What Should I Read? (Fiction)

For young people, and the young at heart, who love to read but aren’t sure what to pick up next, the following will provide a remarkable experience in your mind.

The short answer is, get a copy of The Western Canon by Harold Bloom. There are more than a lifetime’s worth of books to go through in there.

Here I just provide a list. For reviews of many masterworks you can check out my old blog.

Machado de Assis (one of the best 19th century novelists)

• The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas
• Quincas Borba
• Dom Casmurro

Honoré de Balzac

• Eugénie Grandet
• Père Goriot (one of the most marvelous villains in literature)
• Béatrix

Samuel Beckett

• Murphy
• Molloy
• Malone Dies (nothing like it)
• The Unnamable

Jorge Luis Borges

• Labyrinths (mind-bending)

Richard Brautigan

• Trout Fishing in America (utterly unique)

Albert Camus

• The Stranger
• The Plague
• The Fall (blackest humor you’ll ever read)

Miguel de Cervantes

• Don Quixote 1 and 2 (trans. John Rutherford)

JM Coetzee

• Life and Times of Michael K (incredible point of view in prose)
• Foe
• Disgrace
• Summertime

Douglas Coupland

• Generation X
• Hey Nostradamus!
• Eleanor Rigby
• JPod (pushes the novelistic form)

Daniel Defoe

• Robinson Crusoe (one of the first novels, one of the best)
• A Journal of the Plague Year
• Moll Flanders

Charles Dickens

• David Copperfield
• Hard Times

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• Crime and Punishment
• The Brothers Karamazov (trans. David Magarshack)

Jean Dutourd

• A Dog’s Head
• The Horrors of Love
• Pluche, or The Love of Art (a marriage of prose and thought)

Jean Echenoz

• Piano
• Ravel
• Running

Ralph Ellison

• The Invisible Man (a landmark)

William Faulkner

• The Sound and the Fury
• As I Lay Dying (deeply felt and shocking)
• Go Down, Moses

Ford Madox Ford

• The Good Soldier (be married at least ten years before reading this)

Jaroslav Hašek

• The Good Soldier Švejk

Joseph Heller

• Catch 22
• Something Happened

Ernest Hemingway

• A Farewell to Arms (is there a greater love story in literature)
• For Whom the Bell Tolls
• The Old Man and the Sea

Michel Houellebecq

• Whatever
• The Elementary Particles (imagines something better)
• Platform
• The Possibility of an Island

Nikos Kazantzakis

• Zorba the Greek (a cure for depression)

Jack Kerouac

• On the Road (for the young)
• Vanity of Duluoz

Imre Kertész

• Fatelessness (the most devastating World War II novel)
• Detective Story

Harper Lee

• To Kill a Mockingbird

Doris Lessing

• The Golden Notebook (a landmark)
• The Four-Gated City
• The Memoirs of a Survivor
• Shikasta (will change the way you see the world)
• The Diary of a Good Neighbour
• The Fifth Child
• Mara and Dann
• Alfred and Emily

Clarice Lispector

• Chronicles

Jonathan Littel

• The Kindly Ones

Bernard Malamud

• A New Life (exemplary people-with-problems)
• God’s Grace

W. Somerset Maugham

• Of Human Bondage (peak bildungsroman)
• The Moon and Sixpence

François Mauriac (greater gift than a lot of French novelists)

• Flesh and Blood
• Thérèse
• Vipers’ Tangle (ultimate miser)

Herman Melville

• Moby-Dick (the closest an American has come to Shakespeare)
• Bartleby, the Scrivener

Henry Miller

• Tropic of Cancer
• The Colossus of Maroussi (what scope)
• Plexus

Alan Moore

• From Hell (with Eddie Campbell)

Toni Morrison

• Sula
• Beloved (one of the greatest American novels)

Walker Percy

• The Moviegoer (New Orleans existentials)

Harold Pinter (drama but he cannot be excluded)

• The Room
• The Birthday Party
• The Homecoming
• Betrayal

Thomas Pynchon (there’s been nothing like early Pynchon)

• V
• The Crying of Lot 49
• Gravity’s Rainbow

Eça de Queiroz

• The Maias (if you’ve read Dickens, this will knock you for a loop)

Salman Rushdie

• Midnight’s Children

Jose Saramago

• Baltasar and Blimunda (yours truly’s favorite novel)
• The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
• The Stone Raft
• The History of the Siege of Lisbon
• The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (a must if you know the bible)
• Blindness (will kick your guts out)

Laurence Sterne

• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (surprisingly modern)

Jean-Philippe Toussaint

• Monsieur

Mark Twain

• Tom Sawyer
• Huckleberry Finn (greatest American novel according to Ellison and Hemingway)
• The Mysterious Stranger

Voltaire

• Candide (the model for much of what followed)

Kurt Vonnegut (all a must)

• The Sirens of Titan
• Mother Night
• Cat’s Cradle
• Slaughterhouse-Five
• Breakfast of Champions

Richard Wright

• Native Son (piercing, suspenseful)