Top Books To Read Before You Die: As multimedia advances, books are being slowly forgotten, but they shouldn’t. Literature is not only cultivating, but also fascinating; it feeds imagination, it allows you to travel without moving (although traveling is amazing too, so don’t miss our Top 15 Places To Visit Before You Die list), it presents unknown and very different realities…
Before you go to sleep, when you’re on the bus (or a plane to one of the The Top 10 Places to Visit Before You Die), relaxing on the beach, waiting for the doctor to see you, in line at the bank, drinking wine on the countryside, enjoying the sun in the park… almost every relaxing occasion (and most of your down time) is the perfect time for a book.
As an avid reader, I’ve come across some books that one should not die without having read, including almost all of Plato’s dialogues or A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Tool; a comedic jewel. Of course, this is a highly personal selection based on taste, although many of the books you’ll find here are already considered to be classics of literature both old and modern.
So, which are the books that need to be read? Does every English-speaking person need to read Shakespeare? Are there other authors that are a must? Find out in this list of the top 50 books to read before you die.
Naturally, this list is open to suggestions. In fact, I’d love it if you readers could recommend other books that are not in this list but should definitely be read.
1. A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking
2. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
3. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
4. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
5. Animal Farm – George Orwell
6. Before the End – Ernesto Sabato
7. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
8. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
9. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
10. Chronicle of a Death Foretold – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
11. Complete Works of William Shakespeare
12. Cronopios and Famas – Julio Cortazar
13. Crime and Punishment – Fydor Dostoevsky
14. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
15. Demian – Herman Hesse
16. Before the End – Ernesto Sabato
17. Every Dialogue Ever Written by Plato
18. Existentialism is a Humanism – Jean-Paul Sartre
19. Fictions – Jorge Luis Borges
20. Hopscotch – Julio Cortazar
21. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
22. Inferno – Dante Alighieri (The first part of Dante’s epic poem, The Divine Comedy)
23. Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
24. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
25. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
26. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Keep reading the following pages to find out which are the remaining 24 books to read before you die.
27. Maus – Art Spiegelman
28. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
29. Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami
30. Siddartha – Herman Hesse
31. Steppenwolf – Herman Hesse
32. The Aleph – Jorge Luis Borges
33. The Autobiography of Malcolm X – Malcolm X with Alex Haley
34. The Baron in the Trees – Italo Calvino
35. The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx
36. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
37. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
38. The Lost Steps – Alejo Carpentier
39. The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
40. The Odyssey – Homer
41. The Prince – Niccolò Machiavelli
42. The Savage Detectives – Roberto Bolaño
43. The Social Contract – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
44. The Stranger – Albert Camus
45. The Trial – Franz Kafka
46. The Tunnel – Ernesto Sabato
47. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
48. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
49. War and Peace – Leon Tolstoy
50. The Bible
Needless to say, there is one book that has had a special impact on our culture: the Bible. This book closes our list of top books to read before you die. Any other suggestions? We would love to read them.