The Epic of Gilgamesh (Unknown author) (18th – 17th century BCE) The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer (850–750 BCE, 8th century BCE) “The Oresteia” by Aeschylus (458 BCE) Oedipus the King by Sophocles (430 BCE) Medea by Euripides (431 BCE) Aeneid by Virgil (29–19 BCE) One Thousand and One Nights (Unknown author) (700–1500) Beowulf (Unknown author) (975-1025) The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (11th century) The Divine Comedy by Dante (1265–1321) The Decameron by Boccaccio (1349–53) The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer (14th century) “The Mahabharata” by Vyasa
Don Quixote by Cervantes 1605 (part 1), 1615 (part 2) “Taming of the Shrew,” Romeo and Juliet, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “The Merchant of Venice,” “Much Ado About Nothing,” “As You Like It,” “Julius Caesar,” Hamlet, “Othello,” “King Lear,” and “Macbeth” by William Shakespeare (1593, 1594, 1595, 1596, 1598, 1599, 1599, 1600, 1604, 1605, 1605) Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813) Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1832) Le Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac (1835) Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol (1842) Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847) Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851) Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1856) Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1861) War and Peace and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1869, 1877) Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899) Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866, 1880) Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871)
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1913–27) Ulysses by James Joyce (1922) The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925) The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925) Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1925, 1927) The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929) The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942) The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943) Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949) The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (1951) Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952) The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1926, 1952) “The Lord of The Rings” by J. R. R. Tolkien (1954, 1955) Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955) Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo (1955) Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958) Rabbit, Run by John Updike (1960) To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960) The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962) The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963) One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967) Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981) The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1984) Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987) The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (1997) American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1997) The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy (1997) Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee (1999) White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000) Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay by Michael Chabon (2001) Everything is Illuminated by Johnathan Safran Foer (2002) Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (2003) The Known World by Edward P. Jones (2003) Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (2004) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (2007) 2666 by Roberto Bolaño (2008) Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (2011)
Classic short story masters (1600-1950): Edgar Allan Poe, Anton Chekhov, Ernest Hemingway, Jorge Luis Borges, Kafka, Isaac Babel, John Updike, Katherine Mansfield, Eudora Welty, and Ray Bradbury. Contemporary short story masters: (1950-Present): Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Donald Barthelme, Tim ‘O Brien, George Saunders, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Diaz, Z. Z. Packer, Joyce Carol Oates, and Denis Johnson. Classic Short Story Collections: In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (1925) A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor (1953) What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver (1981) Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson (1992) Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (1999)
Everything by Shakespeare, including Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Much Ado About Nothing (1606, 1597, 1599) Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen (1890, 1879) The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde (1895) Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmund Rostand (1897) The Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vanya by Chekhov (1904, 1897) Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw (1912) Our Town by Thornton Wilder (1938) Death of a Salesman and The Crucible by Arthur Miller (1949, 1953) Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1949) Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose (1954) A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams (1947, 1944, 1955) No Exit by John-Paul Sartre (1944) Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence (1955) Long Day’s Journey into Night and The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O’Neill (1956, 1946) A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (1959) Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee (1963) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard (1966) Betrayal by Harold Pinter (1978)
Shakespeare’s Sonnets by William Shakespeare (1609) Paradise Lost by John Milton (1667) The Complete Poems by John Keats (1815) Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1855) The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes The Poetry of Robert Frost by Robert Frost The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson The Waste Land and Other Poems by T. S. Eliot (1922) Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda (1924) E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1904 -1962 by E. E. Cummings Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg (1956) Ariel by Sylvia Plath (1965) The Complete Poems, 1927 - 1979 by Elizabeth Bishop Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966 - 1996 by Seamus Heaney
History Politics Magazines Memoirs Biographies The news
“The Wheel of Time” series by Robert Jordan The Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling Any novel by Nicholas Sparks Any novel by John Grisham The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe Fear of Flying by Erica Jong Books by Bernard Cornwell The “A Song of Ice and Fire” series by George R. R. Martin The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers Freakonomics by Steven Levitt Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert Outliers and The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell The Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series by Stieg Larsson
Setting goals will also keep you from wasting your time in less productive endeavors. Let’s say you’ve aimed to finish Ulysses by the weekend but there’s a marathon of Bad Girls Club on. Bye bye bad girls, hello culture.
The Modern Library Top 100 Modern Books list. [1] X Research source Time Magazine’s Best Book of All Time list. [2] X Research source The Guardian’s Top 100 Books of All Time list. [3] X Research source Read books by Nobel-prize winning authors. Check out the list of authors here:[4] X Research source The Village Voice’s list of best books of the previous decade, by genre. [5] X Research source
Before you buy or rent the book, see if you can listen to a sample to make sure you like the voice of the person who is reading. If you think the person has an annoying voice, the book will feel like a slow read.
When you have a Kindle, you can also sample a chapter of a book before buying it, so you can still browse the books a bit.
In most book clubs, you’ll have a chance to pick a book for the club to read, so you’ll get to share one of your favorite authors with others.
And even if you don’t become a top reader, taking the time to review the books you’ve read will help you think about what you’ve read.
The New Yorker Fiction podcast KCRW’s Bookworm PRI’s Selected Shorts WBEZ Chicago’s This American Life PRI’s America Abroad LearnOutLoud’s Great Speeches in History Podcast New York Times Book Review podcast
