100 Must-Read Books: An Inclusive List

As most ‘best of’ lists tend to be biased towards books written in English by white men, I have attempted to create a more inclusive list. This list, hopefully, is more inclusive of female authors and authors who didn’t originally write in English. I wanted to include authors NOT from North America and Europe, as well as POC authors from those two continents (my term for this in the list below is 'world'). I also think, that for a book to be on a ‘must read’ list, it should be tested over time. I decided to have my list be from the 20th century and earlier.

I want to keep this post short and just focused on the list itself, but more info is available:

-How I Came Up with the List

-Fun Statistics!

As I read the books, I will link my review. As I’m not doing this for work or school, I’m not giving myself a time restraint and I don’t have to go in order. Also, if I decide I really don’t like a book and I don’t want to finish it – then I won’t finish it. I will still post a short review and link it to the title and move on to another book.

Read: 

-What’s a CAWPILE rating?

-Why didn’t you finish the book?

Now, what you’ve all been waiting for…

100 Must-Read Books – An Inclusive List

Rank	Title	Author	Published Language	Other
1	Frankenstein	Shelley, Mary (English, 1797-1851)	1818	Female
2	Pride and Prejudice	Austen, Jane (English, 1775-1817)	1813	Female
3	To the Lighthouse	Woolf, Virginia (English, 1882-1941)	1927	Female
4	One Hundred Years of Solitude	Marquez, Gabriel Garcia (Colombian, 1927-2014) Trans. Gregory	1967 Spanish	World
5	Jane Eyre	Bronte, Charlotte (English, 1816-1855)	1847	Female
6	Mrs. Dalloway	Woolf, Virginia (English, 1882-1941)	1925	Female
7	The Handmaid's Tale	Atwood, Margaret (Canadian, 1939- )	1985	Female
8	Beloved	Morrison, Toni (American, 1931-2019)	1987	Female World
9	Ulysses	Joyce, James (Irish, 1882-1941)	1922
10	The Brothers Karamazov	Dostoevsky, Fyodor (Russian, 1821-1881) Trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky	1880 Russian
11	Things Fall Apart	Achebe, Chinua (Nigerian, 1930-2013)	1958	World
12	To Kill a Mockingbird	Lee, Harper (American, 1926-2016)	1960	Female
13	Middlemarch	Eliot, George (English, 1819-1880)	1971	Female
14	Don Quixote	Cervantes, Miguel De (Spanish, 1547-1616) Trans. Edith Grossman	1605 / 1615 Spanish
15	In Search of Lost Time	Proust, Marcel (French, 1871-1922) Trans. Moncrieff, Kilmartin, Enright	1913 French
16	Madame Bovary	Flaubert, Gustave (French, 1821-1880) Trans. Adam Thorpe	1856 French
17	War and Peace	Tolstoy, Leo (Russian, 1828-1910) Trans. Anthoony Briggs	1867 Russian
18	Crime and Punishment	Dostoevsky, Fyodor (Russian, 1821-1881)	1866 Russian
19	Anna Karenina	Tolstoy, Leo (Russian, 1828-1910)	1878 Russian
20	Moby-Dick	Melville, Herman (American, 1819-1891	1851
21	The Great Gatsby	Fitzgerald, F. Scott (American, 1896-1940)	1925
22	The Color Purple	Walker, Alice (American, 1944- )	1982	Female World
23	The Tale of Genji	Shikibu, Murasaki (Japanese, ~973-1031)	~1008 Japanese	Female World
24	The Iliad	Homer (Greek)	~725 BC Greek
25	The Heart is a Lonely Hunter	McCullers, Carson (American, 1917-1967)	1940	Female
26	The Joy Luck Club	Tan, Amy (American, 1952- )	1989	Female World
