The Metamorphosis

Wow, I mean... how did someone even come up with this concept? And then somehow write it such that it was legit sad by the end.

There's really nothing much to summarise with the plot: Gregor Samsa wakes up one day somehow transformed into some kind of venomous bug or beetle. This book is about how this altered state of things affect his own mentality, as well as how his family copes with it.

The book starts off being absurd and comical at the beginning, but in the second and third parts of the book, when the Samsa family has to rally around the beetle-that-used-to-be-Gregor, that's when you get some amazing moments.

Take when his mother, Mrs. Samsa, is thinking about leaving his room furnished as it always was so that “when Gregor returns to us, he finds everything unchanged and can forget the intervening time all the more easily”, despite the fact that as a beetle he would have actually preferred having an emptier room to scurry around in. Or when his family try to feed him, but giving him human food which he could not appreciate.

The end result is a deeply thought-provoking work that can be read as an allegory for so many things.