Must Reads?

Are there certain books we all should read? It's a fun conversation. Here, for my records, are the ones I think we'd all do well to try. Of course, like all good arbitrary lists, the total is 100.

It is also hierarchical, in a snooty way, with definite presumptions of taste. Truly, there's something for everyone.

Novels

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

Don Quixote by Cervantes

Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Old Goriot by Honore de Balzac

Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo

The Plague by Albert Camus

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong

Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih

Poetry

A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud

Beowulf

Eagle or Sun? by Octavio Paz

Epic of Gilgamesh

Monkey’s Raincoat by Matsuo Basho

The Inferno by Dante

La Jeune Parque by Paul Valery

Mathnawi by Rumi

The Odyssey by Homer

Poet in New York by Gabriel Garcia Lorca

Selected Poems of Du Fu

Selected Poems of Li Bai

Sister My Life by Boris Pasternak

Two-Part Prelude by William Wordsworth

The Wasteland by TS Eliot

Plays

The Bacchae by Euripides

Betrayal by Harold Pinter

The China Tree by Isam Mahfouz

The Clouds by Aristophanes

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka

Faust Part One by Goethe

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Life is a Dream by Calderon La Barca

The Misanthrope by Moliere

No Dramas by Zeami

Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

Recognition of Shakuntala by Kalidasa

Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Short Stories

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor

“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

Complete Short Stories by Franz Kafka

The Decameron by Boccaccio

Diary of a Madman by Lu Xun

Ficciones by Jorge Borges

“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson

The Nose and The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol

Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa 

Selected Short Stories by Edgar Allen Poe

“A Simple Heart” by Gustave Flaubert

Thousand and One Nights

Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Essays and Miscellaneous Literary Works 

The Apology by Plato

“Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

Hojoki by Chomei

Essays in Idleness by Yoshida Kenko

Maxims by La Rochefoucauld

A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift

“Portrait of an Anti-Semite” by Jean-Paul Sartre

“On the Pleasure of Hating” by William Hazlitt

On The Shortness of Life by Seneca

Selected Essays by Montaigne

Selected Essays by George Orwell

“Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

“Why Look at Animals?” by John Berger

Graphic Novels

Akira by Katshuiro Otomo

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller

Bone by Jeff Smith

The Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Kim Deitch

The Contract with God Trilogy by Will Eisner

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware

Maus by Art Spiegelman

Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories by Gilbert Hernandez

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

The Push Man and Other Stories by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Saga by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples

Sandman by Neil Gaiman

Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson

Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

Comics

A Right to Be Hostile by Aaron McGruder

Bloom County: The Complete Library by Berkeley Breathed

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

The Complete Far Side by Gary Larson

Copper by Kazu Kibushi

FoxTrot: The Works – Assorted FoxTrot by Bill Amend

Gordo’s Critters by Gus Arriola

Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips by Walt Kelly

So Many Splendid Sundays! by Winsor McCay

There Is a Heppy Lend Furfur Away by George Herriman