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MikeTheReader's "150 Books to improve your mind"

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I started this list by compiling several ‘Best of’ lists for Fiction (American, British, European), Non-Fiction (general), Philosophy, Plays, Collections (Poems, Essays, Complete Works Of-) with the intention of improving my vocabulary and becoming well-read person. This list is by no means final, and I continue to add to it whenever I see fit. If you have any recommendations, please pass them along.

  2. 2.
    ?
    The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Unabridged)
    by Douglas Adams
  3. 3.
    A Death in the Family
    by James Agee
  4. 4.
    Winesburg, Ohio (Norton Critical Editions)
    by Sherwood Anderson
  6. 6.
    Emma (Penguin Classics)
    by Jane Austen
  8. 8.
    Northanger Abbey (Stage Playscript)
    by Jane Austen
  9. 9.
    Pride and Prejudice (Modern Library Classics)
    by Jane Austen
  10. 10.
    City of Glass: The Graphic Novel (New York Trilogy)
    by Paul Auster
  11. 11.
    Go Tell It on the Mountain
    by James Baldwin
  13. 13.
    ?
    The Adventures of Augie March

  14. 14.
    Jane Eyre
    by Charlotte Bronte
  15. 15.
    Wuthering Heights (Penguin Classics)
    by Emily Brontë
  16. 16.
    THE WAY OF ALL FLESH
    by Samuel Butler
  17. 17.
    A Clockwork Orange
    by Anthony Burgess
  18. 18.
    L'Etranger (Collection Folio, 2) (French Edition)
    by Albert Camus
  19. 19.
  20. 20.
    The Canterbury Tales (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Geoffrey Chaucer
  21. 21.
    The Cherry Orchard
    by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
  22. 22.
    The Awakening
    by Kate Chopin
  23. 23.
    Heart of Darkness
    by Joseph Conrad
  24. 24.
    The Secret Agent (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Joseph Conrad
  25. 25.
    The Last of the Mohicans
    by James Fenimore Cooper
  27. 27.
    Don Quixote
    by Miguel De Cervantes
  28. 28.
    Robinson Crusoe (Modern Library Classics)
    by Daniel Defoe
  29. 29.
    A Tale of Two Cities (Penguin Classics)
    by Charles Dickens
  30. 30.
    Deliverance
    by James Dickey
  31. 31.
    Crime and Punishment (Enriched Classics)
    by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  33. 33.
    ?
    The count of Monte Christo

  34. 34.
    The Three Musketeers (Signet Classics)
    by Alexandre Dumas père
  35. 35.
    The Mill on the Floss (Penguin Classics)
    by George Eliot
  36. 36.
    Invisible Man: A Novel
    by Ralph Ellison
  37. 37.
    ?
  38. 38.
    The Sound and the Fury (Norton Critical Editions)
    by William Faulkner
  39. 39.
    As I Lay Dying (Modern Library)
    by William Faulkner
  40. 40.
    Light in August (Modern Library)
    by William Faulkner
  41. 41.
    The Great Gatsby
    by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  42. 42.
    Madame Bovary (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Gustave Flaubert
  43. 43.
    The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion
    by Ford Madox Ford
  44. 44.
  45. 45.
    Howards End (Norton Critical Editions)
    by E. M. Forster
  46. 46.
    Goethe's Faust
    by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
  48. 48.
    Lord of the Flies (Casebook) (Perigee)
    by William Golding
  49. 49.
    The Maltese Falcon
    by Dashiell Hammett
  50. 50.
    Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Norton Critical Editions)
    by Thomas Hardy
  51. 51.
    The Scarlet Letter (Enriched Classics)
    by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  52. 52.
    The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
    by Robert A. Heinlein
  53. 53.
    Stranger in a Strange Land
    by Robert A. Heinlein
  54. 54.
    Catch-22
    by Joseph Heller
  55. 55.
    A Farewell to Arms
    by Ernest Hemingway
  56. 56.
    The Sun Also Rises (Scribner Classics)
    by Ernest Hemingway
  57. 57.
    Dune, 40th Anniversary Edition (Dune Chronicles, Book 1)
    by Frank Herbert
  59. 59.
    The Odyssey
    by Robert Fagles
  60. 60.
    The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Modern Library Classics)
    by Victor Hugo
  62. 62.
    ?
    BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley

