200 Books Everyone Should Read

To be honest, I hate lists like this because you are bound to miss something and likely in its place is clearly the opinion of the author;  otherwise it wouldn’t or better yet shouldn’t find itself on this list. Additionally, who the hell am I to dictate which books are better than others, when to be quite frank I haven’t read half of these? Truth be told, I searched around and tried to create a well rounded list of books I want to read or have read and feel they are valuable pieces of literature. I’m on a personal quest to become a veracious reader, because I always feel as if I miss out on references to great literary works and I am in awe at those who effortlessly can string together aspects of culture, life and education beyond what the average graduate can do on their own.

There is value in reading, which I’m sad to say more often than not finds itself in the dislike category. Reading, writing and arithmetic are often the most detestable and loathed of all subjects yet hold such great value later in life that most people don’t appreciate them till they reach an age where excusing your quest for knowledge is admissible because you, “haven’t got the time.”

We’ve shown you What the Authors are Reading along with its Part II and a Summer Reading list to keep you on your toes, with your wit as sharp as ever. This alone shows the variety in great works of literature out there for you. Sure, you probably had to read some of these and some may have made no sense to you when you were 14 sitting in your freshman English class but taking a second, or in some cases first, look at these books will help open your eyes to whole side of the world you never knew about before. Movie and TV references will all of a sudden click and you can become one of “those people” that say, “The book was better.”

I listen to all the classics for free through Librivox podcasts, and if you have an e-reader you can download many of these for free, mainly the classics. Otherwise check out your local library, it really doesn’t matter where or how just as long as you are reading, growing, learning.

So, how many have you read?

