Essentials
Where to Start: Essential Reads
If you only read a handful of books from this whole site, start here.
24 books · ranked
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1
Pride and Prejudice
Wit, manners and misjudged first impressions in Regency England — the template for the modern romantic comedy and still the most quoted of Austen's novels.
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2
Dracula
Letters and diaries trace a creeping invasion by an ancient predator; the novel that fixed the vampire in our imagination.
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3
The Waste Land
The fractured, allusive poem that became the emblem of modernism; difficult, dazzling, endlessly studied.
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4
The Hobbit
A comfortable hobbit is swept into an adventure with dwarves and a dragon; the cosy doorway into Middle-earth.
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5
Rebecca
A new bride is haunted by her husband's glamorous dead wife in a brooding country house; gothic suspense at its finest.
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6
1984
Total surveillance, rewritten history and a man who dares to think for himself; the defining dystopia.
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7
Charlotte's Web
A pig, a clever spider and a barnyard friendship that beats death; the gentle classic about loyalty.
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8
Silent Spring
The book that exposed the cost of pesticides and helped launch the environmental movement; calm and devastating.
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9
Dune
Politics, religion and ecology on a desert planet that holds the key to the galaxy; the towering epic of the genre.
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10
In Cold Blood
A Kansas farm-family murder reconstructed in novelistic detail; the book that created the true-crime genre.
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11
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Seven generations of one family in a town where the magical is everyday; the defining novel of magical realism.
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12
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Sharp, cool essays on 1960s America; the book that set the standard for the personal essay.
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13
Ways of Seeing
How we look at images, and who benefits; a short, radical book that changed art criticism.
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14
Beloved
A formerly enslaved mother is haunted, literally, by the past she escaped; a towering, harrowing masterpiece.
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15
Watchmen
Flawed, ageing superheroes in an alternate Cold War; the graphic novel that proved comics could be literature.
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16
A Brief History of Time
Black holes, the Big Bang and the shape of the cosmos for the general reader; the bestseller that made physics fashionable.
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17
Maus
Spiegelman recounts his father Vladek's experience as a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz, told through interviews in the present day and rendered as comics in which Jews are mice and Nazis are cats. The two-volume work won a Pulitzer Prize and is one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust in any medium, as well as a meditation on the act of bearing witness.
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18
Sophie's World
A teenager receives mysterious lessons that walk through the whole history of Western philosophy; a story and a course in one.
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19
The Power of Now
A guide to living in the present moment; the bestselling cornerstone of modern mindfulness.
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20
A Walk in the Woods
Two unfit friends attempt the Appalachian Trail; very funny, with real love for wild places.
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21
Interpreter of Maladies
Stories of Indian and Indian-American lives between cultures; a Pulitzer-winning debut of great delicacy.
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22
The Omnivore's Dilemma
Where our food really comes from, traced through four meals; the book that changed how many people eat.
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23
The Hunger Games
A girl volunteers for a televised fight to the death to save her sister; a propulsive, sharp dystopian thriller.
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24
Wolf Hall
Thomas Cromwell's rise in the court of Henry VIII; political intrigue rendered in extraordinary close-up prose.