22 Books to Read Before You Die
You’ve probably already heard of most of the books on this list because they’re acclaimed and beloved by so many. Add these classics, nonfiction, and young adult books to your to-read list!
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Add to BookshelfThe Secret History: A Read with Jenna Pick
by Donna Tartt
Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality. The Secret History is a contemporary literary classic from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Goldfinch.
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Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel GarcĂa Márquez
In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fell passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs – yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.
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The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove – an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others – prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
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There There
by Tommy Orange
A wondrous and shattering award-winning novel that follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize. A contemporary classic, this “astonishing literary debut” (Margaret Atwood) “places Native American voices front and center before readers’ eyes” (NPR/Fresh Air).
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The Color Purple (Movie Tie-In)
by Alice Walker
A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. The Color Purple broke the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, narrating the lives of women through their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience, and bravery. Deeply compassionate and beautifully imagined, Alice Walker’s epic carries readers on a spirit-affirming journey toward redemption and love.
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Tenth of December
by George Saunders
Unsettling, insightful, and hilarious, the stories in Tenth of December – through their manic energy, their focus on what is redeemable in human beings, and their generosity of spirit – not only entertain and delight; they fulfill Chekhov’s dictum that art should “prepare us for tenderness.” The unforgettable characters that populate the pages of Tenth of December are vividly and lovingly infused with Saunders’s signature blend of exuberant prose, deep humanity, and stylistic innovation.
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The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, here is “an intricate and dazzling novel” (The New York Times) about the perfect butler and his fading, insular world in post-World War II England.
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Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
Things Fall Apart is a classic narrative about Africa’s cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Falls Apart explores one man’s futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political and religious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order.
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A Tale for the Time Being
by Ruth Ozeki
Full of Ozeki’s signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.Â
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The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky’s last and greatest novel is, above all, the story of a murder, told with hair-raising intellectual clarity and a feeling for the human condition unsurpassed in world literature. It is a masterpiece that chronicles the bitter love-hate struggle between an outsized father and his three very different sons.
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A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
by Anthony Marra
In a small rural village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as Russian soldiers abduct her father in the middle of the night and then set fire to her home. When their lifelong neighbor Akhmed finds Havaa hiding in the forest with a strange blue suitcase, he makes a decision that will forever change their lives. A story of the transcendent power of love in wartime, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a work of sweeping breadth, profound compassion, and lasting significance.
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White Teeth
by Zadie Smith
Set against London’s racial and cultural tapestry, venturing across the former empire and into the past as it barrels toward the future, White Teeth revels in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, confounding expectations, and embracing the comedy of daily existence.
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The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
As Whitehead recreates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is a gripping tale of one woman’s will to escape the horrors of bondage.
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In the Time of the Butterflies
by Julia Alvarez
In the Time of the Butterflies is Julia Alvarez’s modern Latinx classic about four sisters known as Las Mariposas, or the Butterflies, who fought to liberate the Dominican Republic from Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship. Through the art and magic of Alvarez’s storytelling, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage, love, and the human cost of political oppression.
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The Kitchen God’s Wife
by Amy Tan
Winnie and Helen have kept each other’s worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past–including the terrible truth even Helen does not know. The Kitchen God’s Wife is “a beautiful book” (Los Angeles Times) from the author of bestselling novels like The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement, and the memoir, Where the Past Begins.
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