Tag Archives: Books

50 Must-Read Books

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I easily read one book a week, more if I am caught up in the book. A couple of weeks back, I was thinking back to the thousands of books I must have read in my lifetime and wondered if these are books one must read in their lifetime. So I decided to compile a list and in this list are some favourites, some that I have read, and some I have on my to-read list. How many of these have you read?

Of course, each person’s must-read books will be different depending on their taste, and what someone may consider a must-read may have not made it to this list. This list of 50 books in alphabetical order is not an exhaustive one by any stretch, so if there is a book I have missed that needs to be included, let me know and I will add it for others to discover new books too.

Source
  1. 1984 by George Orwell
  2. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
  3. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
  4. Animal Farm by George Orwell
  5. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
  6. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  7. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
  8. Charlotte’s Web by E. B White
  9. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  10. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  11. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
  12. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
  13. Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling
  14. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
  15. Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
  16. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
  17. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
  18. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
  19. Malgudi Days by R.K. Narayan
  20. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
  21. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
  22. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
  23. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  24. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
  25. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
  26. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
  27. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
  28. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
  29. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
  30. The Color Purple: A Novel by Alice Walker
  31. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
  32. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
  33. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
  34. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
  35. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
  36. The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
  37. The Kitchen God’s Wife by Amy Tan
  38. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
  39. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  40. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
  41. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
  42. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
  43. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
  44. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
  45. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
  46. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
  47. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  48. Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh
  49. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
  50. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Did your favourite books make the list?

In My Hands Today…

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The Art of Travel – Alain de Botton

Any Baedeker will tell us where we ought to travel, but only Alain de Botton will tell us how and why. With the same intelligence and insouciant charm he brought to How Proust Can Save Your Life, de Botton considers the pleasures of anticipation; the allure of the exotic, and the value of noticing everything from a seascape in Barbados to the takeoffs at Heathrow.

Even as de Botton takes the reader along on his own peregrinations, he also cites such distinguished fellow-travelers as Baudelaire, Wordsworth, Van Gogh, the biologist Alexander von Humboldt, and the 18th-century eccentric Xavier de Maistre, who catalogued the wonders of his bedroom. The Art of Travel is a wise and utterly original book. Don’t leave home without it.

In My Hands Today…

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The White Mosque – Sofia Samatar

In the late nineteenth century, a group of German-speaking Mennonites traveled from Russia into Central Asia, where their charismatic leader predicted Christ would return.

Over a century later, Sofia Samatar joins a tour following their path, fascinated not by the hardships of their journey, but by its aftermath: the establishment of a small Christian village in the Muslim Khanate of Khiva. Named Ak Metchet, “The White Mosque,” after the Mennonites’ whitewashed church, the village lasted for fifty years.

In pursuit of this curious history, Samatar discovers a variety of characters whose lives intersect around the ancient Silk Road, from a fifteenth-century astronomer-king, to an intrepid Swiss woman traveler of the 1930s, to the first Uzbek photographer, and explores such topics as Central Asian cinema, Mennonite martyrs, and Samatar’s own complex upbringing as the daughter of a Swiss-Mennonite and a Somali-Muslim, raised as a Mennonite of color in America.

A secular pilgrimage to a lost village and a near-forgotten history, The White Mosque traces the porous and ever-expanding borders of identity, asking: How do we enter the stories of others? And how, out of the tissue of life, with its weird incidents, buried archives, and startling connections, does a person construct a self?

In My Hands Today…

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India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765 – Richard M. Eaton

Protected by vast mountains and seas, the Indian subcontinent might seem a nearly complete and self-contained world with its own religions, philosophies, and social systems. And yet this ancient land and its varied societies experienced prolonged and intense interaction with the peoples and cultures of East and Southeast Asia, Europe, Africa, and especially Central Asia and the Iranian plateau.

Richard M. Eaton tells this extraordinary story with relish and originality, as he traces the rise of Persianate culture, a many-faceted transregional world connected by ever-widening networks across much of Asia. Introduced to India in the eleventh century by dynasties based in eastern Afghanistan, this culture would become progressively indigenized in the time of the great Mughals (sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries). Eaton brilliantly elaborates the complex encounter between India’s Sanskrit culture—an equally rich and transregional complex that continued to flourish and grow throughout this period—and Persian culture, which helped shape the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire, and a host of regional states. This long-term process of cultural interaction is profoundly reflected in the languages, literatures, cuisines, attires, religions, styles of rulership and warfare, science, art, music, and architecture—and more—of South Asia.

In My Hands Today…

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Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life – Barbara Kingsolver

Author Barbara Kingsolver and her family abandoned the industrial-food pipeline to live a rural life—vowing that, for one year, they’d only buy food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it.

Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is an enthralling narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.