What qualifies a person as well read? Is it the sheer number of books consumed, or the depth and breadth of their literary repertoire? Do you consider yourself well read? We’ve examined this idea before: “in matters of taste, there is no argument” and there is no better example of this than in our choice of reading material. Book lovers will browse through bookshelves whenever they get the chance. And who isn’t guilty of perusing the bookshelves of our friends? We’re always on the hunt for the next great read, or to identify books in common that we can then discuss. While it’s highly unlikely that we’re building a library from scratch, let’s just pretend – for the sake of argument – that we were.
What titles are essential to have on your bookshelf? It’s an almost impossible task, but working through genres it becomes a little easier to narrow down those authors and books that seem to define what “good reading” is. We’ve put together a list – in no particular order or by no particular genre – of 50 titles that we’d consider as a part of any personal library. These titles cover a wide range of voices and experiences in fiction and nonfiction. Clearly there’s something about each title that has struck a chord, stood the test of time, or offers significant insight into an idea or experience.
50 Titles For Your At-Home Library
1. The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf
2. The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
3. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon
4. A Child Called “It”, David Pelzer
5. Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
6. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
7. Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
8. The Human Stain, Philip Roth
9. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
10. Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
11. Elements of Style, Strunk and White
12. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
13. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
14. On Beauty, Zadie Smith
15. Poetics, Aristotle
16. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
17. Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
19. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
20. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
21. The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud
22. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
23. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig
24. Ulysses, James Joyce
25. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
26. Beloved, Toni Morrison
27. Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
28. The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot
29. The Prince, Niccoló Machiavelli
30. Das Kapital, Karl Marx
31. Rights of Man, Thomas Paine
32. Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence
33. The Histories, Herodotus
34. Confessions, St. Augustine
35. The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
36. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
37. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
38. Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
39. On War, Carl von Clausewitz
40. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
41. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
42. The Railway Children, E. Nesbit
43. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
44. Le Morte d’Arthur, Thomas Malory
45. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis
46. Neuromancer, William Gibson
47. And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
48. Death of A Salesman, Arthur Miller
49. How to Cook, Delia Smith
50. If This Is Man, Primo Levi
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