Happy almost-Halloween, class!
Let me be honest with you. I’m only 23 years old. 23 years is not enough time to read all of the best books ever written, no matter what the other 23-year-olds tell you. I’ve read a lot of ’em, but my Want-To-Read List is longer than my Already-Read List.
All of those posts I’ve made about books that are missing from the list are my way of filling in the gaps of the list itself; but then there are those amazing books that I haven’t read yet. You’ve probably heard of them too—they pop up on lists and blog posts, or in English classes for all ages. You may have even read some of them yourself, but I’ve never gotten around to them.
So below is a list of the literary greats I’ve heard about. Some were recommended to me by friends or teachers (or both), and others have been praised by critics for decades. Some are centuries old, and others barely a decade young. It’s a rather arbitrarily made list, but they’re all books I’ll be excited to finish one day.
If you’ve read any of them, feel free to tell me why you think they’re great! And if I need to add to my list, tell me what I’m missing. If your recommendations are flowing, I may begin reading something new sooner rather than later.
- American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
- And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
- Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
- Atonement by Ian McEwan
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- Blindness by José Saramago
- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
- Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
- A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
- Dracula by Bram Stoker
- Emma by Jane Austen
- Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
- The Help by Kathryn Stockett
- The Hours by Michael Cunningham
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
- The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
- The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Floubert
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- Midnight’s Children by Salmon Rushdie
- Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
- The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
- Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
- The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brian
- The Time Quintet by Madeleine L’Engle
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Watership Down by Richard Adams
- We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
- Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
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