Books To Read Before You Die

Winnie and Helen have kept each other’s worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past – including the terrible truth even Helen does not know.

A “dreamlike and compelling” (Chicago Tribune) tour de force — an astonishingly imaginative detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets from Japan’s forgotten campaign in Manchuria during World War II. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels.

Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I includes the novels and stories that introduced the brilliant and unflappable Sherlock Holmes and his partner, Dr. Watson, to the world, including A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, and The Hound of the Baskervilles. These favorite tales have thrilled generations of readers with Holmes’s astounding powers of deduction.

A triumph of realist fiction, George Eliot’s Middlemarch explores a fictional nineteenth-century Midlands town in the midst of sweeping change. Against this backdrop, the quiet drama of ordinary lives is played out by the novel’s complexly portrayed characters — until the arrival of two outsiders further disrupts the town’s equilibrium. Every bit as powerful and perceptive in our time as it was in the Victorian era, Middlemarch displays Eliot’s clear-eyed yet humane understanding of characters caught up in the mysterious unfolding of self-knowledge.

Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man’s futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political and religious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order.

Giovanni’s Room is set in the Paris of the 1950s, where a young American expatriate finds himself caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality. David has just proposed marriage to his American girlfriend, but while she is away on a trip he becomes involved in a doomed affair with a bartender named Giovanni. With sharp, probing insight, James Baldwin’s classic narratives delves into the mystery of love and tells a deeply moving story that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth — all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, Trust engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.

When the scientist Victor Frankenstein attempts to create life in his laboratory, he sets in motion tragic forces beyond his control and faces losing everything he loves. The most famous horror story in world literature — the original tale of a mad scientist and his monster — is a profoundly moving masterpiece and English Romanticism’s finest prose fiction.

A symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness that provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from the acclaimed Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author.

First published in 1930, Langston Hughes’s award-winning debut novel draws from the author’s childhood in the rural Midwest to paint a moving account of the trials and joys of life in Black communities that, until the novel’s publication, had not seen themselves reflected in American literature. A groundbreaking work, Not Without Laughter established Langston Hughes as a gifted novelist as well as a beloved poet.

Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be Black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. A modern classic about star-crossed lovers that explores questions of race and being Black in America — and the search for what it means to call a place home.

Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams — invasive images of blood and brutality — torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.

Don Quixote has become so entranced reading tales of chivalry that he decides to turn knight errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, these exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways. While Quixote’s fancy often leads him astray — he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants — Sancho acquires cunning and a certain sagacity. Sane madman and wise fool, they roam the world together — and together they have haunted readers’ imaginations for nearly four hundred years.

Few have failed to be charmed by the witty and independent spirit of Elizabeth Bennet in Austen’s beloved classic Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth’s early determination to dislike Mr. Darcy is a prejudice only matched by the folly of his arrogant pride. Their first impressions give way to true feelings in a comedy profoundly concerned with happiness and how it might be achieved.

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe, there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. Nora Seed finds herself faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.

From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: A portrait of a marriage — and a life, in good times and bad — that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. This powerful book is Didion’s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness … about marriage and children and memory … about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”

Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality. The Secret History is a contemporary literary classic from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Goldfinch.

In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fell passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs – yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.

In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove – an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others – prays for her eyes to turn blue: So that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

A wondrous and shattering award-winning novel that follows twelve characters from Native communities: All traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize. A contemporary classic, this “astonishing literary debut” (Margaret Atwood) “places Native American voices front and center before readers’ eyes” (NPR).

Unsettling, insightful, and hilarious, the stories in Tenth of December – through their manic energy, their focus on what is redeemable in human beings, and their generosity of spirit – not only entertain and delight; they fulfill Chekhov’s dictum that art should “prepare us for tenderness.” The unforgettable characters that populate the pages of Tenth of December are vividly and lovingly infused with Saunders’s signature blend of exuberant prose, deep humanity, and stylistic innovation.

This is Kazuo Ishiguro’s profoundly compelling portrait of a butler named Stevens. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving the “great gentleman,” Lord Darlington. But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington’s “greatness,” and much graver doubts about the nature of his own life. From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, here is “an intricate and dazzling novel” (The New York Times) about the perfect butler and his fading, insular world in post-World War II England.

Written in Greek by an intellectual Roman emperor without any intention of publication, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius offer a wide range of fascinating spiritual reflections and exercises developed as the leader struggled to understand himself and make sense of the universe. Spanning from doubt and despair to conviction and exaltation, they cover such diverse topics as the question of virtue, human rationality, the nature of the gods, and the values of leadership. But while the Meditations were composed to provide personal consolation, in developing his beliefs Marcus also created one of the greatest works of philosophy.

In Tokyo, 16-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace — and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox — possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.

Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily’s fierce-hearted Black “stand-in mother,” Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free. They escape to Tiburon, South Carolina — a town that holds the secret to her mother’s past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of Black beekeeping sisters, Lily is introduced to their mesmerizing world of bees and honey, and the Black Madonna. This is a remarkable novel about divine female power, a story that women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come.

In a small rural village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as Russian soldiers abduct her father in the middle of the night and then set fire to her home. When their lifelong neighbor Akhmed finds Havaa hiding in the forest with a strange blue suitcase, he makes a decision that will forever change their lives. A story of the transcendent power of love in wartime, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a work of sweeping breadth, profound compassion, and lasting significance.

The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, caught in the tragic sweep of history, The Kite Runner transports readers to Afghanistan at a tense and crucial moment of change and destruction.

In the Time of the Butterflies is Julia Alvarez’s modern classic about four sisters known as Las Mariposas, or the Butterflies, who fought to liberate the Dominican Republic from Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship. Through the art and magic of Alvarez’s storytelling, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage, love, and the human cost of political oppression.

Compared favorably to the works of Faulkner and Dickens, Arundhati Roy’s modern classic is equal parts powerful family saga, forbidden love story, and piercing political drama. The seven-year-old twins Estha and Rahel see their world shaken irrevocably by the arrival of their beautiful young cousin, Sophie. It is an event that will lead to an illicit liaison and tragedies accidental and intentional, exposing “big things [that] lurk unsaid” in a country drifting dangerously toward unrest.