If you've been following me for a while then you know I'm a BIG reader. People always ask me, "What are some of your favorites?" and for whatever reason I clam up and can't think of a single book I've ever read. Years and years ago I put together this list of books (mostly of classic literature) that I determined to read in my lifetime because I thought (and still do think!) that in order to be a good writer it's important to be a good reader. And here we are! I've gotten through a good portion of my list and even added some books along the way. The titles highlighted in blue are the books I have read and the books I have highlighted in purple are my all time favorites. I thought I might share this list with you to encourage more reading. Sometimes, you just need a good couple of recommendations from a trusted source. I know that the classics can be intimidating... but they can also be fun and relevant, too! I also know that this is a long list... something for everyone! Happy reading y'all.
Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
Cervantes - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To The Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Vergil - The Aeneid
Aesop - Aesop's Fables
Wharton, Edith - The Age of Innocence
Anne Brontë - Agnes Grey
Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
Henry James - The Ambassadors
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
The Arabian Nights
Sun Tzu - The Art of War
James Weldon Johnson - The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Other Writings
Kate Chopin - The Awakening and Selected Short Fiction
Anthony Trollope - Barchester Towers
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and Damned
Herman Melville - Billy Budd and The Piazza Tales
Charles Dickens - Bleak House
Henry James - The Bostonians
Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
Thomas Bulfinch - Bulfinch's Mythology
Jack London - WhiteFang
Charles Dickens - A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, & The Cricket on the Hearth
The Collected Oscar Wilde
The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
Thomas Paine - Common Sense and Other Writings
Karl Marx - The Communist Manifesto and Other Writings
Arthur Conan Doyle - The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume I
Arthur Conan Doyle - The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume II
St. Augustine of Hippo - The Confessions
Mark Twain - A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo
Henry James - Daisy Miller and Washington Square
George Eliot - Daniel Deronda
Charles Dickens - David Copperfield
Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls
Leo Tolstoy - The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories
James Fenimore Cooper - The Deerslayer
Bram Stoker - Dracula
Emma - Jane Austen
Edith Nesbit - The Enchanted Castle and Five Children and It
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Essays and Poems
Essential Dialogues of Plato
Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
Edith Wharton - Ethan Frome
Hans Christian Andersen - Fairy Tales
Thomas Hardy - Far From the Madding Crowd
A. E. W. Mason - The Four Feathers
Zola - Germinal
Charles Dickens - Great Expectations
Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm - Grimm's Fairy Tales
Charles Dickens - Hard Times
Fyodor Dostoevsky - The House of the Dead and Poor Folk
Nathaniel Hawthorne - The House of the Seven Gables
E. M. Forster - Howards End
Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Idiot
Oscar Wilde - The Importance of Being Earnest and Four Other Plays
Harriet Jacobs - Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Dante Alighieri - The Inferno
Sigmund Freud - The Interpretation of Dreams
Walter Scott - Ivanhoe
Jules Verne - Journey to the Center of the Earth
Thomas Hardy - Jude the Obscure
Upton Sinclair - The Jungle
Rudyard Kipling - The Jungle Books
Rudyard Kipling - Kim
H. Rider Haggard - King Solomon's Mines
D. H. Lawrence - Lady Chatterley's Lover
Washington Irving - The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos - Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Victor Hugo - Les Misérables
Louisa May Alcott - Little Women
Joseph Conrad - Lord Jim
Honoré de Balzac - Lost Illusions
Booth Tarkington - The Magnificent Ambersons
