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50 Books to Read Before You Die

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Classic Literature

  1. Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen
  2. 1984 — George Orwell
  3. To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee
  4. The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald
  5. Animal Farm — George Orwell
  6. Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë
  7. Frankenstein — Mary Shelley
  8. The Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger
  9. Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë
  10. Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky
  11. The Picture of Dorian Gray — Oscar Wilde
  12. Moby-Dick — Herman Melville
  13. Great Expectations — Charles Dickens
  14. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Mark Twain
  15. War and Peace — Leo Tolstoy

Modern Classics

  1. One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel García Márquez
  2. Beloved — Toni Morrison
  3. The Handmaid’s Tale — Margaret Atwood
  4. Slaughterhouse-Five — Kurt Vonnegut
  5. Catch-22 — Joseph Heller
  6. The Lord of the Rings — J.R.R. Tolkien
  7. Lord of the Flies — William Golding
  8. The Color Purple — Alice Walker
  9. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams
  10. Neuromancer — William Gibson

Non-Fiction

  1. Sapiens — Yuval Noah Harari
  2. Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman
  3. The Selfish Gene — Richard Dawkins
  4. A Brief History of Time — Stephen Hawking
  5. Man’s Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl
  6. Outliers — Malcolm Gladwell
  7. The Power of Habit — Charles Duhigg
  8. In Cold Blood — Truman Capote
  9. The Diary of a Young Girl — Anne Frank
  10. Silent Spring — Rachel Carson

Philosophy & Essays

  1. Meditations — Marcus Aurelius
  2. The Republic — Plato
  3. Thus Spoke Zarathustra — Friedrich Nietzsche
  4. The Art of War — Sun Tzu
  5. On the Shortness of Life — Seneca

Poetry & Drama

  1. Hamlet — William Shakespeare
  2. The Divine Comedy — Dante Alighieri
  3. The Odyssey — Homer
  4. Leaves of Grass — Walt Whitman
  5. The Waste Land and Other Poems — T.S. Eliot

World Literature

  1. The Stranger — Albert Camus
  2. Norwegian Wood — Haruki Murakami
  3. The Alchemist — Paulo Coelho
  4. The Trial — Franz Kafka
  5. Don Quixote — Miguel de Cervantes

Tips for Reading More

  1. Read 20 pages a day — that’s one book every two weeks, 25 books a year
  2. Always have a book with you — physical, Kindle, or phone app
  3. Don’t force it — if you’re not enjoying a book, put it down and try another
  4. Keep a reading journal — write a paragraph about each book when you finish
  5. Join a book club — discussion deepens understanding
  6. Alternate fiction and non-fiction — prevents burnout
  7. Reread great books — they’re different the second time

Start with the classics: Browse our annotated editions with chapter summaries and analysis.

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