A bit about: This list began as a personal project – Amanda Patchin chose 200 works from Everyman’s Library, and set out to read them all in one year (with a newborn, a toddler, and a small business). These are the books. For liability, we do not require you to read them in one year. You’re welcome.
Why it’s important: Two hundred books of literature – spanning major genres – covers a lot of ground. Reading the books in this list gives you a strong foundation in literature. You may find unexpected treasures; you may also find a few foes. But love them or hate them, they are sure to expand your mind.
Download reading list: 200 Books
Fiction
1984 – Orwell, George
A Handful of Dust – Waugh, Evelyn
A House for Mr. Biswas – Naipaul, V.S.
A Passage to India – Forster, E. M.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – Joyce, James
A Tale of Two Cities – Dickens, Charles
Animal Farm – Orwell, George
Anna Karenina – Tolstoy, Leo
Beloved – Morrison, Toni
Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold – Waugh, Evelyn
Brideshead Revisited – Waugh, Evelyn
Canterbury Tales – Chaucer
Carried Away – Munro, Alice
Catch-22 – Heller, Joseph
Collected Stories – Chandler, Raymond
Collected Stories – Dahl, Roald
Collected Stories – Kafka, Franz
Collected Stories – Maugham, W. Somerset
Crime and Punishment – Dostoevsky, Fyodor
David Copperfield - Dickens, Charles
Doctor Zhivago - Pasternak, Boris
Dubliners – Joyce, James
Great Expectations – Dickens, Charles
Heart of Darkness – Conrad, Joseph
Jane Eyre – Bronte, Charlotte
Joseph and His Brothers – Mann, Thomas
Lolita – Nabokov, Vladimir
Love in the Time of Cholera - Garcia Marquez, Gabriel
Madame Bovary - Flaubert, Gustave
Midnight’s Children – Rushdie, Salman
Moby Dick – Melville, Herman
Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unameable: A Trilogy – Beckett, Samuel
Mr. Sampath – The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma – Narayan, R.K.
Mrs. Dalloway – Woolf, Virginia
My Antonia – Cather, Willa
Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring – Fitzgerald, Penelope
Oliver Twist – Dickens, Charles
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Solzhenitsyn, Alexander
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Garcia Marquez, Gabriel
Pale Fire – Nabokov, Vladimir
Persuasion – Austen, Jane
Pnin – Nabokov, Vladimir
Pride and Prejudice – Austen, Jane
Rabbit Angstrom – Updike, John
Sense and Sensibility – Austen, Jane
Song of Solomon – Morrison, Toni
Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher – Narayan, R.K.
The Big Sleep; Farewell my Lovely; The High Window – Chandler, Raymond
The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower – Fitzgerald, Penelope
The Border Trilogy – McCarthy, Cormac
The Brothers Karamazov – Dostoevsky, Fyodor
The Castle – Kafka, Franz
The Complete Henry Bech – Updike, John
The Complete Short Novels – Chekhov, Anton
The Complete Short Stories – Waugh, Evelyn
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis – Bassani, Giorgio
The General in His Labyrinth – Garcia Marquez, Gabriel
The Handmaid’s Tale – Atwood, Margaret
The House of the Spirits – Allende, Isabel
The Human Factor – Greene, Graham
The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback – Chandler, Raymond
The Magic Mountain – Mann, Thomas
The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Red Harvest – Hammett, Dashiell
The Mill on the Floss – Eliot, George
The Name of the Rose – Eco, Umberto
The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays – Camus, Albert
The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories – Cain, James M
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Driver’s Seat, The Only Problem – Spark, Muriel
The Radetzky March – Roth, Joseph
The Scarlett Letter – Hawthorne, Nathaniel
The Stranger – Camus, Albert
The Tale of Genji – Murasaki, Shikibu
The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Underground, Ripley’s Game – Highsmith, Patricia
The Trial – Kafka, Franz
Things Fall Apart – Achebe, Chinua
This Side of Paradise – Fitzgerald, F. Scott
To the Lighthouse – Woolf, Virginia
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn – Twain, Mark
Ulysses – Joyce, James
Zeno’s Conscience – Svevo, Italo
The Best of Wodehouse – Wodehouse, P. G.
