I've read Lord of the Flies a few times in my life and I always wonder how good I really think the book is. The pacing is occasionally questionable, many characters are sort of arbitrarily there, and the ending is sudden and kind of deflates the tension in a moment. 

But it's one of those books that has an eerie prescience about it. The power of charisma, ideology, giving people what they want instead of what they need. The frailty of civilization, how government exists only as long as the people allow it. How fear, literal shadows in the night, can drive people to wild dismissals of logic and policy. None of these themes are new; they've been present since the first ape took the role of the alpha and others followed them. But that timelessness, how anyone reading this book can see how it relates to the world in their lifetime, is its real power.

Lord of the Flies is a classic not up there with Dickens and Hemingway, but with Plato and Rousseau. It addresses fundamental questions of how humanity functions as a group, and how fragile our status of "more than animals" truly is.