27	Like Water for Chocolate	Esquivel, Laura (Mexican, 1950- )	1992 Spanish	Female World
28	Little Women	Alcott, Louisa M. (American, 1932-1888)	1868	Female
29	Lolita	Nabokov, Vladimir (Russian-American, 1899-1977)	1955
30	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man	Joyce, James (Irish, 1882-1941)	1916
31	1984	Orwell, George (English, 1903-1950)	1949
32	Les Miserables	Hugo, Victor (French, 1802-1885) Trans. Julie Rose	1862 French
33	The Trial	Kafka, Franz (Czechoslovak, 1883-1924) Trans. Mike Mitchell	1914 German
34	Great Expectations	Dickens, Charles (English, 1812-1870)	1860
35	Midnight's Children	Rushdie, Salman (British-American-Indian, 1947- )	1981
36	The Age of Innocence	Wharton, Edith (American, 1862-1937)	1920	Female
37	Wide Sargasso Sea	Rhys, Jean (Dominican-British, 1890-1979)	1966	Female
38	Season of Migration to the North	Salih, Tayeb (Sudanese, 1929-2009) Trans. Denys Johnson-Davies	1966 Arabic	World
39	Love in the Time of Cholera	Marquez, Gabriel Garcia (Colombian, 1927-2014)	1985 Spanish	World
40	The River Between	Thiong'o, Ngugi Wa (Kenyan, 1938- )	1965	World
41	The Sea, The Sea	Murdoch, Iris (Irish-British, 1919-1999)	1978	Female
42	Orlando	Woolf, Virginia (English, 1882-1941)	1928	Female
43	The Odyssey	Homer (Greek)	~700 BC Greek
44	The Divine Comedy	Alighieri, Dante (Italian, 1265-1321)	~1472 Italian
45	One Thousand and One Nights	Unknown Collection (Middle Eastern and South Asian)	~750 Arabic	World
46	Oepidus the King	Sophicles (Greek)	~429 BC Greek
47	The Count of Monte Cristo	Dumas, Alexandre (French, 1802-1870)	1844 French
48	The Golden Notebook	Lessing, Doris (British-Zimbabwean, 1919-2013)	1962	Female
49	Invisible Man	Ellison, Ralph (American, 1914-1994)	1952	World
50	The Aeneid	Virgil (Roman)	~24 BC Latin
51	The House of the Spirits	Allende, Isabel (Chilean, 1942- )	1982 Spanish	Female World
52	Tristram Shandy	Sterne, Laurence (Anglo-Irish, 1713-1768)	1759
53	The Metamorphosis	Kafka, Franz (Czechoslovak, 1883-1924)	1915 German
54	I Capture the Castle	Smith, Dodie (English, 1896-1990)	1948	Female
55	The God of Small Things	Roy, Arundhati (Indian, 1961- )	1997	Female World
56	Collected Fiction	Borges, Jorge Luis (Argentine, 1899-1986)	1900s Spanish	World
57	The Red and Black	Stendhal (French, 1783-1842) Trans. Roger Gard	1830 French
58	The Magic Mountain	Mann, Thomas (German, 1875-1955) Trans. John E. Woods	1924 German
59	Song of Solomon	Morrison, Toni (American, 1931-2019)	1977	Female World
60	The Secret History	Tartt, Donna (American, 1963- )	1992	Female
61	Heart of Darkness	Conrad, Joseph (Polish-British, 1857-1924)	1902
62	Native Son	Wright, Richard (American, 1908-1960)	1940	World
63	Absalom, Absalom!	Faulkner, William (American, 1897-1962)	1936
64	Journey to the End of the Night	Celine, Louis-Ferdinand (French, 1894-1961) Trans. Ralph	1932 French
65	The Stories of Anton Chekhov	Chekhov, Anton (Russian, 1860-1904) Trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky	1800s Russian
66	So Long a Letter	Ba, Mariama (Senegalese, 1929-1981) Trans. Modupe Bode-Thomas	1979 French	Female World
67	The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie	Muriel Spark (Scottish, 1918-2006)	1961	Female
68	The Idiot	Dostoevsky, Fyodor (Russian, 1821-1881)	1868 Russian
69	The Death of the Heart	Bowen, Elizabeth (Irish-British, 1899-1973)	1938	Female
