Books to Read Before I Die: The Fiction Edition

Last year, I put out a call on Facebook for recommendations of books for the “ultimate reading list,” both great literature and non-fiction texts, and people responded in a big way. I started a list and pretty quickly became overwhelmed, and I put the project aside. This past December, Facebook’s nostalgic/annoying “On This Day” feature reminded me of this failed mission. So, I began again.

I set a limit of 100 books, and then realized that would only cover fiction—the non-fiction list will have to be another post. I’m hardly the first to attempt such a list, but I noticed that many of the “Top 100 Novels Everyone Should Read” lists are largely focused on Western literature. I thought to myself, what are the great works in other cultures? What are the classics of Arabic literature that I’d want to read? Then a friend sent a list of books kids read in high school in different countries around the world, and so a “world literature” category bloomed. I also wanted to highlight great Canadian literature, because we have great writers who deserve attention. Thus, this is a list in three parts: the Anglo-American novels; great Canadian fiction; and novels from around the world, with their authors’ nationalities noted. I consulted many lists, reviews and blog posts, and a few links are included at the end for your interest.

I chose to include only one book per author, though some writers have many books that deserve to be read. The books are listed in no particular order. My taxonomy’s not perfect, and of course the list is not exhaustive, but I’ve done the best I can. Stars indicate ones I’ve already read—always good to include items on a to-do list that you can check off immediately, right?

Thanks to all who contributed with their suggestions and recommendations. If you haven’t already guessed, reading is one of my life’s great pleasures, and while reading itself may be a solitary act, I take great joy in sharing the love for the written word with others.

Books to Read Before I Die: The Fiction Edition

American and British Literature

Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (1939)*
Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand (1957)
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (1927)
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (1929)
On the Road, Jack Kerouac (1957)
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams (1979)
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway (1940)
Ulysses, James Joyce (1920)
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)*
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (1960)*
Catcher in the Rye, D. Salinger (1951)*
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (1899)*
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell (1949)*
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith (1943)*
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath (1963)*
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (1932)*
Lord of the Flies, William Golding (1954)*
Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift (1726)
Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy (1892)
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens (1850)*
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (1813)*
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte (1847)*
The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing (1962)
Catch-22, Joseph Heller (1961)
Middlemarch, George Eliot (1874)
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (1818)*
Moby Dick, Herman Melville (1851)
Portrait of a Lady, Henry James (1881)
Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)
Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin (1953)
The Rainbow, H. Lawrence (1915)
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton (1920)
The Call of the Wild, Jack London (1903)*
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

Canadian Literature

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Mordecai Richler (1959)
Three Day Road, Joseph Boyden (2006)
Two Solitudes, Hugh MacLennan (1945)*
In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje (1987)
Green Grass, Running Water, Thomas King (1993)
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood (1985)*
Life of Pi, Yann Martel (1991)*
A Complicated Kindness, Miriam Toews (2004)*
Book of Negroes, Lawrence Hill (2007)*
Runaway, Alice Munro (2004)
Obasan, Joy Kagawa (1981)*
Do Not Say We Have Nothing, Madeline Thien (2016)
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, Stephen Leacock (1921)
Le Survenant (The Outlander), Germaine Guevremont (1945)
The Stone Angel, Margaret Laurence (1964)
Lullabies for Little Criminals, Heather O’Neill (2006)
Beautiful Losers, Leonard Cohen (1966)
The Lions of Al-Rassan, Guy Gavriel Kay (1995)
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Wayne Johnston (1998)
Volkswagen Blues, Jacques Poulin (1984)
The Cellist of Sarajevo, Steven Galloway (2008)*
Half-Blood Blues, Esi Edugyan (2011)*
A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry (1995)*

World Literature

Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe – Nigerian (1958)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera (1984)* – Czech
The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka (1915) – Czech/German
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (1869) – Russian
In Search of Lost Time (maybe just Vol. 1, Swann’s Way), Marcel Proust (1913) – French
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967) – Colombian
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy (1997)* – Indian
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie (1981) – Indian
The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse (1943) – German/Swiss
Seasons of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih (1966) – Sudanese
Cities of Salt, Abdelrahman Munif (1984) – Saudi
Miramar, Naguib Mahfouz (1967) – Egyptian
Pere Goriot, Honore de Balzac (1835) – French
The Stranger, Albert Camus (1942) – French
Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami (1987) – Japanese
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1866) –Russian
Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak (1957) – Russian
My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk (1998) – Turkish
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert (1856) – French
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes (1605) – Spanish
The Dream of the Red Chamber, Cao Xueqin (1791) – Chinese
Burger’s Daughter, Nadine Gordimer (1979) – South African
Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter), Mariama Ba (1979) – Senegalese
Terra Sonambula, Mia Couto (1992) – Mozambican
Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga (1988) – Zimbabwean
A Grain of Wheat, Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1967) – Kenyan
Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimanada Ngozie Adichie (2006)* – Nigerian
Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1943) – French
Carpentaria, Alexis Wright (2006) – Australian
Ficciones (Collected Fictions), Jorge Luis Borges (1944) – Argentinian
Three Sisters, Bi Feiyu (2008) (Chinese)
Please Look After Mother, Kyung-sook Shin (2008) – South Korean
The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano (1998) – Chilean/Mexican
The Motorcycle Diaries, Ernesto Che Guevara (1993) – Argentinian
The Bridge on the Drina, Ivo Andric (1945) – Yugoslavian
Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson (2003) – Norwegian
The Rainbow Troops, Andrea Hirata (2005) – Indonesian
Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not), Jose Rizal (1887) – Filipino
A Bend in the River, VS Naipaul (1979) – Trinidadian
The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1958) – Italian
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque (1929) – German
Sophie’s World, Jostein Gaarder (1991) – Norwegian