100 Best Nobel Books of All Time (Updated for 2026)

1

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

5.0

The brilliant, bestselling, landmark novel that tells the story of the Buendia family, and chronicles the irreconcilable conflict between the desire for solitude and the need for love—in rich, imaginative prose that has come to define an entire genre known as "magical realism."

Recommended by Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson, and 9 others.

Barack Obama

Former USA President

When asked what books he recommended to his 18-year-old daughter Malia, Obama gave the Times a list that included The Naked and the Dead and One Hundred Years of Solitude. “I think some of them were sort of the usual suspects … I think she hadn’t read yet. Then there were some books that are not on everybody’s reading list these days, but I remembered as being interesting.” Here’s what he included: The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston [source]

Oprah Winfrey

CEO/O Network

Brace yourselves—One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez is as steamy, dense and sensual as the jungle that surrounds the surreal town of Macondo! [source]

Richard Branson

Founder/Virgin Group

Today is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime. [source]

2

Lord of the Flies

William Golding

4.9

At the dawn of the next world war, a plane crashes on an uncharted island, stranding a group of schoolboys. At first, with no adult supervision, their freedom is something to celebrate; this far from civilization the boys can do anything they want. Anything. They attempt to forge their own society, failing, however, in the face of terror, sin and evil. And as order collapses, as strange howls echo

Recommended by Elon Musk, Ev Williams, Audrey Russo, and 5 others.

Audrey Russo

So many novels; Lord of the Flies, Great Gatsby, Great Expectations; all the Nancy Drew books; Catcher in the Rye, Books written by Zora Neale Hurston; Pat Conroy – all because of the view about different people who endure despite adversity while kindling the hearts of the human spirit. [source]

Chigozie Obioma

William Golding imbues some of these children with wisdom that would read, in the hands of a lesser author, as implausibly knowing [source]

Disco Donnie

@JoshRHernandez1 I love the book “Lord of the Flies” so just started watching The Society [source]

3

The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck, Robert DeMott

4.8

The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanized—and sometimes outraged—millions of readers.

First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads—driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of Cal

Recommended by Antonio Villaraigosa, Elizabeth Tsurkov, John Kerry, and 2 others.

Antonio Villaraigosa

It has been over 70 years since The Grapes of Wrath was published, yet the suffering that Steinbeck describes still hits close to home with families across our country still struggling to find work and put food on the table. It reminds us progressives that the day-to-day struggles of Americans should always remain close to our hearts. [source]

Elizabeth Tsurkov

@Maysaloon great book! [source]

John Kerry

While there is a story that takes place between characters, the hardship and unfairness is a central element of the book. It shows how fiction can create progressive change as well. [source]

4

Siddhartha

Hermann Hesse

4.8

Herman Hesse's classic novel has delighted, inspired, and influenced generations of readers, writers, and thinkers. In this story of a wealthy Indian Brahmin who casts off a life of privilege to seek spiritual fulfillment. Hesse synthesizes disparate philosophies--Eastern religions, Jungian archetypes, Western individualism--into a unique vision of life as expressed through one man's search for me

Recommended by Naval Ravikant, Amir Salihefendic, Bryan Johnson, and 7 others.

Naval Ravikant

CEO & Co-Founder/AngelList

So good that it may as well be non-fiction. [source]

Bryan Johnson

Love this book. [source]

David Blaine

He says, 'Love is stronger than hate. Soft is stronger than hard. Water is stronger than stone.' [source]

5

The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway

4.8

The Old Man and the Sea, an apparently simple fable, represents the mature Hemingway at his best. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature soon after its publication, and half a century later it is still one of his most read books.

Recommended by Jack Dorsey, James Altucher, Jordan B Peterson, and 1 others.

Jack Dorsey

Co-Founder/Twitter

I keep coming back to it. I love the straightforwardness, the tightness, and the poetry. I think it shows a common struggle that is repeated over and over in so many narratives both fictional and nonfictional. [source]

Jordan B Peterson

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway https://t.co/7dJE4Pfn56, a book from my great books list https://t.co/AxBNX3QpMb [source]

May Witwit

I taught this book to my students in Iraq during the economic sanctions. And I feel like it gave me some kind of strength to continue. [source]

6

The Stranger

Albert Camus, Jonathan Davis, et al

4.8

Through the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd." First published in English in 1946; now in a new translation by Matthew Ward.

Recommended by David Heinemeier Hansson and Kyle Maynard.

David Heinemeier Hansson

Seminal novel on existentialism and the absurd by Albert Camus from 1946. Explores that feeling of disconnectedness from society, its norms, and the absurdity of every day life. Striking first-person account in a powerful, direct language. [source]

Kyle Maynard

Kyle Maynard said this is one of his most-recommended books. [source]

7

Voices from Chernobyl

Svetlana Alexievich

4.8

On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred at the Chernobyl complex in Pripyat. English-language reportage on the incident has, so far, focused on facts, names, and data; Voices from Chernobyl presents first-hand accounts of what happened to the people of Belarus and the fear, anger, and uncertainty that they lived through. In order to give voice to their experiences

Recommended by Caterina Fake, Craig Mazin, Kate Brown, and 1 others.

Craig Mazin

Writer, Producer/Chernobyl TV Series

These are sources I found fascinating and useful. Not ALL of them, but a bunch. First up, obviously... Svetlana Alexievich's Voices From Chernobyl. Absolutely essential, and heartbreaking, reading. There's a reason Ms. Alexievich has a Nobel Prize. [source]

Kate Brown

It’s a very beautiful work and I think it gives you the emotional landscape of how people dealt with their anxieties, fears, the health problems that ensued, and their growing sense of disillusionment with their political leaders and the Communist party. [source]

Rebecca Altman

What follows events like Chernobyl is a politics of measurement. Who counts? What counts? Who does the counting? How are boundaries drawn for the purposes of counting and comparing? And what is discounted, or never counted at all? [source]

8

The Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro

4.8

An elegant Everyman's Library hardcover edition of the universally acclaimed novel—winner of the Booker Prize, a bestseller and a perpetually strong backlist title, and the basis for an award-winning film—with full-cloth binding, a silk ribbon marker, a chronology, and a new introduction by Salman Rushdie.

Here is Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of Stevens, the perfect butler, and o

Recommended by Jeff Bezos, Emma Watson, and Riz Khan.

Jeff Bezos

Founder/Amazon

If you read The Remains of the Day, which is one of my favorite books, you can't help but come away and think, I just spent 10 hours living an alternate life and I learned something about life and about regret. You can't do that in a blog post. [source]

Riz Khan

About missed chances and what the British character does to a person’s emotions. There is this brick wall that they can’t crack through and after a while a bit of the grout wears away. [source]

9

Beloved

Toni Morrison

4.7

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby.

Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Her new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, wh

Recommended by Bianca Belair, Esi Edugyan, and Farah Jasmine Griffin.