Dain Curse, The Glass Key and The Selected Stories – Hammett, Dashiel
Death Comes for the Archbishop - Cather, Willa
Ficciones – Borges, Jorge Luis
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Calvino, Italo
*The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov, Mikhail
Sons and Lovers – Lawrence, D. H.
The Cairo Trilogy - Mahfouz, Naguib
The Sword of Honour Trilogy – Waugh, Evelyn
Three Novels of Ancient Egypt Khufu’s Wisdom, Rhadopis of Nubia, Thebes at War – Mahfouz, Naguib
Mansfield Park – Austen, Jane
Northanger Abbey – Austen, Jane
Emma – Austen, Jane
Non-Fiction
Democracy in America - Tocqueville, Alexis De
Essays – Orwell, George
Meditations – Aurelius, Marcus
Rights of Man and Common Sense – Paine, Thomas
Speak, Memory – Nabokov, Vladimir
The Republic – Plato
The Prince – Machiavelli, Niccolo
The Wealth of Nations – Smith, Adam
Walden – Thoreau, Henry David
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live – Didion, Joan
Waugh Abroad: Collected Travel Writing – Waugh, Evelyn
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman – Wollstonecraft, Mary
Religion
Tao Te Ching – Lao-Tzu
The Collected Works – Gibran, Kahlil
The Confessions – Augustine
Poetry
The Aeneid – Virgil
The Divine Comedy – Dante, Alighieri
The Iliad – Homer
The Odyssey – Homer
Marriage Poems – Hollander, John
Baudelaire: Poems – Baudelaire, Charles
Philosophy
The Analects – Confucius
History
The Histories – Herodotus
Biography
The Periodic Table – Levi, Primo
The Woman Warrior, China Men – Kingston, Maxine Hong
The Life of Samuel Johnson – Boswell, James
Children’s
Adventures of Robin Hood – Green, Roger Lancelyn
Aladdin and Other Tales – Robinson, W. Heath
Anne of Green Gables – Montgomery, L. M.
A Apple Pie & Nursery Rhymes – Greenaway, Kate
The BFG – Dahl, Roald
Black Beauty – Sewell, Anna
A Book of Nonsense – Lear, Edward
A Child’s Garden of Verses – Stevenson, Robert Louis
A Christmas Carol – Dickens, Charles
Daddy Long Legs – Webster, Jean
Don Quixote of the Mancha – Cervantes, Miguel De
English Fairy Tales – Jacobs, Joseph
The Everyman Anthology of Poetry for Children – Avery, Gillian
The Everyman Book of Nonsense Verse – Guinness, Louise
Fables – Aesop
Fairy Tales – Andersen, Hans Christian
Fairy Tales – The Brothers Grimm
Jack the Giant Killer – Doyle, Richard
Just So Stories – Kipling, Rudyard
King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table – Green, Roger Lancelyn
The Light in the Forest – Richter, Conrad
Little Red Riding Hood & Other Stories – Perrault, Charles
Little Women – Alcott, Louisa May
Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes – Jerrold, Walter
Peter Pan – Barrie, J.M.
The Pied Piper of Hamelin - Browning, Robert
The Princess and the Goblin – MacDonald, George
Ride a Cock-Horse and Other Rhymes and Stories – Caldecott, Randolph
Robinson Crusoe – Defoe, Daniel
Russian Fairly Tales – Avery, Gillian
The Scarlett Pimpernel – Orczy, Baroness
The Secret Garden – Burnett, Frances Hodgson
Sherlock Holmes – Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan
Sleeping Beauty – Evans, C.S.
The Three Musketeers – Dumas, Alexandre
Treasure Island – Stevenson, Robert Louis
The Wind in the Willows – Grahame, Kenneth
The Wizard of Oz – Baum, L. Frank
A Wonder Book for Boys & Girls – Hawthorne, Nathaniel
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