Literary minimum: 20 books that must be read by everyone

What 20 books should be read to everyone in order to feel well? On the Quora website, they asked what books should be read by every person to be well -read - books that would cover different genres and historical periods and could serve as a good basis for choosing literary directions and books in the future.

Western classics (ancient and modern)

• Odyssey (Homer): The epic about a hero who could not return home without a little help from the gods. (a separate bonus, if you also read the Iliad!)
• “ The Tale of the two cities ” (Charles Dickens): the quintessence of the novels about the French Revolution and Lyubov.
• “Pride and Prejudice” (Jane Austin): A novel that laid the foundation for all further stories with the plot “Hatred at first glance turns into love”.

Antiophy

• “1984” (George Orwell): a novel whose terminology has become a householding to refer to a totalitarian regime.
• “O Worst New World” (Oldos Huxley): Another classic anti -utopia.
• "History of the maid" (Margaret Etwood): The feministic view of the genre.

Science fiction and fantasy

• “The Lord of the Rings” (J. R. R. Tolkien): The most famous work of the Fantasy genre, which had a huge impact on world culture.
• “Foundation” cycle (Isaac Azimov): Classics of science fiction!
• Neuromant (William Gibson): a canonical work in the cyberpunk genre, with one of the most famous first lines: “The sky above the port was the color of the TV screen tuned to an empty channel.”

American literature

• The Great Gatsby (Francis Scott Fitzgerald): You cannot think about the "Age of Jazz" and not remember this novel.
• “Bonfires of the Ambies” (Tom Wolf): a book that is considered decisive for the New York of the 1980s.
• “Bunning of anger” (John Steinbek): Do not enter into a conversation about the great depression if you have not read this novel.

Literary heavyweights

• Ulysses (James Joyce): One day of Leopold Bloom’s life was one of the best books of the 20th century.
• “Endless joke” (David Foster Wallace): A novel about events taking place in the semi -parodic version of future America.
• “Rainbow of earthly gravity” (Thomas Pinchon): A lot of things happen and many people pretend to be understood.

Classical literature outside Europe and the USA (ancient)

• "Ramayana" (India): Ancient Indian epic.
• “Records of the Three Kingdoms” (China): Historical Chronicles of the Three -Gain, covering the period from 189 to 280.

Classical literature outside Europe and the USA (modern)

• “One hundred years of loneliness” (Gabriel Garcia Marquez): one of the most characteristic and popular works in the direction of magical realism.
• “And destruction came” (Chinoa Achebe): the story of the distant past of Nigeria, about the tragic times of the colonization of Africa.

Satire

• “Cradle for a Cat” (Kurt Vonnegut): along with “Boyany number five”, one of the most famous novels of the author.
• “Celov-22” (Joseph Heller): one of the most brilliant samples of a semi-ABSURDIC, phantasmagoric work.
• “Hitchhiking in the Galaxy” (Douglas Adams): Comedy and science fiction in the same book!

Russian classics

According to visitors to the “100 best books” site, the rating of Russian -speaking literature is headed by:

Of course, this list is far from being considered complete (if the full list is generally possible to make), but if you read all the books from this list, you will be familiar with the main works in different directions and you can decide what to read further.

This is not to say that by reading these books, you will feel a well -read, but, on the other hand, a really read person never feels like that.

Image: Hoary . SS BY 2.0 license