Bianca Belair

@ylc130 I went to the library when I was in the 3rd grade and read Beloved... I remember being so confused and my Mama having to explain it to me... I later read it as an adult and it hit me completely different. GREAT BOOK! [source]

Esi Edugyan

I was shocked by the blunt force of its subject matter and its exquisitely torqued prose. It remains one of my most adored novels. [source]

Farah Jasmine Griffin

Beloved was Morrison’s fifth novel. It’s a gripping story, inspired by a famous abolitionist case, the true story of a woman who runs away from slavery with her children, but when the slave catchers catch up with her, she kills one of her own and tries to kill the others, rather than returning them to slavery. [source]

Cover unavailable

10

Blindness

Jose Saramago

4.7

From Nobel Prize–winning author José Saramago, a magnificent, mesmerizing parable of loss

A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" that spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and assaulting women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides her charges—among them a boy w

Recommended by Leah Lizarondo and Samantha Harvey.

Leah Lizarondo

The version of dystopia in this book is provocative but truly, the style and structure is what makes the book even more memorable. I always think about our humanity and how fallible we are. I love that this book tackles that but ultimately, our true core--what is good--triumphs. That is pretty much how I look at life. [source]

Samantha Harvey

It because it brings up the question of what conditions are necessary for sanity and what happens when you take those conditions away. [source]

11

Of Mice and Men

John Steinbeck

4.7

The compelling story of two outsiders striving to find their place in an unforgiving world.

Drifters in search of work, George and his simple-minded friend Lennie have nothing in the world except each other and a dream -- a dream that one day they will have some land of their own. Eventually they find work on a ranch in California’s Salinas Valley, but their hopes are doomed as Lennie, struggling

Recommended by Barack Obama and Steve Benjamins.

Barack Obama

Former USA President

When he got to high school, the president said, his tastes changed and he learned to enjoy classics like “Of Mice and Men” and “The Great Gatsby.” [source]

Steve Benjamins

I think all of John Steinbeck’s books are uplifting. He sees the best in humanity and it leaves me feeling warm and generous. I always love this paragraph in Of Mice and Men that hints at the tension between business and humanity: "It has always seemed strange to me that the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honestly, understanding, and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second." [source]

12

The plague

Albert Camus, Stuart Gilbert

4.7

A gripping tale of human unrelieved horror, of survival and resilience, and of the ways in which humankind confronts death, The Plague is at once a masterfully crafted novel, eloquently understated and epic in scope, and a parable of ageless moral resonance, profoundly relevant to our times. In Oran, a coastal town in North Africa, the plague begins as a series of portents, unheeded by the people.

Recommended by Jim Collins, Arthur Ammann, Jenny Davidson, and 1 others.

Arthur Ammann

It’s an amazing book, considering Camus probably never personally experienced a plague. In his novel, Camus captured everything that we were dealing with in the Aids epidemic without Aids existing at that time. Without his knowing what the consequences of the HIV plague were going to be, he seems to have gotten all the actors in there and the myriad of things that you wrestle with. [source]

Jenny Davidson

Albert Camus’s The Plague probably remains the best-known novel on the topic of epidemic disease. It tells the story of those involved in an epidemic in a North African setting. It is very interested in the details about how quarantines are enforced and the role not just of the government, but of individuals who band together into groups to manage the epidemic. [source]

Stephen Breyer

He talks about the plague. Well, the plague is that part of a human being which can be very evil. That germ, he says at the end, never dies, it simply goes into remission. It lurks. It lurks in the cupboards, it lurks in the hallways, it lurks in the filing cabinets. [source]

Cover unavailable

13

Disgrace

J.M. COETZEE

4.7

After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours; he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressure to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding.

For a

Recommended by Justin Cartwright and Kevin Bloom.

Justin Cartwright

The book is a sort of farewell note to South Africa – a Goodbye, I’m off. [source]

Kevin Bloom

This book was written in the late 90s and although it is very difficult – especially with writers like J M Coetzee – to link the work to the man, my personal reading of the book is that it is a work of profound disappointment and sadness. It is all about a fifty-something professor, David Lurie, who teaches at a Cape Town university. He has an affair with a young student – Melanie. He gets hauled before a disciplinary panel and refuses to defend himself. [source]

14

East of Eden

John Steinbeck

4.6

In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden "the first book," and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set in the rich farmland of California's Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poiso

Recommended by Oprah Winfrey, Emma Watson, John Lilly, and 2 others.

Oprah Winfrey

CEO/O Network

It's the perfect summer read...a novel so rich and full of drama you won't be able to turn the pages fast enough! [source]

John Lilly

@ben_mathes @kevinakwok @samhinkie @aweissman Amazing book. Ive always liked it better than Grapes of Wrath. [source]

Steve Benjamins

My favorite non-business book is East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I think all of John Steinbeck’s books are uplifting. He sees the best in humanity and it leaves me feeling warm and generous. [source]

15

Love in the Time of Cholera

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

4.6

From the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude comes a masterly evocation of an unrequited passion so strong that it binds three people's lives together for more than fifty years. In the story of Florentino Ariza, who waits more than half a century to declare his undying love to the beautiful Fermina Daza, whom he lost to Dr. Juvenal Urbino so many years before, García Márque

Recommended by Bryan Callen, Kate Figes, and Tendai Biti.

Bryan Callen

So here are my three must read books. I've been reading a lot of great books like: Outsmart Your Instincts, The Culture Code, and Antonio Damasio’s The Strange Order, and sometimes when you read a lot of nonfiction it’s very enriching, sometimes you need a novel. I really believe you should take a minute and read something beautiful. Listen, listen to Lolita by Nabokov. But also listen to Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy and listen to Richard Poe narrate that. Those are two of the greatest feats of the english language that I can think of. Then there’s Fortress of Solitude, an amazing book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, these are great novels. Cold Mountain is a beautiful novel, Snow Falling On Cedars, I mean they’ve been around for a while. But goddamnit, get those under your belt. Those are the novels I think you should read. You know Love In The Time Of Cholera it just makes you ache. Kind of like a Hemingway thing, where Hemingway “ahh!”, it’s the same thing, you know. So I don’t know, I’m a fan of all those books. Those are my 3 slash 20 books. [source]

Kate Figes

It’s partly such a passionate book because of the beauty of the prose, describing love through time and how she found contentment – love, passion and sex all in one. [source]

Tendai Biti

2)Marquez s “Love in the time of cholera” & “100 yrs of solitude “ are two of my top books but one still weeps reading or re- reading Tolstoy s “ War & Peace “a book bettered only by “ Anna Karenina. Not a fan of these motivational books but that “f#cked “ up book is quite funny [source]

16

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Kahneman

4.6

Preview Summary

Major New York Times bestseller
Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award in 2012
Selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of 2011
A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year 2011 Title
One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year
One of The Wall Street Journal's Best Nonfiction Books of the Year 2011
2013 Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient

In the internatio

Recommended by Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Ev Williams, and 45 others.

