Reading list
Classic books everyone should read first
If you have not read many classics, or tried and stalled, start here. These fifteen were chosen because they are easy to love, not because they are important, though they are that too. Most are under three hundred pages, and the long ones move fast.
15 books, all free to read
Read them in any order. If one bores you after fifty pages, skip to the next: a classic is not a test.
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1. Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
Funny, romantic and much more modern than its reputation. The classic most people end up loving.
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2. The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Short enough for two evenings, with sentences you will want to read twice.
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3. A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens
A miser and three ghosts on one night. An afternoon's read that explains half of Christmas.
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5. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson
A mystery that turns into a horror story, in under a hundred pages.
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6. Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley
Not the film. A sad, eloquent creature and the man who fled from him.
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8. Candide
by Voltaire
A comic novel that races through disasters on every continent. Voltaire never slows down.
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9. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
by Arthur Conan Doyle
Holmes at his best, one case at a sitting.
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11. Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
Long, but a page-turner: the governess, the master and the secret upstairs.
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12. Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Proof that a "difficult" Russian novel can be impossible to put down.
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13. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll
If you have only seen the films, the book is stranger and much funnier.
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14. Siddhartha
by Hermann Hesse
A short, calm novel about finding your own way. Many people read it at the right moment.
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15. The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas
The long one to try once you are hooked: over a thousand pages that feel like a long weekend.
More lists
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.