Best Books of All Time

If you are planning to go on a reading spree, why not read some of the best books of all time? In here is a handpicked list of fiction and non-fiction books that are waiting to be explored.

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

An attempt at compiling the best books of all time better begin with an apology. Any such endeavor is principally flawed by the inherent biases of critics and compilers. It is largely a subjective choice. Reading a book is much like meeting a person. You may or may not get along. There is no way to predict how that first meeting and impression will turn out to be. Every book is an encased soul waiting to be heard. It’s a subjective experience, a picture of the world as the writer saw it. Depending on the core ideas that you tend to resonate with, your experience with the book, will be unique.

Nevertheless, a list of best fiction and non-fiction books of all time is presented here, based on the choice of people with a refined taste for books. This is a list of books to read before you die, as selected by contemporary critics and book lovers. Perhaps what makes these books great is the fact that they contain the core of a great thought inside, clothed in a fine raiment of appealing prose that mesmerizes you with its originality.

Some of these books have been a spontaneous catharsis for a society, capturing its very soul. Some are great meditations on the human condition, while some have been instrumental in introducing an entirely new realm of thought, unexplored till date. Some will take you along on great journeys and some will make you dive inside yourself. A few will feel like a slap on the face or a push into the unknown. In those paper bindings lies a world, calling for you.

Writers have this great intuitive capacity of looking at the big picture, while not missing the smaller details. What I experience reading some of these books is a kind of resonance. It’s the feeling you have when reading a thought that exactly conveys how you feel inside. The best of all time are the ones that help us make sense out of all the chaos around us and show a way out of it. When you have good books to read, time flies. There are many great books that lie in obscurity and you might discover them in some old bookshop somewhere in some corner of the world. They may never make it to the list of the world’s bestselling books of all time, but they have a charm of their own that appeals to you.

In what follows, you will find a list of some of the best books ever written. However, be aware that this is only the tip of the iceberg that English literature is. Bookmark this page as your personal reading list.

Fiction

“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Reading books and especially a novel is experiencing it. It is a silent sojourn into the interiority of a soul. Here are the best works of fiction ever composed.