Barack Obama

Former USA President

A few months ago, Mr. Obama read “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” by Daniel Kahneman, about how people make decisions — quick, instinctive thinking versus slower, contemplative deliberation. For Mr. Obama, a deliberator in an instinctive business, this may be as instructive as any political science text. [source]

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

On Bill Gates's reading list in 2012. [source]

Marc Andreessen

Co-Founder/Andreessen Horowitz

Captivating dive into human decision making, marred by inclusion of several/many? psychology studies that fail to replicate. Will stand as a cautionary tale? [source]

Cover unavailable

17

The Good Earth (House of Earth #1)

Pearl S. Buck

4.6

Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

The Good Earth is Buck’s classic story of Wang Lung, a Chinese peasant farmer, and his wife, O-lan, a former slave. With luck and hard work, the couple’s fortunes improve over the years: They are blessed with sons, and save steadily until one day they can afford to buy property in the House of Wang—the very house in which O-lan used to

Recommended by Oprah Winfrey, Amy Chua, and Abid Zaidi.

Oprah Winfrey

CEO/O Network

Reading Pearl Buck's writing feels like reading poetry to me. I just love the quiet rhythm of the words. They evoke the simple beauty of the characters and the harsh mystery of China's ancient culture. [source]

Amy Chua

I read this book when I was about nine years old. It just made such an impact on me. O-Lan, the mother in this book, toils silently and stoically all her life to provide for her family. [source]

Abid Zaidi

Day 4 : #30Days of posting cover of books I love (1 book a day for 30 days). No expectations, no reviews, just the covers. Inspired by @rekha_bhardwaj #MyFavouriteBooks https://t.co/Z1RZbzh9vZ [source]

18

A Moveable Feast

Ernest Hemingway

4.6

Preview Summary

Hemingway's memories of his life as an unknown writer living in Paris in the twenties are deeply personal, warmly affectionate, and full of wit. Looking back not only at his own much younger self, but also at the other writers who shared Paris with him - James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald - he recalls the time when, poor, happy, and writing in cafes, he discovered his vocation.

Recommended by Janine di Giovanni, Mohsin Hamid, and Wai Chee Dimock.

Janine di Giovanni

The fact that Hemingway writes it as an old, rather bitter man trapped in his Idaho home with a bullying wife while he dreams of his youth in Paris with his first wife and child is so touching to me. [source]

Mohsin Hamid

We think of Hemingway as an American writer, but much of his writing is set outside of the United States, just as much of his life was set outside of the United States. [source]

Wai Chee Dimock

This is a memoir by Hemingway about his time in Paris, which includes sketches of people like F Scott Fitzgerald. [source]

19

The Alchemist

Paulo Coelho

4.5

Preview Summary

Paulo Coelho's enchanting novel has inspired a devoted following around the world. This story, dazzling in its powerful simplicity and inspiring wisdom, is about an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago who travels from his homeland in Spain to the Egyptian desert in search of a treasure buried in the Pyramids. What starts out as a journey to find worldly goods turns into a discovery of the treas

Recommended by Tony Robbins, Anthony Robbins, Brené Brown, and 27 others.

Brené Brown

There's a great quote in this book: When you're on the right path the universe conspires to help you! [source]

Daniel Ek

It was fascinating to talk to the author about how this book came to be such a hit—he never backed down, and he allowed people to read it for free in order to then boost sales—much like how Spotify’s freemium model was perceived in the early days. [source]

Eric Ripert

Speaks of everyone having an ultimate goal in life, but most of us are too afraid to pursue it. The encouragement to fulfill your dreams is very inspirational! [source]

20

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Eric Bogosian

4.5

Solzhenitsyn's first book, this economical, relentless novel is one of the most forceful artistic indictments of political oppression in the Stalin-era Soviet Union. The simply told story of a typical, grueling day of the titular character's life in a labor camp in Siberia, is a modern classic of Russian literature and quickly cemented Solzhenitsyn's international reputation upon publication in 19

Recommended by Robert Conquest.

Robert Conquest

Yes let’s do that as I’ve quite a lot to say about old Solzh. It was a critical book – an entirely objective account of a victim in a labour camp. Just one day in an ordinary labour camp. Not exaggerated, not even a particularly nasty day. The most extraordinary part is how is got printed. It ran contrary to everyone in the Communist Party in Russia, but the Novy Mir editor Tvardovsky snuck a copy in to Khrushchev and said, ‘This is awfully good, you ought to publish it’. And he did. It was an extraordinary stroke of luck. And once it was printed, as Galina put it, ‘The Soviet government had let the genie out of the bottle, and however hard they tried later, they couldn’t put it back in.’ [source]

21

The Sound and the Fury

William Faulkner, Grover Gardner, et al

4.4

This is an alternate cover ed. for ISBN 0679732241.

The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actio

22

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa

4.4

A man returns to the town where a baffling murder took place twenty-seven years earlier, determined to get to the bottom of the story. Just hours after marrying the beautiful Angela Vicario, everyone agrees, Bayardo San Roman returned his bride in disgrace to her parents. Her distraught family forced her to name her first lover; and her twin brothers announced their intention to murder Santiago Na

23

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro

4.4

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human.

Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature,

Recommended by Lev Grossman.

Lev Grossman

It’s a difficult book to talk about because one almost doesn’t want to give away the premise, which drops on you like a ton of bricks around page eighty or so… It’s set at a very unusual boarding school where the students are being raised and educated for the absolute darkest of purposes, which they initially have no knowledge of or control over, and prove ultimately unable to escape from. [source]

Cover unavailable

24

Steppenwolf: A Novel

Hermann Hesse, Basil Creighton

4.4

Steppenwolf is a poetical self-portrait of a man who felt himself to be half-human and half-wolf. This Faust-like and magical story is evidence of Hesse's searching philosophy and extraordinary sense of humanity as he tells of the humanization of a middle-aged misanthrope. Yet this novel can also be seen as a plea for rigorous self-examination and an indictment of the intellectual hypocrisy of the

Recommended by Amanda Palmer and Sanja Zepan.

Amanda Palmer

Has a fantastical realism that pierces to the bottom of the psyche. I've re-read and re-read this sucker every five years. [source]

Sanja Zepan

Favourite non-business book would be Der Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse. It's a book that's often read by privileged people who feel misunderstood (usually teens), so everyone focuses on the first part about loneliness in the bourgeois world and forgets about the whole second part of the book that's about overcoming that and finding a sense of humour, a shift in perspective, and a bit of distance. Jack Kerouac even dismisses the book in the fashion of the precisely same intellectual hypocrisy this book talks about, which to me sounds like hipsters talking about how other people are hipsters and fake, because they themselves "have been listening the band before it was popular". Also, Steppenwolf is very relevant today - especially in the often lonely world of startup founders, where everyone talks about how great they're doing. So, the message still resonates with me. [source]

Cover unavailable

25

A Farewell to Arms: The Hemingway Library Edition

Ernest Hemingway, Seán Hemingway, Patrick Hemingway

4.4

Presented by Patrick and Seán Hemingway, this augmented edition of Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel of love during wartime features early drafts and, for the first time, all of the author’s alternate endings.

Written when Ernest Hemingway was thirty years old and lauded as the best American novel to emerge from World War I, A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance dri

Recommended by Jordan B Peterson, Jordan Peterson, and Julia Enthoven.

