I tend to read the same books over and over and over. Mainly all of Tolkiens works. I decided I should read some other things and looked up various lists of “top 10 books”. Right now I’m working through this:
I’d never read To Kill Mockingbird and I absolutely loved it. I read 1984 but didn’t love it. It was a bit too “torture porn” by the end for me personally. Loved Pride and Prejudice and Handmaids Tale. Of course I don’t need to read LOTR. I also read Animal Farm and it felt uncomfortably relevant to today. I started the list the beginning of April.
I’ve read them all. Hated “Gatsby.” The rest are all classics for a reason. But lists like that are worse than useless. The world of Literature is too large to limit, and there are joys and insights to be found in some of the most obscure places/works.
Are the books on the list great? Yes.
Are any of them on my personal Top 10? No.
The list is much too anglo-centric and leaves out works from rich foreign literary traditions like French, German, Russian and more. So no Camus, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Cervantes, to name only a few.
The only one in that list that is in my personal top 10 is LOTR (At #1 of course :D)
I’ve read in full:
LOTR, of course. To Kill a Mockingbird, which was very good but not great. One Hundred Years of Solitude, which was also very good but not great (Even if Borges was exaggerating a bit when he said that it “Had at least 50 years too many”)
Tried to read but abandoned in disgust, because the book was good but the subject matter was too depressing:
1984. The handmaid’s tale.
Would never read because not interested:
Pride and Prejudice The Great Gatsby The Catcher in the Rye To the Lighthouse
Would never read because of allergies to new age clap trap:
The Alchemist (seriously? they dare to put Tolkien in the same list with frikkin Paulho Coelho? this should disqualify the list completely)
I attempted to read “One Hundred Years of Solitude” last year, and went slightly mad halfway through. It’s an amazing book - but it borders on the psychotic/psychedelic as you dig deeper into it. It is certainly not for everyone.
What a delightful coincidence that of the top ten books everyone should read, eight are in English, and all are by White authors (two with Latino ethnicity)! No Beloved, no Invisible Man, no Color Purple. No books from Asia or Africa or mainland Europe.
I’ve read seven of them. None of them would be on my top-ten list; and my top ten list would be “Books that I really loved a lot,” not “Books that everyone should read.”
A shattering account about the (non-)sense of life and what it means to be human(e). Became very relevant again during the Covid pandemic.
Franz Kafka - all of his three novels, The Process, The Castle and America, also his novella The Metamorphosis.
Stories about the alienation from modern life and its constraints. Relevant today like never before, although written 100 years ago.
Fjodor Dostoyevsky - Crime And Punishment
Dostoyevsky was a precursor of Kafka as a writer of psychological novels, and this probably is the first and one of the best efforts in that genre. Explores the human mind and condition.
Cervantes - Don Quixote
Ok, this is really not for everyone, because it’s 400 years old, long-winded and stacked with long-lost references and allusions, but OTOH it stands as maybe the first modern novel, and it’s still very funny. Better read an annotated edition.
I saw Don Quixote on stage many years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. It kind of blew my mind at the time that I could watch/listen to something in a language that I didn’t know, but still understand what was going on.
Bit hard to comment, since I read many of these 50 or more years ago. I do reread Gatsby regularly; the prose is beautiful, the commentary cutting, the issues timeless. The recent scorn Fitzgerald gets is puzzling. Mockingbird remains powerful to me, but it’s so of its time that moderns may not realize what it said in the 50s.
Tried reading Salinger a few years ago. Big disappointment, a nothing book. His short stories are far better.
Couldn’t finish Marquez.
The Alchemist’s greatness is as baffling as putting a Dan Brown book on the list.
Tolkien is for kids. If you haven’t read it by the time you graduate high school, it will never mean anything to you.
If you want a non-white foreign writer, couldn’t be a better place to start than Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe.
FTR, these are both on Columbia University’s required first-year reading list, along with Pride and Prejudice and To the Lighthouse from the OP’s link (among others).
Have to disagree with you here. The Silmarillion, Beren and Luthien, Children of Hurin and The Fall of Gondolin aren’t children’s books. Of course The Hobbit was specifically written for Tolkien’s kids and LOTR could fall under young adult.
I didn’t say “him” referring to Tolkien, I said “it” to refer to LotR. Nevertheless, if you didn’t like LotR, I can’t possibly imagine picking up his later works or finding any pleasure in them.
I’d like to echo the person that recommended Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. I haven’t re-read it in years but it’s definitely one I think most people should give a shot at.
I just finished reading Moby Dick and I absolutely loved it although that book definitely isn’t for everyone. But if you’re working your way through classics / well-known novels you may have missed in life then I have to plug it.
Other books that jumped to mind personally but probably don’t belong in a “top 10” list for me are Darkness at Noon (Koestler) and We (Zamyatin). We is more fantastical/sci-fi in its elements.
