I asked a similar question over in ~games and am interested to hear how ~books would respond to the same setup.

Here's the task: pretend you're a professor! You have to do the following:

• Choose a focus for your class on literature (with a snazzy title if you like)
• Choose the books that you, as a professor, will have your class dive into in order to convey key concepts
• Explain why each book you chose ties into your overarching exploration

Your class can have any focus, broad or specific: victorian literature, contemporary poetry, Shakespearean themes in non-Shakespearean works -- whatever you want! It can focus on any forms of literature and does not have to be explicitly limited to "books" if you want to look at some outside-of-the-box stuff (I once took a literature class where we read afternoon, a story, for example.)

After choosing your specific focus, choose what will be included on your syllabus as "required reading" and why you've chosen each item.

People like me are why I believe the slippery slope is a fact, not a fallacy...

I'm asking this in the context of a school project mainly because of 2 things:

1: 2 of the questions of the project are about main and secondary characters and their physical and psychological characteristics, so the book is gonna require those unless I'm misinterpreting those questions.

2: The project is for March 12th so something like 1984 with 300+ pages is probably too long. (Although there are probably many technicalities to blur this, like how much text there is in a page and the actual amount of pages I can read in a given time and how much time can I dedicate to reading the damn book.)

I recall when I took biology in high school, we used the well-regarded Biology textbook, written by Campbell. Another example might be Kernighan & Ritchie's The C Programming Language.

My discipline is Electrical Engineering, focused in integrated circuit design. I find that there are often a few competing textbooks, and some of them are stronger in their explanations. Razavi's Design of Analog CMOS Integrated Circuits for example, is considered the best at explaining complex topologies using intuition, rather than complete mathematical rigor.

A book you find many junior electrical engineering students posessing is Sedra & Smith's Microelectronics, which in my honest opinion, is great for explaining operational amplifiers and simple topologies of single transistor amplifiers, but the latter chapters are much better explained (and notated) by a multitude of other authors, Razavi included.

The reason I ask is because I was considering taking a biochemistry course, and they use a hefty looking text that also has a highly descriptive name as other "bibles," simply called Principles of Biochemistry.