Recommended Reading

A recommended reading list.

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Literature is about the human experience, and hence often brushes with serious themes. Be sure to get a summary of the text before reading if you wish to avoid being shocked.

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21st century

1. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
2. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
3. All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr

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20th century

1. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
2. The Crucible, Arthur Miller
3. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
4. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
8. Animal Farm, George Orwell
9. The Wind in the WIllows, Kenneth Grahame
10. The Quiet American, Graham Greene
11. The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien
12. The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
13. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
14. Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
15. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
16. The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
17. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
18. Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie

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19th century and earlier

1. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde (aesthetic; decadent)
4. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy (Russian)
5. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes (Spanish)
6. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flabert (French)
7. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
8. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
9. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
10. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
11. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky (Russian)
12. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (Russian)
13. The Odyssey, Homer (Ancient Greek)
14. The Aeneid, Virgil (Latin)
15. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
16. Middlemarch, George Eliot
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Measure for Measure, William Shakespeare
19. Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare
20. Paradise Lost, John Milton
21. Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy

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Short story authors

1. Alice Munro (author)
2. Men Without Women, Haruki Murakami (Japanese)
3. Daphne du Maurier

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Poetry + poets

1. The Wasteland, T. S. Eliot
2. The Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot
3. Wordsworth
4. Edgar Allen Poe
5. Alexander Pope
6. Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
7. Robert Frost

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Other notable authors

1. Dante
2. Thomas Aquinas
3. Sylvia Plath
4. James Joyce
5. Franz Kafka
6. Gabriel García Márquez
7. Ernest Hemingway
8. Vladimir Nabokov
9. Marcel Proust
10. Emily Dickinson
11. Albert Camus
12. Sophocles
13. Kurt Vonnegut
14. Joseph Conrad
15. Voltaire
16. J. K. Rowling
17. Dr Seuss
18. Roald Dahl
19. Victor Hugo
20. Anton Chekhov
21. Guy de Maupassant
22. Virginia Woolf
23. Margaret Mitchell

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