Jordan B Peterson

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway https://t.co/dwAYVoKl3K, a book from my great books list https://t.co/AxBNX3QpMb [source]

Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson recommended this book on his website. [source]

Julia Enthoven

For non-business, I’ve loved so many different books that it’s hard to pick a favorite. Recently, I’ve enjoyed The Art of Fielding and Americanah, and I love classics like A Farewell to Arms and Lord of the Flies. [source]

26

The Tin Drum

Günter Grass

4.4

Without a doubt, The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass is a classic of Western Literature. Sardonic in tone and exuberant in its condemnation of the late 20th century world and its values, The Tin Drum is a picture of a world in upheaval. Told through the eyes of dwarf, it was Grass's first novel and it catapulted him to fame.

The Tin Drum is a portrait of German society from the 1930s to the 1950s. The n

27

Waiting for Godot

Samuel Becket

4.4

The story revolves around two seemingly homeless men simply waiting for someone—or something—named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree, inhabiting a drama spun of their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as mankind’s inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett’s language pioneered an expressionistic minimalis

Recommended by Elon Musk.

Elon Musk

Founder/SpaceX

Have recently come to appreciate the awesome, absurdist humor of this book. [source]

28

Nausea

Jean-Paul Sartre, Lloyd Alexander, et al.

4.4

Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form he ruthlessly catalogues his every feeling and sensation about the world and people around him.

His thoughts culminate in a pervasive, overpowering feeling of nausea which "spread at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of our time, the time of purple suspender

Recommended by David Heinemeier Hansson, Samantha Harvey, and Sarah Bakewell.

David Heinemeier Hansson

Existentialists like Sartre are big on the idea that you can’t just relate a philosophical worldview by simply stating values, techniques, and facts. To understand existentialism, you must feel it. Breathe its ambience. It’s like a tonal curve for life. Yes, we can talk about highlights, shadows, and all the mechanical elements of that tonal curve, but you won’t become an artist just by knowing these mechanics. It goes much deeper than that. So Nausea is a novel, which imparts the existentialist tonal curve. I’m only halfway through it, but I’m liking it a lot already. It’s not as wild or erratic as Notes from Underground, but it’s got that similar feel. That the narrator gives us a mirror to reflect in, and those reflections are novel because we’re outside the normal tonal curve. [source]

Samantha Harvey

Halldor Laxness, Brad Leithauser

4.3

This magnificent novel—which secured for its author the 1955 Nobel Prize in Literature—is at last available to contemporary American readers. Although it is set in the early twentieth century, it recalls both Iceland's medieval epics and such classics as Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. And if Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determinat

Recommended by Alison Wolf.

Alison Wolf

Here are five books with something to say, not just about education but about people – all five make us realise how different our societies are from how they were. Independent People is the book that has just bowled me over in the last couple of years, more than anything else I’ve read. It is incredibly moving, about a poor Icelandic farmer who does not want to be dependent on anyone for anything. And that is his overriding value – a very classic value of small, self-supporting peasant farmers. They have this integrity and courage as well as this drive to independence. It is set in Iceland at a time when it was much poorer. The country has had a miserable history in many ways, but it’s not really about that. The book is great because of the author’s ability to create a world utterly different from ours, with a value system so different but also so totally human. I don’t know why he is not better known – he clearly is not obscure, he did win the Nobel Prize. But why hasn’t the whole of Britain read him? It is long, though – Independent People is for when you have a large chunk of time. [source]

Cover unavailable

35

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway

4.3

Hemingway's classic novel of the Spanish Civil War. In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war; three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight," For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. Surpassing hi

Recommended by David Kadavy, Jordan B Peterson, and Josh Waitzkin.

Jordan B Peterson

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway https://t.co/1DfwVoZDRJ, a book from my great books list https://t.co/AxBNX3QpMb [source]

Josh Waitzkin

Exquisite novel. [source]

Cover unavailable

36

The Feast of the Goat

Mario Vargas Llosa, Edith Grossman

4.3

Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic - and finds herself reliving the events of 1961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million people. Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a

Cover unavailable

37

The Golden Notebook

Doris Lessing

4.3

"The Golden Notebook is Doris Lessing's most important work and has left its mark upon the ideas and feelings of a whole generation of women." — New York Times Book Review

Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusio

Recommended by Barack Obama and Erica Jong.

Barack Obama

Former USA President

When asked what books he recommended to his 18-year-old daughter Malia, Obama gave the Times a list that included The Naked and the Dead and One Hundred Years of Solitude. “I think some of them were sort of the usual suspects … I think she hadn’t read yet. Then there were some books that are not on everybody’s reading list these days, but I remembered as being interesting.” Here’s what he included: The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston [source]

Erica Jong

The thing that I thought so fabulous about Doris Lessing was that she created a heroine who was intellectual and sexual. [source]

38

The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison

4.3

The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel, a book heralded for its richness of language and boldness of vision. Set in the author's girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year t

Cover unavailable

39

Hunger

Knut Hamsun, Sverre Lyngstad, Jo Nesbo, Paul Auster

4.3

First published in Norway in 1890, Hunger probes into the depths of consciousness with frightening and gripping power. Like the works of Dostoyevsky, it marks an extraordinary break with Western literary and humanistic traditions.

Librarian note: an older cover for this ISBN can be found here.

Recommended by Ryan Holiday and Stephane Grand.

Ryan Holiday

Author

A dark and moving first-person narrative, about the conflicting drives for self-preservation and self-immolation inside all of us. Hunger is about a writer who is starving himself. He cannot write because he is starving and cannot eat because writing is how he makes his living. It’s a vicious cycle and the book is a first-person descent into it. Strangely modern for being published in 1890 and ultimately inspired a lot of great stream-of-consciousness writing since (but influence goes unacknowledged because Knut was a Nazi sympathizer). [source]

Stephane Grand

This is an amazing book about being true to your engagements. [source]

Cover unavailable

40

The Bridge over the Drina

Ivo Andric, Lovette F. Edwards

4.3

In the small Bosnian town of Visegrad the stone bridge of the novel's title, built in the sixteenth century on the instruction of a grand vezir, bears witness to three centuries of conflict. Visegrad has long been a bone of contention between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, but the bridge survives unscathed until 1914, when the collision of forces in the Balkans triggers the outbreak of

Recommended by Arnold Jansen and Ned Boulting.

Arnold Jansen

It describes life in the small town of Visegrad over four centuries, from the Ottoman occupation to the start of the First World War. The focus is the stone bridge across the Drina which links east and west, poor and rich, and Serbs, Croats, Jews and Muslims who live together. He shows the lives of ordinary people set against major historical events….The Bridge on the Drina is a page-turner and you get under the skin of the country. [source]

Ned Boulting

This is a great book. https://t.co/WvlqDAuOQe [source]

Cover unavailable

41

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway, William Hurt, et al

4.3

The quintessential novel of the Lost Generation, The Sun Also Rises is one of Ernest Hemingway’s masterpieces and a classic example of his spare but powerful writing style.

