These are some of the books that have played a pivotal role in shaping the way we read and write today. They challenge conceptions and break traditions, pushing us to examine our views of the world and demand better from it. Taken into the soul, they add immeasurable depth to our understanding of human nature.
1984, Animal Farm by George Orwell
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, Ulysses by James Joyce
A Room with a View, Howards End by E.M. Forster
A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House, David Copperfield, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Anna Karenina, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
Beloved by Tony Morrison
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Dracula by Bram Stoker
East of Eden, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbec
Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello by William Shakespeare
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Inferno by Dante
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Jane Erye by Charlotte Bronte
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Metamorphoses by Ovid
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
North and South by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
The Aeneid by Virgil
The Brothers Karamasov, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The Iliad, The Odyssey by Homer
The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
The Plague, The Stranger by Albert Camus
The Prince by Nicollo Machiavelli
The Republic by Plato
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenso
The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte