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)
  • The Ingénu

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)