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”