After doing a DuckDuckGo search on “How to be well-read”, I found that four out of the first five results contained reading lists. Of course, becoming well-read is a multi-faceted approach. However, the most rational thing to do is compile my own list. Several sources ¹ were used to curate this list.

This list is sorted alphabetically by the author’s first name.

1. Aeschylus, “The Orestes”
2. Albert Camus, The Stranger
3. Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems
4. Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman and The Crucible
5. Abundant Roy, The God of Small Things”
6. Any Rand, The Fountainhead
7. Beowulf
8. Bernard Cornell, Books
9. Boccaccio, The Cameron
10. Cervantes, Don Quixote
11. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
12. Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
13. Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vanya
14. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
15. Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code
16. Dante, The Divine Comedy
17. Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
18. Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son
19. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
20. E. E. Cummings, E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1904 -1962
21. Edmund Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac
22. Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
23. Edward P. Jones, The Known World
24. Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, 1927 - 1979
25. Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
26. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
27. Emily Dickinson, The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
28. Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
29. Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time
30. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea
31. Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night and The Iceman Cometh
32. Euripides, Medea
33. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
34. Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find
35. Franz Kafka, The Trial
36. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov
37. Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
38. George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion
39. George Eliot, Middlemarch
40. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
41. George R.R. Martin, The “A Song of Ice and Fire” series
42. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
43. Harold Pinter, Betrayal
44. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
45. Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
46. Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House
47. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
48. Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey
49. Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot
50. Ian McEwan, Atonement
51. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
52. J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
53. J.K. Rowling, The Harry Potter series
54. J.R.R. Tolkien, “The Lord of The Rings”
55. James Joyce, Ulysses
56. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
57. Jeffery Eugenides, Middlesex
58. Jerome Lawrence, Inherit the Wind
59. Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies
60. Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
61. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
62. John Grisham, Any novel
63. John Keats, The Complete Poems
64. John Milton, Paradise Lost
65. John Updike, Rabbit, Run
66. John-Paul Sartre, No Exit
67. Johnathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
68. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
69. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
70. Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo
71. Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
72. Karen Russell, Swamplandia!
73. Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
74. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
75. Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
76. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace and Anna Karenina
77. Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun
78. Malcom Gladwell, Outliers and The Tipping Point
79. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
80. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
81. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
82. Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay
83. Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
84. Nicholas Sparks, Any novel
85. Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
86. One Thousand and One Nights
87. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
88. Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
89. Paolo Coelho, The Alchemist
90. Philip Roth, American Pastoral
91. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
92. Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
93. Reginald Rose, Twelve Angry Men
94. Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost
95. Robert Jordan, “The Wheel of Time” series
96. Roberto Bolaño, 2666
97. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
98. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
99. Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966 - 1996
100. Sophocles, Oedipus the King
101. Stephanie Meyer, The Twilight series
102. Steven Levitt, Freakonomics
103. Stieg Larsson, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series
104. Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games trilogy
105. Sylvia Plath, Ariel
106. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
107. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems
108. Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
109. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
110. Thornton Wilder, Our Town
111. Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
112. Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities
113. Toni Morrison, Beloved
114. Unknown, The Epic of Gilgamesh
115. Virgil, Aeneid
116. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse
117. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
118. Vyasa, “The Mahabharata”
119. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
120. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
121. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
122. William Shakespeare, As You Like It
123. William Shakespeare, Hamlet
124. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
125. William Shakespeare, King Lear
126. William Shakespeare, Macbeth
127. William Shakespeare, Othello
128. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
129. William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets
130. William Shakespeare, Taming of the Shrew
131. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
132. Zadie Smith, White Teeth