70	Rebecca	Maurier, Daphne Du (English, 1907-1989)	1938	Female
71	The Grapes of Wrath	Steinbeck, John (American, 1902-1968)	1939
72	Alice's Adventures in Wonderland	Carroll, Lewis (English, 1832-1898)	1865
73	A Wrinkle in Time	L'engle, Madeleine (American, 1918-2007)	1962	Female
74	Their Eyes Were Watching God	Hurston, Zora Neale (American, 1891-1960)	1937	Female World
75	Catch-22	Heller, Joseph (American, 1923-1999)	1961
76	Brave New World	Huxley, Aldous (English, 1894-1963)	1932
77	As I Lay Dying	Faulkner, William (American, 1897-1962)	1930
78	The Time of the Hero	Llosa, Mario Vargas (Peruvian-Spanish, 1936- ) Trans. Edith Grossman	1966 Spanish	World
79	Lord of the Flies	Golding, William (British, 1911-1993)	1954
80	Poems of Emily Dickenson	Dickinson, Emily (American, 1830-1886)	1890	Female
81	Hamlet	Shakespeare, William (English, 1564-1616)	~1600
82	The Sound and the Fury	Faulkner, William (American, 1897-1962)	1929
83	Gulliver's Travels	Swift, Jonathan (Anglo-Irish, 1667-1745)	1726
84	Nectar in a Sieve	Markandaya, Kamala (British-Indian, 1924-2004)	1954	Female
85	The Stranger	Camus, Albert (French-Algerian, 1913-1960) Trans. Sandra Smith	1942 French
86	Nostromo	Conrad, Joseph (Polish-British, 1857-1924)	1904
87	Leaves of Grass	Whitman, Walt (American, 1819-1892)	1855
88	Malone Dies Trilogy	Beckett, Samuel (Irish, 1906-1989) Trans. Patrick	1951 French
89	The Canterbury Tales	Chaucer, Geoffrey (English, 1340s-1400)	1300s
90	Kindred	Butler, Octavia E. (American, 1947-2006)	1979	Female World
91	David Copperfield	Dickens, Charles (English, 1812-1870)	1849
92	And Then There Were None	Christie, Agatha (English, 1890-1976)	1939	Female
93	The Power of One	Courtenay, Bryce (South African-Australian, 1933-2012)	1989	World
94	The Bell Jar	Plath, Sylvia (American, 1932-1963)	1963	Female
95	The Tenant of Wildfell Hall	Bronte, Anne (English. 1820-1849)	1848	Female
96	The Man Who Loved Children	Stead, Christina (Australian, 1902-1983)	1940	Female World
97	The Temple of the Golden Pavilion	Mishima, Yukio (Japanese, 1925-1970)	1956 Japanese	World
98	Half a Lifelong Romance	Chang, Eileen (Chinese-American, 1920-1995)	1948 Chinese	Female World
99	The Prince and the Pauper	Twain, Mark (American, 1835-1910)	1881
100	Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World	Murakami, Haruki (Japanese, 1949- ) Trans. Alfred	1991 Japanese	World

But… what about the 21st century?!

Great question. In my initial ranked list of 130 books, before I made any edits (after Step 2, but before Step 3 in How I Came Up with the List), these 21st-century books snuck onto my list. I’ve included their original rank below.

72. White Teeth (2000) by Zadie Smith (English, 1975- )

107. An American Marriage (2018) by Tayari Jones (American, 1970- )

108. Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) by Jesmyn Ward (American, 1977- )

-Multiple books by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigerian-American, 1977- ) 

[literally multiple books – that’s not a title]

I might have to compile lists for female authors, the Inklings, as well as sci-fi and/or fantasy. 

I love lists and statistics and research and… READING! 

I hope there are some familiar titles and some not-so-familiar titles in my list above. 

Happy reading!