• 1984 by George Orwell
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
• Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
• Atonement by Ian McEwan
• For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• Deliverance by James Dickey
• A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man by James Joyce
• The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner
• Under The Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• The Way Of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
• The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
• Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• Neuromancer by William Gibson
• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
• Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
• A Passage to India by E.M.Forster
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
• The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
• Fear by L. Ron Hubbard
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski
• An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
• The Native Son by Richard Wright
• Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler
• The Wings Of The Dove by Henry James
• Appointment In Samarra by John O’Hara
• Rabbit, Run by John Updike
• The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
• The Stranger by Albert Camus
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Trial by Franz Kafka
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
• Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Possession by A.S. Byatt
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
• Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
• The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
• I, Claudius by Robert Graves
• The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
• Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow
• U.S.A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos
• Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
• The Ambassadors by Henry James
• Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Golden Bowl by Henry James
• Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
• A Handful Of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
• As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
• All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
• Howards End by E.M. Forster
• The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac
• Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
• The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
• Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
• Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
• Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
• The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
• Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
• Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
• Light in August by William Faulkner
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac
• The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
• The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
• Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford
• Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm
• The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
• Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
• From Here to Eternity by James Jones
• The Wapshot Chronicles by John Cheever
• Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
• A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
• Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
• Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
• The House Of Mirth by Edith Wharton
• The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
• A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
• The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
• The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
• A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
• Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
• Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
• Kim by Rudyard Kipling
• Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
• Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
• A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
• Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
• Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
• Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
• The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett
• The Call of the Wild by Jack London
• Loving by Henry Green
• Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
• Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
• Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell
• Ironweed by William Kennedy
• The Magus by John Fowles
• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
• Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
• Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
• The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
• The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
• The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy
• Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard
• Anthem by Ayn Rand
• We The Living by Ayn Rand
• Mission Earth by L. Ron Hubbard
• Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
• Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
• Shane by Jack Schaefer
• Trustee From The Toolroom by Nevil Shute
• A Prayer For Owen Meany by John Irving
• The Stand by Stephen King
• The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison
• Moonheart by Charles de Lint
• Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
• Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor
• Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
• Someplace To Be Flying by Charles de Lint
• Yarrow by Charles de Lint
• At The Mountains Of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft
• One Lonely Night by Mickey Spillane
• Memory And Dream by Charles de Lint
• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
• On The Beach by Nevil Shute
• Greenmantle by Charles de Lint
• Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
• The Little Country by Charles de Lint
• The Recognitions by William Gaddis
• Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
• The World According To Garp by John Irving
• Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
• The Haunting Of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
• The Wood Wife by Terri Windling
• The Door Into Summer by Robert Heinlein
• At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis
• Watership Down by Richard Adams
• Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
• The Hunt For Red October by Tom Clancy
• Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K. Hamilton
• The Puppet Masters by Robert Heinlein
• It by Stephen King
• V. by Thomas Pynchon
• Double Star by Robert Heinlein
• Citizen Of The Galaxy by Robert Heinlein
• Sometimes A Great Notion by Ken Kesey
• My Antonia by Willa Cather
• Mulengro by Charles de Lint
• Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
• Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock
• Illusions by Richard Bach
• The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies
• Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes
• Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
• Gulliver’s Travels Jonathan Swift
• Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
• Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
• Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
• Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
• Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
• Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock
• The Black Sheep by Honore De Balzac
• The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
• The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
• Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott
• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
• Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
• The Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith
• The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
• Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
• The Plague by Albert Camus
• Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
• The BFG by Roald Dahl
• Harry Potter Series by J.K Rowling
• Money by Martin Amis
• Northern Lights by Philip Pullman
• The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
• American Pastoral by Philip Roth
• Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
• Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
• The Assistant by Bernard Malamud
• The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
• The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood
• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
• A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
• Falconer by John Cheever
• The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
• Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone
• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
• The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
• The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
• A Death in the Family by James Agee
• The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
• The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

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Non-Fiction

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
– Mark Twain

If fiction is a dive into the inner world of a writer, non-fiction is a leap into the unknown outer world. It’s a world bursting with complexities and mysteries waiting to be explored. Here are some of the best works of non-fiction classified into neat categories.

• Mythologies by Roland Barthes (1972)
• Notes on Camp by Susan Sontag (1964)
• Within the Context of No Context by George W.S. Trow (1980)
• The American Cinema by Andrew Sarris (1968)
• The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell (1949)
• A Child of the Century by Ben Hecht (1985)
• Mystery Train by Greil Marcus (1975)
• Against Interpretation, and Other Essays by Susan Sontag (1966)
• The Romantic Generation by Charles Rosen (1998)

• The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (1936 )
• The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
• Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E. F. Schumacher (1973)
• Principles of Political Economy and Taxation by David Ricardo (1817)
• Das Kapital by Karl Marx (1867)
• Principles of Economics by Carl Menger (1871)
• Human Action: A Treatise on Economics by (1949)
• The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L.Heilbroner (1953)

• The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock (1979)
• Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)

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• The Republic by Plato (380 BC)
• The Symposium by Plato (380 BC)
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (c180)
• Essays by Michel de Montaigne (1580)
• The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (1621)
• Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes (1641)
• Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume (1779)
• Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant (1781)
• Phenomenology of Mind by G.W.F.Hegel (1807)
• Phenomenology of Spirit by George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1807)
• Walden by HD Thoreau (1854)
• On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (1859)
• Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche (1883)
• Principia Ethica by G. E. Moore (1903)
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M.Pirsig (1974)
• Philosophy and Civilization by John Dewey (1968)
• Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein (1954)

This list is a continual work in progress. Like wine, choosing good books is largely a matter of taste. What book will strike a chord with which reader is an entirely unpredictable phenomenon. The same book that you read during your teen years may convey something different from what you read it as an older person. There is this one thing about a great book. It grows on you and you grow with the book. With time, the relationship only gets better. Even if you manage to read fifty of these books in your lifetime, you will be left enriched forever.