It’s well understood that reading improves your focus and concentration and expands your imagination but reading also broadens your understanding of the world in general. To that end, here are 100 books that every person should read before they die.
- “1984” by George Orwell
- “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking
- “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” by Dave Eggers
- “A Long Way Gone” by Ishmael Beah
- “A Series of Unfortunate Events #1: The Bad Beginning: The Short-Lived Edition” by Lemony Snicket (aka Daniel Handler)
- “A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’Engle
- “Alice Munro: Selected Stories” by Alice Munro
- “Alice in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll
- “All the President’s Men” by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
- “Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir” by Frank McCourt
- “Are You There, God? It’s me, Margaret” by Judy Blume
- “Bel Canto” by Ann Patchett
- “Beloved” by Toni Morrison
- “Born To Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen” by Christopher McDougall
- “Breath, Eyes, Memory” by Edwidge Danticat
- “Catch-22” by Joseph Heller
- “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” by Roald Dahl
- “Charlotte’s Web” by E.B. White
- “Cutting For Stone” by Abraham Verghese
- “Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead” by Brene Brown
- “Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Book 1” by Jeff Kinney
- “Dune” by Frank Herbert
- “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury
- “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream” by Hunter S. Thompson
- “Gone Girl” by Gillian Flynn
- “Goodnight Moon” by Margaret Wise Brown
- “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens
- “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” by Jared M. Diamond
- “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” by J.K. Rowling
- “In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote
- “Interpreter of Maladies” by Jhumpa Lahiri
- “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison
- “Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth” by Chris Ware
- “Kitchen Confidential” by Anthony Bourdain
- “Life After Life” by Kate Atkinson
- “Little House on the Prairie” by Laura Ingalls Wilder
- “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov
- “Love in the Time of Cholera” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- “Love Medicine” by Louise Erdrich
- “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl
- “Me Talk Pretty One Day” by David Sedaris
- “Middlesex” by Jeffrey Eugenides
- “Midnight’s Children” by Salman Rushdie
- “Moneyball” by Michael Lewis
- “Of Human Bondage” by W. Somerset Maugham
- “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac
- “Out of Africa” by Isak Dinesen
- “Persepolis” by Marjane Satrapi
- “Portnoy’s Complaint” by Philip Roth
- “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen
- “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson
- “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut
- “Team of Rivals” by Doris Kearns Goodwin
- “The Age of Innocence” by Edith Wharton
- “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” by Michael Chabon
- “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
- “The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak
- “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Diaz
- “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger
- “The Color of Water” by James McBride
- “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen
- “The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America” by Erik Larson
- “The Diary of Anne Frank” by Anne Frank
- “The Fault in Our Stars” by John Green
- “The Giver” by Lois Lowry
- “The Golden Compass: His Dark Materials” by Philip Pullman
- “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood
- “The House At Pooh Corner” by A. A. Milne
- “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins
- “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot
- “The Liars’ Club: A Memoir” by Mary Karr
- “The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1)” by Rick Riordan
- “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- “The Long Goodbye” by Raymond Chandler
- “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” by Lawrence Wright
- “The Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien
- “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales” by Oliver Sacks
- “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” by Michael Pollan
- “The Phantom Tollbooth” by Norton Juster
- “The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel” by Barbara Kingsolver
- “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York” by Robert A. Caro
- “The Right Stuff” by Tom Wolfe
- “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy
- “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt
- “The Shining” by Stephen King
- “The Stranger” by Albert Camus
- “The Sun Also Rises” by Ernest Hemingway
- “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien
- “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” by Eric Carle
- “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame
- “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel” by Haruki Murakami
- “The World According to Garp” by John Irving
- “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion
- “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe
- “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee
- “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption” by Laura Hillenbrand
- “Valley of the Dolls” by Jacqueline Susann
- “Where the Sidewalk Ends” by Shel Silverstein
- “Where the Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak