The Green Child

Written by: Herbert Read

First line: The assassination of President Olivero, which took place in the autumn of 1861, was for the world at large one of those innumerable incidents of a violent nature which characterise the politics of the South American continent.

Why you should read this book: I thought it was going to be an anarchist fairy tale, but it's really more of a Marxist parable. Oliver, or Don Olivero, depending on which continent he's on, leaves home, magically becomes the leader of a worker's utopia for twenty-five years, then returns home to learn the fate of the green children, a pair of strange creatures who appeared around the time he embarked on his adventures. Then he helps the surviving thirty-year-old "child" return to her magical crystalline origins under the ground, where he finds true happiness in a strange austerity.

Why you shouldn't read this book: More political posturing than magic.