The books you ought to be reading now.

The New Year is still a while off yet, but it’s never too soon to start working on a bit of pre-resolution betterment. No offence intended: we’re sure you are already exceptionally charming, polite and well-rounded – otherwise, what on earth would you be doing on MR PORTER? Still, we hold to the notion that there’s always room for improvement, and so we’ve compiled a five-strong selection of books that we hope will not just entertain you, but, in our opinion, teach you something important both about yourself and this increasingly tricky world of ours. Scroll down for some literary lessons of the very best kind.

Oryx And Crake is a cautionary Milton-esque parable set in a not-too-far off future, where the world has ended as we know it, humanity has all been but wiped out, and a new race called the “Crakers” has been created. Through the eyes of our human protagonist Jimmy and his flashbacks, we see how it all happened, and the parallels this fall draws with our own world are uncomfortably (and intentionally) familiar. Stream-able suicides, out-of-control god complexes, and gene-spliced pigs with human brains are just a taster of the dystopia that Ms Margaret Atwood crafts, and are a product of extensive scientific research that the author undertook while writing the book. What is particularly pertinent is how Oryx And Crake exposes our reliance on electricity and technology, and raises the question of what we would do if a natural (or artificial) disaster took it away. A good remedy for all iPhone addictions, from nascent to crippling.

“I realise, when I care to think about it, that all my hobbies are pornographic in tendency. The element of lone gratification is bluntly stressed: fast food, sex shows, space games, slot machines, video nasties, nude mags, drink, pubs, fighting, television, hand jobs.” A prolific consumer of anything he can get his clammy paws on, the love-to-hate figure at the centre of Money is John Self, a hedonistic and slobby ad-man who splits his time between London and New York while working on his very first feature film. Certainly not a character to aspire to (but perhaps a character to learn from), Self is simultaneously self-assured and self-loathing, and is forever getting into fights with men and objectifying women, all the while spending too much money. What Money will teach you is that while money can indeed buy lots of things, most of those things will probably be bad for you.

Try as we might, it’s near impossible to predict the avenues our life will travel down, and as such, it’s crucial to adapt. Mr Charles Dickens’ classic Victorian Bildungsroman is a lesson in this. The story of its eponymous protagonist’s abusive upbringing and challenging adulthood contains a whole world that spans decades, full of the affections and tragedies that many of us will be familiar with, plus a wealth of themes that are surprisingly and perhaps worryingly relevant today. The book’s six-hundred-plus pages may have something to do with it, but we see David grow from a boy into a man and follow him from home, where his widowed mother marries the contemptable Mr Murdstone, to when he is packed off to boarding school, right through to his own marriages. Touching on everything from class inequality to domestic violence, David Copperfield is a crash course in living through adversity.

Though it’s almost four decades since Ms Angela Carter published this book of reworked fairy tales, its conceit of reimagining the cliché-filled genre from a female, feminist perspective feels particularly timely in the context of the current news cycle. What would happen, asks Ms Carter, if women were given agency in these well-known narratives? One example is Ms Carter’s take on Bluebeard, in which a young Parisian pianist is rescued from her sadistic Marquis husband not by other men (as in the original), but by her mother; or “The Tiger Bride”, an inversion of Beauty And The Beast in which a woman transforms into an animal to suit her lover, rather than the other way around. The most famous of the tales, though, is “The Company Of Wolves” (Ms Carter’s sado-masochistic take on Little Red Riding Hood), which repaints our crimson-cloaked character as a powerful figure who, unafraid of the big bad wolf, laughs at his threats and seduces him instead. The Bloody Chamber is often misunderstood as a collection of “adult versions of fairy tales”, but the stories are better taken as new tales that extract and expose the latent darkness and misogyny from stories that are arguably seen as the building blocks of our literary culture. In other words, Ms Carter’s stories, as well as being full of sex, death, violence and magic, are also rather enlightening.

The title of Mr JM Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning Disgrace is self-explanatory. The protagonist of the book is David Lurie, a fiftysomething academic and university lecturer who has trouble controlling his carnal impulses, and as such, ends up disgraced. Like Money’s John Self, Disgrace’s Lurie is a flawed male character that exists as both perpetrator and victim. After being rightly accused of sexual misconduct with one of the students from his romantic poetry seminar, Lurie is dismissed from his position, and leaves town to stay with his daughter on her farm to do some soul-searching, but a litany of punishing circumstances ensue. Set in post-Apartheid South Africa, the book’s many themes include ageing masculinity, animal rights, race, and shows us that justice doesn’t necessarily bring peace. What’s most important about the novel, though, is that the questions it raises about harassment and the abuse of power are more pressing at the moment than they were when Disgrace was published almost two decades ago. Considering the snowballing allegations of sexual assault that are currently tearing through Hollywood (and the ensuing disgrace of the perpetrators), this is required reading.