While the amount of books a person has read is not an indication of how intelligent they are or how rich of a life they have lived, books no doubt offer a keen bit of education. But it is those essential books that can really offer something special for the reader. They can give insight into a world you’ve never known, it can provide you with context to an event in history, or it can simply be an escape within the world and characters the author has created. So while books don’t define our lives, they can certainly enrich them and you don’t want to miss out on some of the greatest literary pieces of all-time. Take a look at our list of the 100 novels ever book lover should read at some point in their lives.
1984 by George Orwell
20,000 Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Confederacy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
A Game Of Thrones by George R. R. Martin
Alice’s Adventure’s In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Catcher In The Rye by J.D Salinger
Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Dune by Frank Herbert
For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Invisible Man by H.G Wells
It by Stephen King
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Life Of Pi by Yann Martel
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Lord Of The Flies by William Golding
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Maus by Art Spiegelman
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Murder On The Orient Express by Agatha Christie
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass
Necromancer by William Gibson
No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
Old Man And The Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
On The Road by Jack Kerouac
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Pillars Of The Earth by Ken Follett
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Sandman by Neil Gaiman
Slaughter-House Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
The 39 Steps by John Buchan
The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
The Call Of The Wild by Jack London
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Count Of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas
The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time by Mark Haddon
The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Friends Of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins
The Godfather by Mario Puzo
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
The Lord Of The Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavell
The Shining by Stephen King
The Silence Of The Lambs by Thomas Harris
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
The Unbearable Lightness Of Being by Milan Kundera
Things Fall Apart by Milan Kundera
Three Men In A Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
True Grit by Charles Portis
Ulysses by James Joyce
War And Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Watchmen by Alan Moore
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
World War Z by Max Brooks
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
For more great content and everything else in the world of boomers, sign up with BoomersPlus for FREE. Go to www.boomersplus.com or email us at info@boomersplus.com to learn more.