50 Books To Read Before You Die
If books are your best friends, I’ve about a thousand friends just waiting for me to get home. If books are teleportals, I’ve travelled all across the world and recently even to Mars. If reading is the only therapy you need, here’s a list that’ll cure everything that ails you. Presenting, the 50 books you must read before you die.
#1 1984
By: George Orwell (Penguin)
Genre: Social Science Fiction/Dystopian Fiction
“War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance
is Strength”
#2 Little Women
By: Louisa May Alcott (Vintage Classics)
Genre: Coming of Age/ Bildungsroman
“Have regular hours for work and play; make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well. Then youth will be delightful, old age will bring few regrets, and life will become a beautiful success, in spite of poverty.”
#3 Catch 22
By: Joseph Heller (Vintage Books)
Genre: Satire/Historical Fiction
“Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.”
#4 To Kill A Mockingbird
By: Harper Lee (Arrow Books)
Genre: Coming of Age/ Bildungsroman
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
#5 The Help
By: Kathryn Stockett (Penguin)
Genre: Southern Fiction
“You is kind. You is smart. You is important.”
#6 The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
By: Douglas Adams (Random House)
Genre: Comic Science Fiction
“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, m
ind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
#7 One Hundred Years Of Solitude
By: Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Penguin)
Genre: Fantastical Drama
“The world must be all fucked up,” he said then, “when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.”
#8 A Clockwork Orange
By: Anthony Burgess (Penguin)
Genre: Dystopian Fiction
“It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.”
#9 The Kite Runner
By: Khaled Hosseini (Bloomsbury Publishing)
Genre: Historical Drama
“It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime.”
#10 White Fang
By: Jack London (Rupa & Co)
Genre: Adventure Fiction
“White Fang knew the law well: to oppress the weak and obey the strong.”
#11 Pride And Prejudice
By: Jane Austen (Rupa Publications)
Genre: Romance
“A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”
#12 The Great Gatsby
By: F. Scott Fitzgerald (Wisehouse Classics)
Genre: Historical Drama
“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
#13 Lolita
By: Vladimir Nabokov (Penguin)
Genre: Tragicomedy
“We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.”
#14 Gone With The Wind
By: Margaret Mitchell (Macmillan)
Genre: Romace/Drama
“Life’s under no obligation to give us what we expect. We take what we get and are thankful it’s no worse than it is.”
#15 Memoirs Of A Geisha
By: Arthur Golden (Penguin)
Genre: Historical Fiction/Drama
“This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes they consume us completely.”
#16 The Catcher In The Rye
By: J.D. Salinger (Penguin)
Genre: Coming of Age
“I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It’s nice.”
#17 The Godfather
By: Mario Puzo (Random House)
Genre: Crime Fiction
“I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
#18 Hamlet
By: William Shakespeare (Fingerprint Publishing)
Genre: Tragedy
“Doubt thou the stars are fire;Doubt that the sun doth move;Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love.”
#19 Frankenstein 
By: Mary Shelley (Peacock)
Genre: Gothic Fiction
“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”
#20 Of Mice And Men
By: John Steinbeck (Penguin)
Genre: Tragedy
“Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”
#21 Wuthering Heights
By: Emily Bronte (Fingerprint Publishing)
Genre: Gothic Fiction/Romance
“He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
#22 The Color Purple
By: Alice Walker (Orion Publishing)
Genre: Epistolary Novel/ Fiction
“Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.”
#23 The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo
By: Steig Larsson (Quercus)
Genre: Psychological Thriller
“I can be a regular bitch. Just try me.”
#24 Anna Karenina
By: Leo Tolstoy (Penguin)
Genre: Drama/Romance
“If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.”
#25 Les Miserables
By: Victor Hugo (Penguin)
Genre: Realism/Historical Fiction
“To love another person is to see the face of God.”
#26 Where The Wild Things Are
By: Maurice Sendak (Random House)
Genre: Children’s Literature
“There should be a place where only the things you want to happen, happen.”
#27 Delirium
By: Lauren Oliver (HarperCollins)
Genre: Dystopian Fiction/Romance
“I’d rather die my way than live yours.”
#28 Breakfast At Tiffany’s
By: Truman Capote (Penguin)
Genre: Comedy/Drama/Romance
“Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.”
#29 The Age Of Innocence
By: Edith Wharton (Peacock)
Genre: Romance
“Women ought to be free – as free as we are,’ he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.”
#30 Norwegian Wood 
By: Haruki Murukami (Randome House)
Genre: Romance/Bildungsroman
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
#31 The Odyssey
By: Homer (Penguin)
Genre: Poetry
“Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man.”
#32 The God Of Small Things
By: Arundhati Roy (Penguin)
Genre: Fiction/Drama
“It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that is purloined. ”
#33 Requiem For A Dream
By: Hubert Selby Jr. (Penguin)
Genre: Tragedy
“Eventually we all have to accept full and total responsibility for our actions, everything we have done, and have not done. ”
#34 Harry Potter And The Philosophers Stone
By: J.K. Rowling (Bloomsbury)
Genre: Fantasy Literature
“There is no good and evil, there is only power and those too weak to seek it.”
#35 The Diary Of A Young Girl
By: Anne Frank (General Press)
Genre: Autobiography
“I wish to go on living even after my death.”
#36 One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
By: Ken Kesey (Penguin)
Genre: Modern Fiction/Drama
“Good writin’ ain’t necessarily good readin’.”
#37 Charlotte’s Web
By: E.B. White (HarperCollins)
Genre: Children’s Fiction
“It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.”
#38 Animal Farm
By: George Orwell (Penguin)
Genre: Political Satire
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
#39 Vanity Fair
By: William Thackeray (HarperCollins)
Genre: Social Satire
“Life is a mirror: if you frown at it, it frowns back; if you smile, it returns the greeting.”
#40 The Prophet
By: Kahlil Gibran (Macmillan)
Genre: Prophetic Literature
“To belittle, you have to be little.”
#41 Jane Eyre
By: Charlotte Bronte (HarperCollins)
Genre: Gothic Romance
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
#42 Great Expectations
By: Charles Dickens (Penguin)
Genre: Bildungsroman
“The broken heart. You think you will die, but you just keep living, day after day after terrible day.”
#43 Brave New World
By: Aldous Huxley (Random House)
Genre: Dystopian Fiction
“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
#44 Tess of D’Urbervilles
By: Thomas Hardy (Penguin)
Genre: Tragedy
“A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.”
#45 Madame Bovary
By: Gustav Flaubert (Penguin)
Genre: Realism
“An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.”
#46 Metamorphosis
By: Franz Kafka (Fingerprint Publishing)
Genre: Modern Fiction
“He was a tool of the boss, without brains or backbone.”
#47 A Tale Of Two Cities
By: Charles Dickens (Penguin)
Genre: Historical Fiction
“I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul.”
#48 War And Peace
By: Leo Tolstoy (Penguin)
Genre: Philosophical Literature
“Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.”
#49 The Count Of Monte Cristo
By: Alexandre Dumas
Genre: Historical Fiction
“All human wisdom is contained in these two words – Wait and Hope”
#50 The Wind In The Willow
By: Kenneth Grahame (Penguin)
Genre: Children’s Fiction
“There’s nothing––absolutely nothing––half so much worth doing as messing about in boats.”
