50 Amazing and Essential Novels to Enrich Your Library

I am sure that if I asked you to to create a list of your favourite books, I would be able to get a good insight towards what your personality is like - like a window to who you are.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us - Wystan Hugh Auden

And prolific blogger Leo Babuta from Zen Habits fame has provided a great insight into what he considers to be ‘50 Amazing and Essential Novels to Enrich Your Library‘.

We have just provided the simple list here - but you can visit Leo’s blog for the reasons for each suggested title.

1. King Lear, by Shakespeare.
2. Hamlet, by Shakespeare.
3. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
4. Tender Is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
5. A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, by James Joyce
6. Ulysses, by James Joyce
7. Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
8. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut.
9. Neuromancer, by William Gibson
10. All Tomorrow’s Parties, by William Gibson.
11. Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson.
12. Slow Man, by J.M. Coetzee.
13. The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler.
14. Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem.
15. Gun, with Occasional Music, by Jonathan Lethem.
16. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro.
17. When We Were Orphans, by Kazuo Ishiguro.
18. Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami.
19. Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett.
20. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, by Douglas Adams.
21. The Discworld Series, by Terry Pratchett.
22. The Stand, by Stephen King.
23. Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling.
24. The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings series, by J.R.R. Tolkein.
25. High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby.
26. About a Boy, by Nick Hornby.
27. Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen.
28. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera.
29. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy.
30. Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoyevsky.
31. The Broker, by John Grisham.
32. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger.
33. Aztec, by Gary Jennings.
34. Creation, by Gore Vidal.
35. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee.
36. Shibumi, by Trevanian.
37. Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris.
38. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck.
39. Deep Blue Good-by, by John D. MacDonald.
40. Watership Down, by Richard Adams.
41. Lolita, by Vladamir Nobokov.
42. Sometimes a Great Notion, by Ken Kesey.
43. Life of Pi, by Yann Martel.
44. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon.
45. Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen.
46. The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
47. Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier.
48. Noble House, by James Clavell.
49. Don Quixote, by Cervantes.

[ Zen Habits ]

About Chung: Chung Nguyen-Le is a resident blogger at icrylab writing posts which help advise and inspire writers. More information on Chung is available on his personal website, http://www.cnlifeasitis.com

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