A student recently made the mistake of asking me for a reading list comprised of the most important books I’ve read. Joke’s on me, I guess, as I thought it would be easy. The list kept growing the more and more I thought about it! After winnowing down the numbers, here are the books I’d have to save in case of a fire. I hope my house never burns down!
If you know me personally, you can probably guess why certain books appear here and why they’re categorized a certain way. If you’re interested in the reasoning behind each, just ask.
Anyway, were is the list, categorized and in no particular order. Love some of these books or want to add some? Let us know in the comments!
Fiction
The Iliad – Homer
The Odyssey – Homer
The Lord of the Rings trilogy – J.R.R. Tolkien
The Lightning Thief series – Rick Riordan
The Hunger Games series – Suzanne Collins
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series – Douglass Adams
The Dark Tower series – Stephen King
His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass) series – Phillip Pullman
Close Range – Annie Proux
The Plague – Albert Camus
The Road – Cormac McCarthy
Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac – Gabrielle Zevin
Ender’s Game series – Orson Scott Card
Interpreter of Maladies – Jumpa Lahiri
The Namesake – Jumpa Lahiri
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – Jonathan Saffron Foer
Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
Looking for Alaska – John Green
Ishmael – Daniel Quinn
1984 – George Orwell
Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
Beloved – Toni Morrison
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austin
Much Ado About Nothing – William Shakespeare
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
