100 Books Everyone Should Read (+ PDF)
How many have you read?
Saturday night’s are designated as “date night” in our house and the majority of these date night are spent at home with a homemade meal, a glass of whisky and a movie. Sometimes we play a board game, but this is rarer.
This past Saturday, the meal was charcuterie board-esque with pita chips, cheese, meat, veggies, and a few dips. The whisky was Aberlour for me and cognac for my husband. The movie was “The Equalizer” with Denzel Washington.
The food and drink were very good, and while the movie wasn’t the greatest, I do love Denzel Washington and it was entertaining, so definitely not a loss.
In it, Denzel Washington’s character reads a book in a diner, where he is befriended by another regular, a Russian escort. The book is called "The Old Man and the Sea" by Ernest Hemingway and I think it’s the thing that ultimately brings these characters together. He mentions that his late wife was working through the 100 Books Everybody Should Read when she died and he’s carrying on the tradition.
As soon as I heard about this list, I was very intrigued. I immediately found my phone and I looked it up. I haven’t been reading as much as I’d like to, mostly because I just don’t know what I want to read. The last new book that I read was Weyward and that was a while ago. I have also recently re-read Goodbye, Things, but committing to reading 100 books sounds like a challenge that could be fun (I guess it’ll be fun as long as I actually like the books that I’m reading).
Finding a definitive list of the 100 Books Everyone Should Read proved to be more difficult that I thought. There actually ended up being a lot of lists of this nature. I wanted the list to include the 3 books that were mentioned in the movie - Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.
Ultimately, I’ve decided to work from the the Goodreads “100 Books from The Equalizer” (seemed fitting). I have no idea how these books were selected, but here they are in what appears to be alphabetical order:
1984 by George Orwell
A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
A Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Aenid by Virgil
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
Blindness by José Saramago
The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
The Book of Job by Anonymous
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family by Thomas Mann
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Castle by Franz Kafta
Children of Gebelawi by Naguib Mahfouz
Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
Complete Poems of Giacomo Leopardi by Giacomo Leopardi
The Complete Stories by Franz Kafta
The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe by Edgar Allan Poe
Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by João Guimarães Rosa
Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Lu Xun
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne
The Complete Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Gargantua and Pantagruel by Fraçois Rabelais
The Epic of Gilgamesh by Anonymous
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
The Gypsy Ballads of Garcia Lorca
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
History by Elsa Morante
Hunger by Knut Hamsun
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Illiad by Homer
Independent People by Halldór Laxness
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Jacques the Fatalist and His Master by Denis Diderot
Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
King Lear by William Shakespeare
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
The Mahabharata the Great Hindu Epic 500 B.C.
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
The Mathnazi of Julaluddin Rumi: Complete Six Books by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi
Medea by Euripides
Memories of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
Metamorphoses by Ovid
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Njaals Saga Oversat Af Karl L. Sommerfelt ...: Med to Karter ... (Norwegian Edition) by Anonymous
Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
The Odyssey by Homer
Oedipus Rex (The Theban Plays, #1) by Sophocles
Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García
The Orchard by Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi
Othello by William Shakespeare
Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren
Poems of Paul Celan by Paul Celan
The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: The Complete English Translation by Robert P. Goldman
The Recognition of Śakuntalã by Kãlidãsa
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Rememberance of Things Past - Volume 1 by Marcel Proust
Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata
The Stranger by Albert Camus
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
Things Fall Apart (The African Trilogy, #1) by Chinua Achebe
The Book of the Thousand and One Night; Complete by Anonymous
The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Trial by Franz Kafka
The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
Ulysses by James Joyce
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
How many of these books have you read? Are there books that are missing that you feel should be included? My son says that it’s missing A Tale of Two Cities!
I’ve actually read a handful of these but it was a long time ago, so I’ll be reading all of the books on the list. I’m going to start with the first book and I intend to read them in order, but I’m not holding myself to this. I may also take a break from the list to read other books as well. I have no particular timeline in which I want to read these books but as there is around 38 weeks left in 2025, I’d be happy to read 10-15 of these books before the end of the year.
I plan to read these all in book format, or at least as many of them as I can find in book format. We have a couple of them already (1984, Wuthering Heights and the Complete Works of Shakespeare), and the rest I’ll hopefully be able to locate at a local library. I’ll also rely on our Library’s app for books that are hard to find in book format. I’ll purchase them as a last resort.
I’m really hoping that I’ll enjoy all of these books, but I realize that this may be unrealistic. So, what will I do if I don’t like a particular book? I’m implementing a 100 page rule - If I’m miserable at the 100 page mark, I’m abandoning it, knowing that I gave it my best effort to get into it!
If you would also like to read all, or some, of these book, I’ve put together a checklist that you can print:
You can download the checklist here:
If you are on a paid subscription, I’ve made an additional Record Book for you to use where you can record your rating of each title, as well as your favorite parts and thoughts about the book.
You can find the 100 Books to Read Record Book HERE, where I’ve compiled all of Bonuses for Paid Subscribers, and where I’ll be adding any new resources in the future!
Thanks for reading! x Gillian
I have a hard time with “should” lists like this. Why are the books must reads? Maybe the reason makes sense to the person who compiled the list but is it important to me? Life is short and time is limited. I’m going to read books I have a reasonable expectation that I will enjoy.
Oof, I’ve read a whopping 15 of those only, with no real desire to read more. I am mad. I laughed out loud at Pippi Longstocking in the middle of all those very serious books.💕