  63. 63.
    Point Counter Point (British Literature)
    by Aldous Huxley
  64. 64.
    A Doll's House (Dodo Press)
    by Ibsen Henrik Ibsen
  65. 65.
    The World According to Garp (Modern Library)
    by John Irving
  67. 67.
  69. 69.
    The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
    by Maxine Hong Kingston
  70. 70.
    ?
    Kim
    by Rudyard Kipling
  71. 71.
    Darkness at Noon
    by Arthur Koestler
  72. 72.
    To Kill a Mockingbird
    by Harper Lee
  73. 73.
    Babbitt (Dover Thrift Editions)
    by Sinclair Lewis
  74. 74.
    The Chronicles of Narnia Box Set (adult) (Narnia)
    by C. S. Lewis
  75. 75.
    Lady Chatterley's Lover
    by D. H. Lawrence
  76. 76.
    The Rainbow
    by D.H. Lawrence
  77. 77.
    The Naked and the Dead: 50th Anniversary Edition
    by Norman Mailer
  78. 78.
    Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph
    by T.E. Lawrence
  79. 79.
    The Prince
    by Niccolo Machiavelli
  80. 80.
    The Magic Mountain
    by Thomas Mann
  82. 82.
    Of Human Bondage (Modern Library Classics)
    by W. Somerset Maugham
  83. 83.
    Moby-Dick: or, The Whale (Penguin Classics)
    by Herman Melville
  84. 84.
    The Crucible
    by Arthur Miller
  85. 85.
    Paradise Lost (Penguin Classics)
    by John Milton
  86. 86.
    Lolita (Everyman's Library Classics)
    by Vladimir Nabokov
  87. 87.
    A House for Mr. Biswas
    by V.S. Naipaul
  88. 88.
    A Bend in the River
    by V.S. Naipaul
  89. 89.
    In a Free State: A Novel
    by V.S. Naipaul
  90. 90.
    A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories
    by Flannery O'Connor
  91. 91.
    Wise Blood: A Novel
    by Flannery O'Connor
  92. 92.
    Long Day's Journey into Night
    by Eugene O'Neill
  93. 93.
    Appointment in Samarra: A Novel
    by John O'Hara
  94. 94.
    Animal Farm: Centennial Edition
    by George Orwell
  95. 95.
    George Orwell's 1984
    by George Orwell
  96. 96.
    ?
    Dr. Zhivago
    by Boris Pasternak
  97. 97.
    ?
    Great Tales of Edgar Allen Poe
    by Edgar Allan Poe
  98. 98.
    ?
    A Dance to the Music of Time (series)
    by Anthony Powell
  99. 99.
    The Bell Jar
    by Sylvia Plath
  100. 100.
    Swann's Way (Modern Library Classics)
    by Marcel Proust
  101. 101.
    The Crying of Lot 49
    by Thomas Pynchon
  102. 102.
  103. 103.
    V. (Perennial Classics)
    by Thomas Pynchon
  104. 104.
    All Quiet on the Western Front
    by Erich Maria Remarque
  105. 105.
    Cyrano De Bergerac
    by Edmond Rostand
  106. 106.
    Call It Sleep: A Novel
    by Henry Roth
  107. 107.
    ?
    Midnight's Children

  108. 108.
    The Satanic Verses: A Novel (Bestselling Backlist)
    by Salman Rushdie
  109. 109.
    The Catcher in the Rye
    by J.D. Salinger
  110. 110.
    A Midsummer Night's Dream (Signet Classics)
    by William Shakespeare
  111. 111.
    Julius Caesar (The New Folger Library Shakespeare)
    by William Shakespeare
  112. 112.
    Romeo and Juliet (Folger Shakespeare Library)
    by William Shakespeare
  113. 113.
    The Tempest (Folger Shakespeare Library)
    by William Shakespeare
  114. 114.
    Pygmalion (Dover Thrift Editions)
    by George Bernard Shaw
  115. 115.
    Frankenstein (Enriched Classics)
    by Mary Shelley
  116. 116.
    A Town Like Alice
    by Nevil Shute
  117. 117.
    Trustee from the Toolroom
    by Nevil Shute
  118. 118.
    One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich
    by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
  120. 120.
    ?
    The Oedipus Plays of Sophpcles
    by Sophocles
  121. 121.
    The Grapes of Wrath (Centennial Edition)
    by John Steinbeck
  123. 123.
    Treasure Island (Kingfisher Classics)
    by Robert Louis Stevenson
  124. 124.
    ?
    Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
    by Tom Stoppard
  125. 125.
    Uncle Tom's Cabin
    by Harriet Beecher Stowe
  126. 126.
    Gulliver's Travels (Norton Critical Editions)
    by Jonathan Swift
  127. 127.
    Vanity Fair (Barnes & Noble Classics)
    by William Makepeace Thackeray
  128. 128.
    The Lord of the Rings
    by J.R.R. Tolkien
  129. 129.
    War and Peace
    by Leo Tolstoy
  131. 131.
    Fathers and Sons
    by Ivan Turgenev
  132. 132.
  133. 133.
    Candide (Modern Library)
    by Voltaire
  134. 134.
    Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel
    by Kurt Vonnegut
  135. 135.
    All the King's Men
    by Robert Penn Warren
  136. 136.
    A Handful of Dust (Everyman's Library)
    by Evelyn Waugh
  137. 137.
    Brideshead Revisited
    by Evelyn Waugh
  138. 138.
    ?
    The Color Purple
    by Alice Walker
  139. 139.
    The Age of Innocence
    by Edith Wharton
  140. 140.
    The House of Mirth (Barnes & Noble Classics)
    by Edith Wharton
  141. 141.
    The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
    by Eudora Welty
  142. 142.
    Night

  143. 143.
    Leaves of Grass
    by Walt Whitman
  145. 145.
    ?
    The Bridge of San Luis Rey
    by Thornton Wilder
  146. 146.
    The Glass Menagerie
    by Tennessee Williams
  147. 147.
    Jeeves and Wooster Omnibus
    by P G Wodehouse
  148. 148.
    To the Lighthouse (Annotated)
    by Virginia Woolf
  149. 149.
    Notes of a Native Son (Beacon Paperback)
    by James Baldwin
This is MikeTheReader's list. Only MikeTheReader can edit it. You can make your own version of this list.
Created by MikeTheReader on May 25, 2009.
 

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