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Time to add to your “to be read” stack.

These are our picks for the 60 most essential classic books.

Woman reading book

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You know, the ones that everyone should get around to reading sooner, rather than later.

That’s why we’re still reading them.

to the English Renaissance to the mid-20th century.

1984 by George Orwell

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We’re betting a few of them already are.

A House for Mr. Biswas

A struggle for independence is at the heart of V.S.

Naipaul’s darkly comic and very moving 1961 novel.

A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul

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It is a timeless coming of age you simply must read.

It is an important must-read that instantly earned its place as a classic.

Emma

Emma Woodhouse entertains herself by meddling in the romantic affairs of her neighbors.

A Separate Peace book cover

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As with so many of Jane Austen’s classic comedies of manners,Emmais as relevant as ever.

Youve probably seen the film, but the book is worth a read as well.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Does it get anymore classic American literature than Mark Twain?

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

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No, we dont think so.

Much of the inspiration came from Twains own childhood in Hannibal, Missouri.

Steinbeck captures the dichotomy of the times between the powerful and the powerless with measured empathy and tragedy.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

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The Hobbit

TheHobbitis J.R.R.

Tolkiens prelude to theLord of the Ringstrilogy and a readers introduction to Middle Earth.

This is also where Bilbo first encounters a mysterious and magical ring.

Beloved

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The 1927 novel brings to life a family and their visits to Scotland’s Isle of Skye.

Add These to Your BookshelfAnd Your Reading List

Cane by Jean Toomer

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Catcher in the Rye cover

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East of Eden

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Emma by Jane Austen

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Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

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Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

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Gone With the Wind

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Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

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Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

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Howards End by E. M. Forster

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Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

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Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

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Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

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Metamorphoses by Ovid

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Middlemarch by George Eliot

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Misty of Chincoteague

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Moby-Dick; or The Whale by Herman Melville

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My Antonia by Willa Cather

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Native Son by Richard Wright

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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: Written by Himself by Frederick Douglass

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Night by Elie Wiesel

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Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

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Paradise Lost by John Milton

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Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

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Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

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Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

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The Awakening by Kate Chopin

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The Bell Jar (P.S. Series) by Sylvia Plath

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The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts and an Epilogue by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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The Collected Stories Of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty

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The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Barnes & Noble Collectible Editions) by William Shakespeare

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The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

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The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

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The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

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The Great Gatsby

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The Grapes of Wrath

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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

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The Hobbit

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The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper

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The Moviegoer: A Novel by Walker Percy

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The Odyssey by Homer

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The Picture of Dorian Gray (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by Oscar Wilde

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The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

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The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

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Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

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Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

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To Kill a Mockingbird

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To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

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Ulysses by James Joyce

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Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

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Wuthering Heights (Barnes & Noble Collectible Editions) by Emily Brontë

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