A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway’s most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Bret

Recommended by Wai Chee Dimock.

Wai Chee Dimock

Many people don’t appreciate what a big commitment writing this novel was for Hemingway. He was used to writing short stories. It meant he had to spend a lot of time on one book that could have been spent more profitably writing short stories. Like many of Hemingway’s later novels, it is stitched together from shorter pieces – in this case, what he’d already written about Pamplona. [source]

42

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

Svetlana Alexievich, Bela Shayevich

4.3

From the 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Svetlana Alexievich, comes the first English translation of her latest work, an oral history of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a new Russia. Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive documentary style, Secondhand Time is a monument to the collapse of the USSR, charting the decline of Soviet culture and

Recommended by Sam Freedman and Stephanie Flanders.

Sam Freedman

@martinbright It's amazing. Have you read Second Hand Time? Best book of the century so far for me. Just incredible. [source]

Stephanie Flanders

The power comes from the stories themselves, the people she found and talked to. [source]

Cover unavailable

43

Fatelessness

Imre Kertész, Tim Wilkinson

4.3

At the age of 14 Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn’t particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, “You are no Jew.” In the lowest circle of the Holocaust, Georg remains a

44

The Magic Mountain

THOMAS MANN

4.3

Hans Castorp is 'a perfectly ordinary, if engaging young man' when he goes to visit his cousin in an exclusive sanatorium in the Swiss Alps.What should have been a three week trip turns into a seven year stay. Hans falls in love and becomes intoxicated with the ideas he hears at the clinic - ideas which will strain and crack apart in a world on the verge of the First World War.

Recommended by Igor Debatur and Marc Wittmann.

Igor Debatur

It’s a story about young ambitious man who felt in a trap of his own mind in form of a chronic disease. He visited his brother in a clinic, situated in high mountains of Switzerland. Instead of retreating after a week, as was originally planned, he stayed there for seven years. There are several very bright characters with different ideas about liberalism, conservatism, hedonism and many other matters. All of them were living in a very comfortable reality with a set of rules. It’s very alike to any virtual society that could become a thing in upcoming years, and it’s easy to understand why the hero of the book decided to stay there. [source]

Marc Wittmann

In the ever-repeating sameness of the Magic Mountain Resort, time accelerates because all novelty is lost. [source]

45

The Pearl

John Steinbeck

4.3

Like his father and grandfather before him, Kino is a poor diver, gathering pearls from the gulf beds that once brought great wealth to the kings of Spain and now provide Kino, Juana, and their infant son with meager subsistence. Then, on a day like any other, Kino emerges from the sea with a pearl as large as a sea gull’s egg, as “perfect as the moon.” With the pearl comes hope, the promise of co

46

Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family

Thomas Mann

4.3

A Major Literary Event: a brilliant new translation of Thomas Mann's first great novel, one of the two for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929.

Buddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1900, when Mann was only twenty-five, has become a classic of modem literature -- the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany. With consummate skill, Mann

Cover unavailable

47

Snow Country

Yasunari Kawabata, Edward G. Seidensticker

4.2

Nobel Prize recipient Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country is widely considered to be the writer's masterpiece, a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan.

At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante meets Komako, a lowly geisha. She gives herself to him fully and without remorse, despite knowing that their pa

Cover unavailable

48

Death with Interruptions

José Saramago

4.2

Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago's brilliant new novel poses the question -- what happens when the grim reaper decides there will be no more death? On the first day of the new year, no one dies. This of course causes consternation among politicians, religious leaders, morticians, and doctors. Among the general public, on the other hand, there is initially celebration—flags are hung out on balconie

Recommended by Magda Marcu.

Magda Marcu

I also have a soft spot for Jose Saramago, specifically “All the names” and “Death with Interruptions”. [source]

Cover unavailable

49

As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner

4.2

As I Lay Dying is Faulkner’s harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Narrated in turn by each of the family members -- including Addie herself -- as well as others; the novel ranges in mood, from dark comedy to the deepest pathos. Considered one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, styl

Cover unavailable

50

Travesuras de la niña mala

Mario Vargas Llosa

4.2

¿Cuál es el verdadero rostro del amor?

Ricardo ve cumplido, a una edad muy temprana, el sueño que en su Lima natal alimentó desde que tenía uso de razón: vivir en París. Pero el rencuentro con un amor de adolescencia lo cambiará todo. La joven, inconformista, aventurera, pragmática e inquieta, lo arrastrará fuera del pequeño mundo de sus ambiciones.

Testigos de épocas convulsas y florecientes en ciu

Cover unavailable

51

Dear Life

Alice Munro

4.2

Suffused with Munro's clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, these tales about departures and beginnings, accidents and dangers, and outgoings and homecomings both imagined and real, paint a radiant, indelible portrait of how strange, perilous, and extraordinary ordinary life can be.

Alice Munro's peerless ability to give us the essence of a life in often brief but always spa

52

Waiting for the Barbarians

J.M. Coetzee

4.2

For decades the Magistrate has been a loyal servant of the Empire, running the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement and ignoring the impending war with the barbarians. When interrogation experts arrive, however, he witnesses the Empire's cruel and unjust treatment of prisoners of war. Jolted into sympathy for their victims, he commits a quixotic act of rebellion that brands him an enemy of the st

Recommended by Imraan Coovadia.

Imraan Coovadia

Waiting for the Barbarians was the Coetzee book that I was always most attached to – I think it’s the Coetzee book that most South Africans are attached to. Coetzee takes the mood of the 1980s state of emergency – when people were being detained and disappearing and there was a fear of communist or black madness on the borders – and he makes it more interesting by creating this partial allegory of some unnamed empire. The whole point of the book is contained in the title. It’s a bit like The Importance of Being Earnest. It’s a book you can’t imagine with a different title. It’s about a magistrate. He works for the empire, you don’t know what the empire is and you don’t know what century it’s taking place in. The magistrate is trying to administer law and order, he’s trying to be a figure of some kind of justice. And all the time there’s fear that the barbarians are about to invade and take down the empire. All sorts of draconian measures and violations of decency are carried out in the name of emergency. Needless to say, it ends unhappily. There is always a personal subtext in writing and part of the interest in this book is that it’s hard not to see the magistrate, a failed liberal, as a version of John himself. It’s quite a beautiful book, spare and controlled and strange. The opening scene, where he’s talking about seeing his interrogator’s sunglasses for the first time, is unforgettable. Especially if you know that African security police loved wearing sunglasses. I don’t know why. [source]

53

Song of Solomon

Toni Morrison, Reynolds Price

4.2

In this celebrated novel, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison created a new way of rendering the contradictory nuances of black life in America. Its earthy poetic language and striking use of folklore and myth established Morrison as a major voice in contemporary fiction.

Song of Solomon begins with one of the most arresting scenes in our century's literature: a dreamlike tableau depicting a m

Recommended by Barack Obama, Bozoma Saint John, and Jesse Williams.

