Reading list
100 classic books to read before you die
Every "books to read before you die" list has the same problem: half of it is in copyright, so it costs a small fortune and a library card to finish. This one is all classics, so every book on it is free, and you can start the first one in the next minute.
100 books, all free to read
It mixes novels with plays, poems, history and philosophy, because a life of reading is not only novels. The order is roughly the order we would suggest: famous and enjoyable first, demanding and rewarding later.
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1. Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
The perfect first classic: sharp, romantic and over before you want it to be.
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2. The Odyssey
by Homer
The original story of a long way home, and still the best adventure ever told.
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3. Hamlet
by William Shakespeare
The play everyone quotes without knowing it. A prince, a ghost and a great deal of thinking.
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5. Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley
A monster who speaks better than his maker, and the start of science fiction.
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8. Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
A murder and a conscience, as gripping as any thriller.
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9. Meditations
by Marcus Aurelius
An emperor's notes to himself on how to be decent. A page a day for life.
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15. Romeo and Juliet
by William Shakespeare
The love story that every love story since has been compared to.
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16. The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas
The revenge novel against which all others are measured.
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23. The Divine Comedy
by Dante Alighieri
A journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. Start with the Inferno.
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24. Paradise Lost
by John Milton
The fall of Satan and of Adam and Eve, and the most magnificent villain in English verse.
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25. Middlemarch
by George Eliot
The novel Virginia Woolf called one of the few written for grown-up people.
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31. Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
A voyage up the Congo into the darkness of empire. Short and haunting.
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37. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
by Frederick Douglass
An enslaved man learns to read and writes his way to freedom.
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43. All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque
The First World War from a German trench.
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48. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll
Nonsense so good that grown-ups never stop rereading it.
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50. The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
by Daniel Defoe
The castaway story that started a genre.
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51. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson
The double life, in a single evening's read.
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54. The Yellow Wallpaper
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
A short story about a woman, a room and a wallpaper. Unforgettable.
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56. Metamorphoses
by Ovid
Two hundred and fifty myths of transformation, the source of half of Western art.
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58. The Canterbury Tales
by Geoffrey Chaucer
Pilgrims tell each other stories on the road, some of them very rude.
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61. Essays
by Michel de Montaigne
The man who invented the essay, and the best company in any library.
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63. King Lear
by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare's darkest tragedy: a father, three daughters and a storm.
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65. The Tempest
by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare's farewell: a magician on an island giving up his magic.
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67. A Doll’s House
by Henrik Ibsen
A wife walks out and slams the door. The door was heard around Europe.
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68. Uncle Vanya
by Anton Chekhov
Wasted lives on a country estate, as only Chekhov can make them funny.
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71. The Song Celestial, or Bhagavad-Gita
by Edwin Arnold
The Gita: duty and devotion on a battlefield.
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73. Sense and Sensibility
by Jane Austen
Two sisters, sense and sensibility, and two very different heartbreaks.
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87. The Federalist Papers
by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison
How to build a republic, argued in newspaper essays.
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88. Uncle Tom’s Cabin
by Harriet Beecher Stowe
The antislavery novel that sold more copies than any book but the Bible in its century.
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89. The Communist Manifesto
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
The pamphlet that shook the twentieth century. Under an hour.
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92. The Story of My Experiments with Truth
by Mahatma Gandhi
Gandhi's life as a series of experiments.
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93. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
by Mary Wollstonecraft
The founding argument for women's equality, from 1792.
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96. The Decameron
by Giovanni Boccaccio
Ten young people escape the plague and tell a hundred stories.
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97. In Search of Lost Time
by Marcel Proust
The longest novel here: memory, jealousy and a madeleine. Start with Swann's Way.
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98. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
by Laurence Sterne
A novel that cannot get its hero born. The strangest book of the eighteenth century.
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Read them free
Every book on this list is free in Doomreader: open one and it reads as short posts you scroll, with your place kept and its best pages a tap away. You can listen to any of them free too, read aloud by your device.