1. 1984 – George Orwell
2. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea- Jules Verne
3. 2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur Clark
4. A Christmas Carol -Charles Dickens
5. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
6. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court – Mark Twain
7. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
8. A Moveable Feast  – Ernest Hemingway
9. An Incomplete Education: 3,684 Things You Should Have Learned but Probably Didn’t -Judy Jones & William Wilson
10. A Midsummer Night’s Dream -William Shakespeare
11. Around the World in Eighty Days- Jules Verne
12. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
13. A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys -Nathaniel Hawthorne
14. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland -Lewis Carroll
15. Allan Quatermain – Henry Rider Haggard
16. All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
17. Animal Farm – George Orwell
18. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
19. As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
20. Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
21. Barchester Towers – Anthony Trollope
22. Beloved – Toni Morrison
23. Black Beauty – Anna Sewell
24. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
25. Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West – Cormac McCarthy
26. Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
27. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
28. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee – Dee Brown
29. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
30. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
31. Cyrano de Bergerac – Edmond Rostand
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Dharma Bums – Jack Kerouac
34. Don Quixote of La Mancha – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
35. Dracula – Bram Stoker
36. East of Eden – John Steinbeck
37. Emma – Jane Austen
38. Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
39. Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
40. Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
41. First Edition of the The Boy Scout Handbook
42. Finnegan’s Wake – James Joyce
43. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
44. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
45. Freakonomics – Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
46. Gone with the wind – Margaret Mitchell
47. Go Tell it on the Mountain – James Baldwin
48. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
49. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
50. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies – Jared Diamond
51. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
52. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
53. Herzog – Saul Bellow
54. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
55. How To Win Friends and Influence People – Dale Carnegie
56. I, Claudius – Robert Graves
57. Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
58. Into the wild – Jon Krakauer
59. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
60. Journey to the Center of the Earth – Jules Verne
61. Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson
62. Kim – Rudyard Kipling
63. King Lear – William Shakespeare
64. King Solomon’s Mines – Henry Rider Haggard
65. Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
66. Lies My Teacher Told Me – James Loewen
67. Little Lord Fauntleroy – Frances Hodgson Burnett
68. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
69. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
70. Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
71. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
72. Lorna Doone – R. D. Blackmore
73. MacBeth – William Shakespeare
74. Mein Kampf – Adolf Hitler
75. Middlemarch – George Eliot
76. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
77. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
78. Nicholas Nickleby – Charles Dickens
79. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
80. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
81. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
82. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
83. One Thousand and One Nights – Anon
84. Othello, The Moore of Venice – William Shakespeare
85. Paradise Lost – John Milton
86. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
87. Rain of Gold – Víctor E. Villaseñor
88. Reflections from Captivity – Ho Chi Minh
89. Rights of Man – Thomas Paine
90. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
91. Romeo and Juliet – William Shakespeare
92. Roots: The Saga of an American Family – Alex Haley
93. Rules for Radicals -Saul Alinsky
94. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
95. Siddhartha – Hermann Hesse
96. Silas Marner – George Eliot
97. Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
98. Steppenwolf – Herman Hesse
99. Swiss Family Robinson – Johann David Wyss
100. Tales of Mystery and Imagination – Edgar Allan Poe
101. Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys – Nathaniel Hawthorne
102. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
103. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen Covey
104. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
105. The Adventures of Pinocchio – Carlo Collodi
106. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Arthur Conan Doyle
107. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain
108. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
109. The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
110. The Art of War – Sun Tzu
111. The Aspern Papers – Henry James
112. The Autobiography of Malcolm X – Malcom X
113. The Awakening – Kate Chopin
114. The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry – Christine De Pizan
115. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
116. The Call of the Wild – Jack London
117. The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
118. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
119. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
120. The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx
121. The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
122. The Day of the Locust – Nathanael West
123. The Deerslayer – James Fenimore Cooper
124. The Diary of Anne Frank – Anne Frank
125. The Diary of a Nobody – George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
126. The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
127. The Four Million – O. Henry
128. The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
129. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
130. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
131. The Happy Prince and Other Stories – Oscar Wilde
132. The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle
133. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame – Victor Hugo
134. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
135. The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde
136. The Jungle Book – Rudyard Kipling
137. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
138. The Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
139. The Man in the Iron Mask – Alexandre Dumas
140. The Man Who Was Thursday – G.K. Chesterton
141. The Man Who Would Be King – Rudyard Kipling
142. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
143. The Millionaire Next Door – Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko
144. The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
145. The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey – Ernesto Che Guevara
146. The Napoleon of Notting Hill – G.K. Chesterton
147. The Odyssey – Homer
148. The Origin of Species – Charles Darwin
149. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
150. The Phantom of the Opera – Gaston Leroux
151. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
152. The Prince – Niccolò Machiavelli
153. The Princess and Curdie – George MacDonald
154. The Princess and the Goblin – George MacDonald
155. The Prince and the Pauper – Mark Twain
156. The Prisoner of Zenda – Anthony Hope
157. The Quiet American – Graham Greene
158. The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
159. The Republic – Plato
160. The Rough Riders – Theodore Roosevelt
161. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
162. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
163. The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon – Washington Irving
164. The Social Contract – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
165. The Story of My Experiments with Truth- Ghandi
166. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
167. The Sun Also Rises – Earnest Hemmingway
168. The Tale of Genji – Lady Murasaki
169. The Taming of the Shrew – William Shakespeare
170. The Tao of Pooh – Benjamin Hoff
171. The Tempest – William Shakespeare
172. The Thin Red Line – James Jones
173. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
174. The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
175. The Tin Drum – Gunter Grass
176. The Trial – Franz Kafka
177. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
178. The Wealth of Nations – Adam Smith
179. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Graham
180. The Wisdom of the Desert – Thomas Merton
181. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
182. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – L. Frank Baum
183. The Young Man’s Guide – William Alcott
184. Through the Looking-Glass – Lewis Carroll
185. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
186. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
187. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
188. Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
189. Ulysses – James Joyce
190. Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe
191. Utopia – Thomas More
192. V. – Thomas Pynchon
193. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
194. Walden – Henry David Thoreau
195. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
196. Waverley – Sir Walter Scott
197. White Fang – Jack London
198. Winesburg, Ohio – Sherwood Anderson
199. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
200. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert Pirsig

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