Sinclair Lewis - Main Street
George Bernard Shaw - Man and Superman and Three Other Plays
Alexandre Dumas - The Man in the Iron Mask
Jane Austen - Mansfield Park
Thomas Hardy - The Mayor of Casterbridge
Ovid - Metamorphoses
George Eliot - Middlemarch
Daniel Defoe - Moll Flanders
Wilkie Collins - The Moonstone
Willa Cather - My Ántonia
Frederick Douglass - My Bondage and My Freedom
Charles Dickens - Nicholas Nickleby
Virginia Woolf - Night and Day
Jane Austen - Northanger Abbey
Joseph Conrad -Nostromo
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Notes from Underground, The Double and Other Stories
O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
W. Somerset Maugham - Of Human Bondage
Charles Dickens - Oliver Twist
John Milton - Paradise Lost
Dante Alighieri - Paradiso
Jane Austen - Persuasion
J. M. Barrie - Peter Pan
Gaston Leroux - The Phantom of the Opera
John Bunyan - The Pilgrim's Progress
James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Possessed
Niccolò Machiavelli - The Prince and Other Writings
Mark Twain - The Prince and the Pauper
Mark Twain - Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins
Dante Alighieri - Purgatorio
Stendhal - The Red and the Black
Plato - Republic
Thomas Hardy - The Return of the Native
William D. Howells - The Rise of Silas Lapham
E. M. Forster - A Room with a View
Joshua Slocum - Sailing Alone Around the World
Baroness Emmuska Orczy - The Scarlet Pimpernel
Joseph Conrad - The Secret Agent
Frances Hodgson Burnett - The Secret Garden
Jane Austen - Sense and Sensibility
Gustave Flaubert- A Sentimental Education
Hermann Hesse - Siddhartha
George Eliot - Silas Marner and Two Short Stories
Theodore Dreiser - Sister Carrie
D. H. Lawrence - Sons and Lovers
W. E. B. Du Bois - The Souls of Black Folk
Robert Louis Stevenson - The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories
Lao Tzu - Tao Te Ching
Edgar Rice Burroughs - Tarzan of the Apes
F. Scott Fitzgerald - This Side of Paradise
Gertrude Stein - Three Lives
Friedrich Nietzsche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra
H. G. Wells - The Time Machine and The Invisible Man
Henry James - The Aspern Papers, and Two Stories
Jules Verne - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Richard Henry Dana - Two Years Before the Mast
Thomas More - Utopia
William Makepeace Thackeray - Vanity Fair
William James - The Varieties of Religious Experience
Charlotte Brontë - Villette
Owen Wister - The Virginian
Virginia Woolf - The Voyage Out
Henry David Thoreau - Walden and Civil Disobedience
H. G. Wells - The War of the Worlds
Anton Chekhov- Ward No. 6 and Other Stories
T. S. Eliot - The Waste Land and Other Poems
Anthony Trollope - The Way We Live Now
Kenneth Grahame - The Wind in the Willows
Henry James - The Wings of the Dove
Elizabeth Gaskell - Wives and Daughters
Wilkie Collins - The Woman in White
D. H. Lawrence - Women in Love
L. Frank Baum - The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Wally Lamb- She's Come Undone
John Steinbeck - East of Eden
James Fray - A Million Little Pieces
Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love in the Time of Cholera
George Orwell - 1984
Bill Buford - Heat
Ken Kesey - One Flew Over The Koo Koos Nest
Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff
Tom Wolfe - A Man in Full
John Hersey - Hiroshima
Norman Maclean - A River Runs ThroughI It
Lillian Ross - A Portrait of Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway - For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea
John Knowles - A Separate Peace
John Steinbeck - Travels with Charlie
Tim O'Brien - The Things They Carried
Wally Lamb - The Hour I First Believed
Bill Bryson - A Lost Continent
Bill Bryson - A Walk in the Woods
Bill Bryson - Notes From a Small Island
Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson - The Road to Little Dribbling
Bill Bryson - The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
Bill Bryson - The Body
Bill Bryson - I'm a Stranger Here Myself
Bill Bryson - Neither Here Nor There
Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead
John Steinbeck - Tortilla Flat
Shirley Jackson - The Lottery
Jacques Pepin - My Life in France
Truman Capote - In Cold Blood
Gay Talese - Thy Neighbor's Wife
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