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Dostoyevsky’s Idiot illustrates that the opposite of "good" is not "evil" but "well intentioned". "The idiot" wants to do good and fails terribly, and that’s relevant today: Finally, our world has become so complex that nobody can know for sure what’s good and what’s bad for it.

Dante's Divine Comedy is the most important work in Italian literary history and at least parts of it belong to the “Splatter and Blood” genre. Even then, people simply enjoyed reading about how the wicked are punished in the most horrific ways.

Cervantes' novel about the Knight of Sorrowful Countenance is world literature. His "tilting at windmills" is part of the English vocabulary. Even more than 400 years later, this book is still a pleasure to read.

It could be so simple: a man and a woman fall in love, get married and live happily together – not so with Charlotte Brontë. In Jane Eyre she showed how complicated it can be and thus created topoi that have become the standard in romance novels.

No book by Bradbury is as topical as his parable of the decline of written expression. If you don't want to hurt anyone, don't write anything. If you want to make everyone equal, those unwilling to learn are your benchmark, TV is your tool. The Fahrenheit 451 society sees no other solution than to burn all the books.