- Featured
- Reading Challenge Pick
Romance
Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy misread each other for most of a novel that invented the modern love story.
Essentials
Must-Read Books
The starting library — the novels and nonfiction we return to, recommend and reread most often.
13 books in this list
Every reader deserves a shelf they can begin from. These are the titles we hand to people who ask where to start, chosen for range as much as reputation: a comedy of manners, a dystopia, two American classics, a Latin American landmark and a single-volume history of our species.
- Featured
- Reading Challenge Pick
Science Fiction
1984
by George Orwell
Winston Smith rewrites the past for a living, until he decides to keep one honest thought of his own.
- Featured
- Editor's Pick
- Reading Challenge Pick
Literary Fiction
To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
A small-town Alabama childhood, a courtroom, and a father who tries to explain both to his daughter.
- Editor's Pick
Literary Fiction
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A bootlegger throws parties for a woman across the bay, and Nick Carraway watches the whole thing come apart.
- Reading Challenge Pick
Literary Fiction
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez
Seven generations of the Buendía family rise and repeat themselves in the invented town of Macondo.
- Reading Challenge Pick
Literary Fiction
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Sethe escaped slavery years ago. The house she lives in has not let her leave it behind.
- Reading Challenge Pick
Literary Fiction
Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
An orphaned governess refuses, repeatedly, to be made smaller than she is.
Fantasy
The Lord of the Rings
by J. R. R. Tolkien
One ring, one long walk, and the book that built modern fantasy around it.
- Reading Challenge Pick
Science Fiction
The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
In the Republic of Gilead, Offred records what she is not allowed to say out loud.
- Featured
- Editor's Pick
- Reading Challenge Pick
Nonfiction
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by Yuval Noah Harari
A single-volume argument about how shared fictions let one human species run the planet.
Nonfiction
Thinking, Fast and Slow
by Daniel Kahneman
Two systems of thought, and a lifetime of experiments showing where the fast one fails.
Biography & Memoir
Man's Search for Meaning
by Viktor E. Frankl
A psychiatrist's account of the camps, and the therapy he built from what he observed there.
Biography & Memoir
The Diary of a Young Girl
by Anne Frank
Two years in a hidden annexe in Amsterdam, written by a teenager who wanted to be a writer.
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