Barack Obama

Former USA President

According to the president’s Facebook page and a 2008 interview with the New York Times, these titles are among his most influential forever favorites: Moby Dick, Herman Melville Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson Song Of Solomon, Toni Morrison Parting The Waters, Taylor Branch Gilead, Marylinne Robinson Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene The Quiet American, Graham Greene Cancer Ward, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Gandhi’s autobiography Working, Studs Terkel Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren [source]

Bozoma Saint John

I love this book. Her writing style is incredibly poetic and complex. [source]

Jesse Williams

The characters’ dilemmas just rocked my world in high school. [source]

54

Night

Elie Wiesel

4.2

Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author's original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importan

Recommended by Johanna Reiss and Steven Katz.

Johanna Reiss

Elie Wiesel wrote..that he was considering running into the barbed wire once, but he didn’t because his father needed him. [source]

Steven Katz

Probably the best known memoir that has been written about the experience of the death camps. [source]

Cover unavailable

55

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Olga Tokarczuk, Antonia Lloyd-Jones

4.2

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

"A brilliant literary murder mystery." --Chicago Tribune "Extraordinary. Tokarczuk's novel is funny, vivid, dangerous, and disturbing, and it raises some fierce questions about human behavior. My sincere admiration for her brilliant work." --Annie Proulx

In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poe

Cover unavailable

56

Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

Hermann Hesse

4.2

Emil Sinclair ist ein Junge, der in einem als "Scheinwelt" beschrieben bürgerlichen Elternhaus aufgewachsen ist. Dies ist die dramatische Geschichte seines Abstiegs - gesteuert durch sein frühreifen Schulkamerad Max Demian - in eine geheime und gefährliche Welt der Kleinkriminalität und Revolte gegen Konvention und seiner Erwachen zu Selbstheit.

57

Fall

Albert Camus, Justin O'Brien

4.2

Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a successful Parisian barrister, has come to recognize the deep-seated hypocrisy of his existence. His epigrammatic and, above all, discomforting monologue gradually saps, then undermines, the reader's own complacency.

58

The Glass Bead Game

Hermann Hesse, Richard Winston, Clara Winston, Theodore Ziolkowski

4.2

The final novel of Hermann Hesse, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, 'The Glass Bead Game' is a fascinating tale of the complexity of modern life as well as a classic of modern literature.

Set in the 23rd century, 'The Glass Bead Game' is the story of Joseph Knecht, who has been raised in Castalia, the remote place his society has provided for the intellectual elite to grow an

Recommended by Tyler Cowen, Ari Iaccarino, Igor Debatur, and 1 others.

Tyler Cowen

Founder/Marginal Revolution University

This is about the beauty of organised structures and how we play them in game-like fashion and how much they entrance us. [source]

Ari Iaccarino

The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse played a pivotal role in helping me decide to become a teacher and in further pursuits afterwards. There are various interpretations of the text and many conclusions I could personally draw from, but the general theme entails following the life of a man in an institution of academic-like monks who study various subjects for the sake of knowledge itself - nothing done for money, “progress”, or technological advancement. In an age where academics is constantly pressured to lead students towards a job, I found that to be refreshing for me, especially as I had been living in Spain post-college trying to find some purpose beyond teaching English. Learning to learn is beautiful and meaningful by itself, and in terms of how that relates to Ridj-it, this attitude has helped me to engage with the company in finding it to be rewarding for what it is, not because it serves some other external purpose. Investors don’t want to hear that, nor does anyone else relying on your existence, but thinking as such helps defend against dwelling on future scenarios and thoughts that inherently have no reality because, quite honestly, they don’t exist. The consequence of this commitment to the “now” is focus on the task at hand and the inevitable quality that follows. I’m not sure if I could have personally gotten to that point if I hadn’t committed myself to education via Hesse’s book. [source]

Igor Debatur

Question: What five books would you recommend to young people interested in your career path & why? Answer: The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche The Castle by Franz Kafka 1984 by George Orwell and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley [source]

Cover unavailable

59

Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Gabriel GarcÍA MÁRquez and Edith Grossma

4.2

Memories of My Melancholy Whores is Gabriel García Márquez’s first work of fiction in ten years, written at the height of his powers, the Spanish edition of which Ilan Stavans called, “Masterful. Erotic. As hypnotizing as it is disturbing” (Los Angeles Times).

On the eve of his ninetieth birthday, our unnamed protagonist–an undistinguished journalist and lifelong bachelor–decides to give himself “t

Cover unavailable

60

Quo Vadis

Henryk Sienkiewicz, W.S. Kuniczak

4.2

This glorious saga unfolds against the backdrop of ancient Rome--from the Forum to the Coliseum, from banquet halls to summer retreats in Naples, from the luxurious houses of the nobility to the hovels of the poor, Quo Vadis richly depicts a place and time still captivating to the modern imagination. This radiant translation by W.S. Kuniczak restores the original glory and richness of master story

Cover unavailable

61

Growth of the Soil

Knut Hamsun

4.2

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the

Recommended by Caterina Fake and Roy Jacobsen.

Roy Jacobsen

As every Russian writer is rolled out of Gogol’s coat, every Norwegian one is an offspring of Hamsun, admittedly or otherwise [source]

Cover unavailable

62

Runaway

Alice Munro

4.2

The incomparable Alice Munro’s bestselling and rapturously acclaimed Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises, from the title story about a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband, to three stories about a woman named Juliet and the emotions that complicate the luster of her intimate relationships. I

Cover unavailable

63

Baltasar and Blimunda

Jose Saramago, Giovanni Pontiero

4.2

From the recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature, a “brilliant...enchanting novel” (New York Times Book Review) of romance, deceit, religion, and magic set in eighteenth-century Portugal at the height of the Inquisition. National bestseller. Translated by Giovanni Pontiero.

When King and Church exercise absolute power what happens to the dreams of ordinary people? In early eighteenth centur

Cover unavailable

64

Cannery Row

John Steinbeck

4.2

Cannery Row is a book without much of a plot. Rather, it is an attempt to capture the feeling and people of a place, the cannery district of Monterey, California, which is populated by a mix of those down on their luck and those who choose for other reasons not to live "up the hill" in the more respectable area of town. The flow of the main plot is frequently interrupted by short vignettes that in

Cover unavailable

65

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories

Alice Munro

4.2

A superb new collection from one of our best and best-loved writers. Nine stories draw us immediately into that special place known as Alice Munro territory-a place where an unexpected twist of events or a suddenly recaptured memory can illumine the arc of an entire life.
The fate of a strong-minded housekeeper with a "frizz of reddish hair," just entering the dangerous country of old-maidhood, is

Recommended by Ron Conway, Ryan Holiday, David Cancel, and 1 others.

Lauren Mechling

Any Alice Munro story is a horrid story to boil down to an elevator pitch. I still don’t even know what the story Nettles is about, except I know that it’s about a woman who feels at home in the Alice Munro universe: she’s a writer, she’s a Canadian, she’s a mother, she’s sexually alive. [source]

Cover unavailable

66

Light in August

William Faulkner, Noel Polk, Joseph Blotner

4.1

Light in August, a novel that contrasts stark tragedy with hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality, which features some of Faulkner’s most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, a lonely outcast haunted by visions of Confederate glory; and Joe Christmas, a desperate, enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed

Cover unavailable

67

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

Jose Saramago

4.1

The year: 1936. Europe dances while an invidious dictator establishes himself in Portugal. The city: Lisbon—gray, colorless, chimerical. Ricardo Reis, a doctor and poet, has just come home after 16 years in Brazil.

