The 100 Books You Must Read Before You Start Reading NYTimes Bestsellers In A State Of Vague, Dismal Distraction
THE RELIGIOUS BOOKS
The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James
The Bible (King James Edition), by people pretending to be God
The Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu (trans. Stephen Mitchell)
The Selected Poems of Rumi
The Analects, Confucius (trans. Simon Leys)
The Bhagavad-Gita (trans. Stephen Mitchell)
Essays (complete), Ralph Waldo Emerson
Mount Analogue, Rene Daumal
Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse
In Praise of Folly, Desiderius Erasmus
THE BIG, OLD NOVELS
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
The Ambassadors, Henry James
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
The Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy
MODERN GENRE NOVELS
The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
1984, George Orwell
THE MODERN NOVEL
The Sportswriter, Richard Ford
Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
Arcadia, Lauren Groff
Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
The Ask, Sam Lipsyte
The Counterlife, Philip Roth
Written on the Body, Jeannette Winterson
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
Possession, A. S. Byatt
Freedom, Jonathan Franzen
PLAYS
Plays (complete), Oscar Wilde
Plays (complete), William Shakespeare
Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry
No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O’Neill
A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams
Our Town, Thornton Wilder
The Threepenny Opera, Bertolt Brecht
POEMS
The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
Selected Poems, Alfred Lord Tennyson
Selected Poems, T. S. Eliot
Complete Poems, Pablo Neruda
Complete Works, Edgar Allen Poe
Complete Poems, Sylvia Plath
Complete Poems, Emily Dickinson
Complete Poems, Langston Hughes
Selected Poems, John Donne
Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
SELECTED NONFICTION
Complete Essays, Michel de Montaigne
Biophilia, E. O. Wilson
The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene
Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud
Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams
The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch
Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
Selected Writings and Speeches, Martin Luther King, Jr.
Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan
SHORT STORIES
Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
Complete Short Stories, Ernest Hemingway
Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson
Complete Short Stories, Flannery O’Connor
Self-Help, Lorrie Moore
Selected Short Fiction, Leo Tolstoy
Complete Short Fiction, Giovanni Verga
Complete Short Fiction, Anton Chekhov
Where I’m Calling From: Selected Stories, Raymond Carver
Selected Stories, O. Henry
PHILOSOPHY
The Complete Works of Plato
Selected Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche
The Foucault Reader
The Kierkegaard Reader
The Hegel Reader
Selected Writings, Immanuel Kant
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein
Illuminations, Walter Benjamin
Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno
Ethics, Baruch Spinoza
MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM
Ulysses, James Joyce
In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
Underworld, Don DeLillo