Answers to Frequently Asked Questions
I don't have that much time. Just tell me: what are the books I must read?
I realize when people ask for book suggestions they aren't necessarily asking for a lifetime reading project. They are really asking what handful of books—usually novels and mostly modern—they have to read to be considered moderately well-read.
Again, there's no single answer. But I'll go out on a limb with a medium-length list of accessible (not too long or overly complex) works that might give you a feel for the breadth of literature, in rough order of publication:
- The Odyssey by Homer
- Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
- Hamlet by William Shakespeare
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevski
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- The World According to Garp by John Irving
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
I'm sure other readers would have dozens more they think should go on this list and I can already think of more to add myself. No Thomas Mann? James Joyce? D.H. Lawrence? Victor Hugo? Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler? Ian McEwan? Margaret Atwood? They should all be on the list for at least a book or two, along with many others. But it's a start.
In the meantime be comforted in the thought that, despite those urgently titled lists found elsewhere, there are no books you must read before you die. No one piece of literature is going to open up the entire world to you. No book or set of books is going to reveal the conclusive meaning of life or make your life worth living.
But everything you read—every great piece of work you engage in—offers an opportunity to get a little closer to grasping the larger picture.
