Top 250 Books of All Time | Books I Have Loved
This is my personal list of the best books to make you wiser and a better thinker (and a writer, if you are into writing). But, most importantly each one of these books is life-changing and full of wisdom.
By the way, these books span five continents, dozens of countries, and 2000 years of distilled human experience.
I’ll continue to add to this list for your enjoyment and my pleasure! So as time goes by the number of books will increase and will likely stop at the Top 250.
“Reading makes our soul richer.” – Salil Jha
(The listing is in no particular order).
1. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2. The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
3. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
4. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
5. Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
6. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
7. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
8. Medea by Euripides
9. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
11. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
12. A Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert
13. Gypsy Ballads by Federico Garcia Lorca
14. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
15. Gilgamesh by Unknown in Mesopotamia (1800 BC)
16. Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Library – a place like no other / The Naked Soul
17. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
18. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu
19. The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by Joao Guimaraes Rosa
20. Hunger by Knut Hamsun
21. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
22. The Iliad by Homer
23. The Odyssey by Homer
24. Ulysses by James Joyce
25. The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka
26. Alice in Wonderland by Jane Carruth
27. The Recognition of Sakuntala by Kalidasa, India
28. The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata
29. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
30. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
31. Independent People by Halldor K Laxness
32. Complete Poems by Giacomo Leopardi
33. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Books transform us with transpersonal experiences / The Naked Soul
34. The First and Last Freedom by Jiddu Krishnamurti
35. Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Lu Xun
36. Mahabharata by Vyasa India (500 BC)
37. Children of Gebelawi by Naguib Mahfouz
38. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
39. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
40. Essays by Michel de Montaigne
41. History by Elsa Morante
42. Beloved by Toni Morrison
43. The Tale of Genji by Shikibu Murasaki
44. The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
45. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
46. Njaals Saga by Unknown from Iceland (1300 AD)
47. 1984 by George Orwell
48. Metamorphoses by Ovid (43 BC)
49. The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
50. The Complete Tales by Edgar Allan Poe
51. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
52. Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
53. Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo
54. Masnawi (and Collection of Complete Poems) by Rumi
Reading makes us more human / The Naked Soul
55. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
56. The Orchard by Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi
57. Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
58. Blindness by Jose Saramago
59. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
60. Othello by William Shakespeare
61. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
62. The Red and the Black by Stendhal
63. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
64. Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo
65. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
66. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
67. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
68. One Thousand and One Nights by Unknown from India/Persia/Iraq
69. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
70. Ramayana by Valmiki, India (300 BC)
71. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
72. Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
73. Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
74. The New Testament (The Bible) by various authors
75. The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason
76. The Stranger by Albert Camus
77. The Trial by Franz Kafka
78. Middlemarch by George Eliot
79. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
80. The Book of Job (Old Testament) by Unknown
81. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
82. Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin
83. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
84. Meetings With Remarkable Men by G.I. Gurdjieff
85. Buddenbrook and The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
86. The Story of My Experiments With Truth by Mahatma Gandhi
87. The Dhammapada by Anonymous
88. Lust for Life by Irving Stone
89. The Analects by Confucius
90. The Outsider by Colin Wilson
91. The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone
92. A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
93. In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching by P.D. Ouspensky
94. Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu by Zhuangzi
95. Our Life with Mr. Gurdjieff by Thomas de Hartmann
96. Selected Writings by Meister Eckhart
97. Songs of Milarepa by Milarepa
98. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus
99. Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
100. Who Am I? The Teachings of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi by Ramana Maharshi
101. The Light of Asia by Edwin Arnold
102. Confessions by Augustine of Hippo
103. Mother by Maxim Gorky
104. Japji Sahib – The Song of the Soul by Guru Nanak
105. The Three Pillars of Zen by Philip Kapleau