Recommended by Edith Grossman.

Edith Grossman

I’ll tell you why I did that. A few years ago, I discovered two authors whom I confess I had known nothing about before, and I discovered them in translation. One was WG Sebald and the other was José Saramago. It was the shock of my life. I was stunned by The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. I read it in Giovanni Pontiero’s translation and I was so overwhelmed by the book – both by Saramago’s vision of the world and by the beauty and skill of the translation – that I started to devour Saramago novels, one after the other. [source]

Cover unavailable

68

Narcissus and Goldmund

Hermann Hesse, Ursule Molinaro

4.1

Narcissus and Goldmund tells the story of two medieval men whose characters are diametrically opposite: Narcissus, an ascetic monk firm in his religious commitment, and Goldmund, a romantic youth hungry for knowledge and worldly experience. First published in 1930, Hesse's novel remains a moving and pointed exploration of the conflict between the life of the spirit and the life of the flesh. It is

Cover unavailable

69

The Jungle Book (AmazonClassics Edition)

Rudyard Kipling

4.1

Orphaned as a baby, human-boy Mowgli is adopted by wolves, befriended by Baloo the bear, and educated in the wonders and dangers of the Indian jungle. But the adventures of The Jungle Book don’t end with the young man-cub and his unusual new family. Through tales of Kotick the White Seal, Rikki-tikki-tavi the mongoose, and others, readers learn about courage and survival, rules and order, principl

Cover unavailable

70

Herzog

Saul Bellow, Philip Roth

4.1

This is the story of Moses Herzog, a great sufferer, joker, mourner, and charmer. Although his life steadily disintegrates around him - he has failed as a writer and teacher, as a father, and has lost the affection of his wife to his best friend - Herzog sees himself as a survivor, both of his private disasters and those of the age. He writes unsent letters to friends and enemies, colleagues and f

Recommended by Ruth Wisse.

Ruth Wisse

What Bellow does — magically almost — is to make the schlemiel into a liberal humanist. [source]

Cover unavailable

71

Death in Venice

Thomas Mann, Michael Henry Heim, Michael Cunningham

4.1

The world-famous masterpiece by Nobel laureate Thomas Mann -- here in a new translation by Michael Henry Heim.

Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead

Cover unavailable

72

Red Sorghum

Mo Yan, Howard Goldblatt

4.1

Spanning three generations, this novel of family and myth is told through a series of flashbacks that depict events of staggering horror set against a landscape of gemlike beauty, as the Chinese battle both Japanese invaders and each other in the turbulent 1930s. A legend in China, where it won major literary awards and inspired an Oscar-nominated film, Red Sorghum is a book in which fable and his

Cover unavailable

73

Pygmalion

George Bernard Shaw

4.1

One of George Bernard Shaw's best-known plays, Pygmalion was a rousing success on the London and New York stages, an entertaining motion picture and a great hit with its musical version, My Fair Lady. An updated and considerably revised version of the ancient Greek legend of Pygmalion and Galatea, the 20th-century story pokes fun at the antiquated British class system.

In Shaw's clever adaptation,

Cover unavailable

74

The Hunger Angel

Herta Müller, Philip Boehm

4.1

It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a camp in the Soviet Union. Leo would spend the next five years in a coke processing plant, shoveling coal, lugging bricks, mixing mortar, and battling the relentless calculus of hunger that governed the labor colony: one shovel load of coal is worth one gram of bread.

In her new novel, Nob

75

The Gulag Archipelago: (Abridged edition)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

4.1

The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, a vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators and also of heroism, a Stalinist anti-world at the heart of the Soviet Union where the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair.

The work is based on the testimony of some two hundred survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn

Recommended by Jordan B Peterson.

Jordan B Peterson

"The Gulag Archipelago" audiobook is available now in the UK (https://t.co/FwqDKSEp2w) with a forward narrated by me as well as a Q&A with myself and Ignat Solzhenitsyn at the end of the book that I believe you'll enjoy! Who here has previously read the book? https://t.co/SHldoeI0sY [source]

Cover unavailable

76

A Personal Matter

Kenzaburo Oë, John Nathan

4.1

Kenzaburō Ōe, the winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature, is internationally acclaimed as one of the most important and influential post-World War II writers, known for his powerful accounts of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and his own struggle to come to terms with a mentally handicapped son. The Swedish Academy lauded Ōe for his "poetic force [that] creates an imagined world where life

Cover unavailable

77

Of Love and Other Demons

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

4.1

On her twelfth birthday, Sierva Maria, the only child of a decaying noble family in an eighteenth-century South American seaport, is bitten by a rabid dog. Believed to be possessed, she is brought to a convent for observation. And into her cell stumbles Father Cayetano Delaura, who has already dreamed about a girl with hair trailing after her like a bridal train. As he tends to her with holy water

78

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Pablo Neruda, W. S. Merwin, Cristina Garcia

4.1

When it appeared in 1924, this work launched into the international spotlight a young and unknown poet whose writings would ignite a generation. W. S. Merwin's incomparable translation faces the original Spanish text. Now in a black-spine Classics edition with an introduction by Cristina Garcia, this book stands as an essential collection that continues to inspire lovers and poets around the world

79

Flights

Olga Tokarczuk

4.1

From the incomparably original Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, Flights interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. Chopin's heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly des

Cover unavailable

80

Kristin Lavransdatter (Kristin Lavransdatter, #1-3)

Sigrid Undset, Tiina Nunnally, Brad Leithauser

4.1

In her great historical epic Kristin Lavransdatter, set in fourteenth-century Norway, Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset tells the life story of one passionate and headstrong woman. Painting a richly detailed backdrop, Undset immerses readers in the day-to-day life, social conventions, and political and religious undercurrents of the period. Now in one volume, Tiina Nunnally's award-winning definitive t

Recommended by Emily Vanderwerff.

Emily Vanderwerff

Holy hell, the way time passes in this book, like it's slipping through the characters' fingers! Undset darts among all of their perspectives so deftly too. I am about halfway done, and this might end up one of my favorite books. [source]

Cover unavailable

81

Mario Vargas Llosa

4.0

En 1962, La ciudad y los perros recibía el Premio Biblioteca Breve. Así comenzaba la andadura literaria de esta obra considerada una de las mejores novelas en español del siglo XX.Los personajes de La ciudad y los perros, un grupo de jóvenes que se «educan» en una disciplina militar implacable y violenta, aprenden a sobrevivir en un ambiente en el que están muy arraigados los prejuicios raciales y

87

All the Names

Jose Saramago, Margaret Costa

4.0

Senhor José is a low-grade clerk in the city's Central Registry, where the living and the dead share the same shelf space. A middle-aged bachelor, he has no interest in anything beyond the certificates of birth, marriage, divorce, and death, that are his daily routine. But one day, when he comes across the records of an anonymous young woman, something happens to him. Obsessed, Senhor José sets of

Recommended by Magda Marcu.

