Books

These are books that I feel like everyone should read. You can find my recent reviews of books I’ve read here.

I was inspired by a project collecting a community’s “must reads”. But the list is far from complete in part because of my rating system, which often stresses what I view as “importance” over whether or not I like something.

Also I’ve consumed most of these in the past and most of them once. It’s definitely likely that I would not view some of them as essential any more.

Non-Fiction

  • Hannah Arendt: The Human Condition
  • Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism
  • Charles Darwin: On the Origin of Species
  • Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs and Steel
  • Leszek Kolakowski: Main Currents of Marxism
  • John Stuart Mill: On Liberty
  • Friedrich Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil

Short Stories

  • James Baldwin: “Going to Meet the Man”
  • John Barth: “Lost in the Funhouse”
  • Ambrose Bierce: “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”
  • John Cheever: “The Music Teacher”
  • John Cheever: “The Swimmer”
  • Joseph Conrad: “The Secret Sharer”
  • Robert Coover: “The Magic Poker”
  • Stephen Crane: “The Monster”
  • Andre Dubus: “The Doctor”
  • Ralph Ellison: “King of the Bingo Game”
  • William Faulkner: “Barn Burning”
  • William Faulkner: “Turnabout”
  • Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “I Only Came to Use the Phone”
  • Nikolai Gogol: “The Nose”
  • Nikolai Gogol: “The Overcoat”
  • Donald Hall: “Argument and Persuasion”
  • Shirley Jackson: “The Lottery”
  • James Joyce: The Dubliners
  • Franz Kafka: “The New Advocate”
  • Ring Lardner: “Haircut”
  • Vladimir Nabokov: “The Passenger”
  • Joyce Carol Oates: “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
  • Joyce Carol Oates: “Shopping”
  • Flannery O’Connor: “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
  • Flannery O’Connor: “The Displaced Person”
  • Flannery O’Connor: “Good Country People”
  • Flannery O’Connor: “Greenleaf”
  • Flannery O’Connor: “A View from the Woods”
  • Edgar Allan Poe: “The Fall of the House of Usher”
  • Edgar Allan Poe: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
  • Edgar Allan Poe: “Never Bet the Devil Your Head”
  • Edgar Allan Poe: “The Pit and the Pendulum”
  • Jonathan Swift: “A Modest Proposal”
  • Luisa Valenzuela: “The Verb to Kill”
  • Edith Wharton: “Roman Holiday”

Novels

  • Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart
  • Aeschylus: The Persians
  • Albert Camus: The Plague
  • Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Karamazov Brothers
  • William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying
  • Timothy Findley: Headliner
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
  • Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Love in the Time of Cholera
  • William Golding: The Lord of the Flies
  • Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory
  • Graham Greene: The Quiet American
  • Joseph Heller: Catch-22
  • Aldous Huxley: Ape and Essence
  • Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis
  • Corma McCarthy: Blood Meridian
  • George Orwell: Animal Farm
  • George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four
  • Walker Percy: The Moviegoer
  • Thomas Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49
  • Thomas Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow
  • Philip Roth: American Pastoral
  • Laurence Sterne: The Life and and Opinions of Tristam Shandy
  • Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  • Kurt Vonnegut: Mother Night
  • Kurt Vonnegut: Cat’s Cradle
  • Robert Penn Warren: All the King’s Men
  • Nathaniel West: Miss Lonelyhearts
  • Nathaniel West: The Day of the Locusts

Plays

  • Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot
  • Anton Chekov: The Cherry Orchard
  • Goethe: Faust
  • Eugene O’Neill: The Iceman Cometh
  • William Shakespeare
  • Sophocles: Antigone
  • Sophocles: Oedipus Rex
  • Sophocles: Electra
  • Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus
  • Peter Weiss: The Persecution and Assassination of Jean Paul Marat as performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade

Poetry

  • TS Eliot: The Waste Land
  • Edgar Allan Poe: “The Raven”
  • Edgar Allan Poe: “Ulalume”