Must Reads

Some books change your life–or at least the way you think of it. At the core of writing, and of reading, is the need to connect with a story that means something more than words on a page. Some authors have accomplished this task tremendously, and here is a list of the books that have changed my way of thinking. Be them insightful, poignant, or simply beautiful, these books are those that I recommend to all lovers of the written word.

• A Fraction of the Whole, Steve Toltz
• Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse
• On the Nature of Things, Lucretius
• Meditations on First Philosophy, Renee Descartes
• An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
• The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin
• The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
• Orlando, Virginia Woolf
• The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
• Elizabeth I, Margaret George
• Lie Down in Darkness, William Styron
• The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
• Wunderkind, Nikolai Grozni
• The Memory Palace, Mira Bartók
• Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
• The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Awakening, Kate Chopin
• The Great Typo Hunt, Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson
• The House at Tyneford, Natasha Solomons
• Partitions, Amit Majmudar
• The Bone People, Keri Hulme