Magda Marcu

I also have a soft spot for Jose Saramago, specifically “All the names” and “Death with Interruptions”. [source]

Cover unavailable

88

Kim

Rudyard Kipling

4.0

Kim is set in an imperialistic world; a world strikingly masculine, dominated by travel, trade and adventure, a world in which there is no question of the division between white and non-white.

Two men - a boy who grows into early manhood and an old ascetic priest, the lama - are at the center of the novel. A quest faces them both. Born in India, Kim is nevertheless white, a sahib. While he wants to

Recommended by Mark Tully and Stephen Evans.

Mark Tully

Kim is the story of a young boy who falls in with a Tibetan lama and joins in with the lama’s search for his spiritual goal. I have always loved the book because of Kipling’s wonderful writing. I think it is Kipling’s greatest book. I also love it because the descriptions of India at that time are so vivid. Bear in mind what I said earlier about the way that the British were, on the whole, encouraged not to get too closely involved with India – encouraged to live separate lives. One of the great features of Kipling’s genius is the way that he did learn so much, and did get so involved in the life of India and Indians. [source]

Stephen Evans

This is the fictionalised account of the Great Game, telling the story of an Anglo-Indian boy who is recruited by British spy masters in India during the latter part of the 19th century. But the book adds up to far more than that. Kim’s nickname is ‘little friend of all the world’, because he straddles Western and Indian cultures. The book is a sympathetic and sensitive attempt, by an Englishman who knew India very well, to portray this extraordinary land and its complex society. Perhaps the most impressive and moving character is a Tibetan lama who takes Kim on a mystical pilgrimage. Interestingly, although Kipling is seen by many now as an arch-imperialist (and he was, in some ways), his sympathies for India and Indian people are very real. A lot of Indians, long after independence, still regard Kim as a truly great book about their country. [source]

Cover unavailable

89

Too Much Happiness

Alice Munro

4.0

In these ten stories, Alice Munro once again renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.

Ten superb new stories by one of our most beloved and admired writers—the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize.

In the first story a young wife and mother re

90

Palace Walk (The Cairo Trilogy, #1)

Naguib Mahfouz

4.0

Volume I of the masterful Cairo Trilogy. A national best-seller in both hardcover and paperback, it introduces the engrossing saga of a Muslim family in Cairo during Egypt's occupation by British forces in the early 1900s.

Cover unavailable

91

The Grass Is Singing

Doris Lessing

4.0

Set in South Africa under white rule, Doris Lessing's first novel is both a riveting chronicle of human disintegration and a beautifully understated social critique.

Mary Turner is a self-confident, independent young woman who becomes the depressed, frustrated wife of an ineffectual, unsuccessful farmer. Little by little the ennui of years on the farm work their slow poison, and Mary's despair pro

Cover unavailable

92

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

Mario Vargas Llosa

4.0

Mario Vargas Llosa's brilliant, multilayered novel is set in the Lima of the author's youth, where a young student named Marito is toiling away in the news department of a local radio station. His young life is disrupted by two arrivals.

The first is his aunt Julia, recently divorced and thirteen years older, with whom he begins a secret affair. The second is a manic radio scriptwriter named Pedro

Cover unavailable

93

Life and Times of Michael K

J. M. Coetzee

4.0

In a South Africa torn by civil war, Michael K sets out to take his mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. Life and Times of Michael K goes to the centre of human experience - the need for an interior, spiritual life, for

Recommended by Samantha Harvey.

Samantha Harvey

An absolutely devastating read from the first page, but you can’t put it down. It’s a terrible and beautiful story about a man whose mother is dying. [source]

94

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

John Steinbeck

4.0

To hear the speech of the real America, to smell the grass and the trees, to see the colors and the light— these were John Steinbeck's goals as he set out, at the age of fifty-eight, to rediscover the country he had been writing about for so many years.

Recommended by Richard Branson.

Richard Branson

Founder/Virgin Group

I wanted to include an older book that has been on my bookshelves for decades, and is a less obvious example of reading to lead. John Steinbeck took a road trip with his dog Charley for company across the length and breadth of the US, and recorded what he saw, who he met and what he learned. With his inimitable charm, it opens your eyes to the small pleasures of life, and the great wonders of humanity in the little moments that matter. Less a direction on how to lead, you could see it as a subtle guide on how to live. [source]

Cover unavailable

95

A House for Mr. Biswas

V S Naipaul

4.0

The early masterpiece of V. S. Naipaul’s brilliant career, A House for Mr. Biswas is an unforgettable story inspired by Naipaul's father that has been hailed as one of the twentieth century's finest novels.

In his forty-six short years, Mr. Mohun Biswas has been fighting against destiny to achieve some semblance of independence, only to face a lifetime of calamity. Shuttled from one residence to an

Recommended by Barack Obama.

Barack Obama

Former USA President

As 2018 draws to a close, I’m continuing a favorite tradition of mine and sharing my year-end lists. It gives me a moment to pause and reflect on the year through the books I found most thought-provoking, inspiring, or just plain loved. It also gives me a chance to highlight talented authors – some who are household names and others who you may not have heard of before. Here’s my best of 2018 list. [source]

96

The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings

Octavio Paz

4.0

Octavio Paz has long been acknowledged as Mexico's foremost writer and critic. In this international classic, Paz has written one of the most enduring and powerful works ever created on Mexico and its people, character, and culture. Compared to Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses for its trenchant analysis, this collection contains his most famous work, "The Labyrinth of Solitude," a beauti

97

The Frog and Toad Collection Box Set (I Can Read Book 2) Frog and Toad All Year / Frog and Toad Are Friends / Frog and Toad Together

Arnold Lobel

4.0

Frog and Toad are always there for each other -- just as best friends should be. From sledding in winter to eating ice cream on hot summer days, these two friends have fun together the whole year round

Recommended by Peter Worley.

Peter Worley

There’s a wonderful story where Frog and Toad are trying to work out what it means to be brave. [source]

Cover unavailable

98

Tortilla Flat

John Steinbeck, Jim Taylor

4.0

"Steinbeck is an artist; and he tells the stories of these lovable thieves and adulterers with a gentle and poetic purity of heart and of prose." -- New York Herald Tribune

Adopting the structure and themes of the Arthurian legend, Steinbeck created a "Camelot" on a shabby hillside above the town of Monterey,California and peopled it with a colorful band of knights. At the center of the tale is Dan

Cover unavailable

99

The Piano Teacher

Elfriede Jelinek, Joachim Neugroschel

4.0

The Piano Teacher, the most famous novel of Elfriede Jelinek, who was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, is a shocking, searing, aching portrait of a woman bound between a repressive society and her darkest desires.
Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the prestigious and formal Vienna Conservatory, who still lives with her domineering and possessive mother. Her life appears to be a seamless

Cover unavailable

100

100 Songs

Bob Dylan

4.0