have been lost to perpetuity.

Clearly, we have lost touch with classic literature. As much as I would like to berate these young men for not being well read, I know that most students’ lives leave very little time outside their studies to devote to reading.

While trying to become well read, I have often fallen into the trap of the monstrous, tedious, yellow-paged monstrosity that has been long esteemed by dead critics. Novels such as “Moby Dick,” “War and Peace” and “Of Human Bondage” are, while literary wonders, simply quite impractical for the college student who has only a few moments between classes that he or she may use to devote attention to literature.

As a solution to this problem, I would like to present my top choices in classic literature that every college student can read. While many of these works are on the shorter side, they are never short on eloquence, imagination or cultural significance. Without further adieu, and in no particular order, I give you five little books that will take you a long way toward being well-read.

First on the list has to be “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is a truly American story that frames the destructive beauty of the 1920s aristocracy with the timeless elements of unrequited love. If you read this in high school, I highly recommend another reading with more mature and seasoned eyes that may better interpret Gatsby’s dangerous addiction to the driving force of nostalgia.

“Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” by Robert Pirsig, comes in at number two. This classic addresses many of the social changes that shaped our generation as well as some fairly heavy philosophical issues with a conversational style that helps blend them with the plot: the motorcycle trip of a father and son across the U.S.

When every young person grows toward the end of adolescence, they owe it to themselves to read “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” by James Joyce. His distinct writing style blends stream of consciousness with storytelling to bring to life every coming of age pain and insecurity faced in adolescence. His fervent language paints an engrossing picture of a life that, while set nearly a hundred years before our own, lies little divorced from ours today.

“Brave New World,” by Aldous Huxley, is a look into the future wherein humanity is ruled by pleasure, genetics and the intellectual elite. This short novel keenly and poignantly asks difficult questions about the motivations of our culture and the meaning of our passions and freedoms. It sits often overshadowed by “1984,” but I feel its point and purpose are absolutely relevant to our modern lives.

My list is ended by Joseph Conrad’s most famous work, “Heart of Darkness.” This masterpiece of both language and story draw the reader into the least appealing parts of our humanity, and begs us to understand that our capabilities as men may turn us as much to greatness as to evil.

So, if you stand upon the shores of literature and see no clear path through the ocean-fog of generations of genius, try navigating the rocky shore with this list as your map. See where it takes you. I guarantee you will not be disappointed.