Ahab’s Quest

I read a great deal, so I’ve compiled here what I hope to be a useful list of recommendations. I read the classics so you can know what’s worthwhile!
Best of the Best (Key: +Difficult reading)

The Divine Comedy–Dante Alighieri+

Pride and Prejudice–Jane Austen

Don Quixote de la Mancha–Miguel de Cervantes

A Tale of Two Cities–Charles Dickens

The Complete Poems–Emily Dickinson

The Brothers Karamazov–Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Four Quartets–T.S. Eliot

The Great Gatsby–F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Celestial Railroad–Nathaniel Hawthorne

Catch-22–Joseph Heller

A Farewell to Arms–Ernest Hemingway

A Prayer for Owen Meany–John Irving

The Ambassadors–Henry James

Ulysses–James Joyce+

Immortality–Milan Kundera

To Kill a Mockingbird–Harper Lee

Mere Christianity–C.S. Lewis

Moby-Dick–Herman Melville

King Lear–William Shakespeare
Hamlet–Shakespeare
Othello–Shakespeare

The Green Letters–Miles Stanford

Sacred Marriage–Gary Thomas

Walden–Henry David Thoreau

The Lord of the Rings–J.R.R. Tolkien

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn–Mark Twain

The Aeneid–Virgil

Good Reading

Things Fall Apart–Chinua Achebe

Tuesdays with Morrie–Mitch Albom

The Confessions–St. Augustine

Fahrenheit 451–Ray Bradbury

Wuthering Heights–Emily Bronte

The Da Vinci Code–Dan Brown

The Plague–Albert Camus

Breakfast at Tiffany’s–Truman Capote

Heart of Darkness–Joseph Conrad

Crime and Punishment–Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Sound and the Fury–William Faulkner+

Tom Jones–Henry Fielding

The End of the Affair–Graham Greene

The Scarlet Letter–Nathaniel Hawthorne

A Moveable Feast–Ernest Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls–Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea–Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises–Hemingway

Siddhartha–Herman Hesse

The Iliad–Homer
The Odyssey–Homer

Les Miserables–Victor Hugo+

Their Eyes Were Watching God–Zora Neale Hurston

A Doll’s House–Henrik Ibsen

The Portrait of a Lady–Henry James
The Turn of the Screw–James

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man–James Joyce
Dubliners–Joyce

A Separate Peace–John Knowles

The Chronicles of Narnia–C.S. Lewis
The Screwtape Letters–Lewis

The Giver–Lois Lowry

The Encyclopedia of the Dead–Danilo Kis

The Prince–Niccolo Machiavelli

One Hundred Years of Solitude–Gabriel García Márquez

The Seven Storey Mountain–Thomas Merton

The Crucible–Arthur Miller
Death of a Salesman–Miller

Paradise Lost–John Milton+

Utopia–Sir Thomas More

1984–George Orwell
Animal Farm–Orwell

The Republic–Plato

The Chosen–Chaim Potok
The Promise–Potok

Catcher in the Rye–J.D. Salinger

Austerlitz–W.G. Sebald

As You Like It–Shakespeare
Henry V–”
Julius Caesar–”
The Merchant of Venice–”
Much Ado About Nothing–”
Romeo and Juliet–”
The Tempest–”
Twelfth Night–”

Frankenstein–Mary Shelley

Of Mice and Men–John Steinbeck

Gulliver’s Travels–Jonathan Swift

The Silmarillion–J.R.R. Tolkien

The House of Mirth–Edith Wharton

The Picture of Dorian Gray–Oscar Wilde

To the Lighthouse–Virginia Woolf

Don’t Bother
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings–Maya Angelou

Jane Eyre–Charlotte Bronte

The Black Envelope–Norman Manea+

The Jew of Malta–Christopher Marlowe

On Deck:
The Red Badge of Courage–Stephen Crane
My Name is Asher Lev–Chaim Potok
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea–Jules Verne
Sherlock Holmes–Arthur Conan Doyle (at least one about the detective)
The Stranger–Albert Camus
Oliver Twist–Charles Dickens
The Last of the Mohicans–James Fenimore Cooper
A Return to Modesty–Wendy Shalit
The Invisible Man–H.G. Wells
Silence–Shusaku Endo
Rabbit, Run–John Updike
Brave New World–Aldous Huxley
War and Peace–Leo Tolstoy
The Cider House Rules–John Irving
Slaugherhouse-Five–Kurt Vonnegut
Grimm’s Fairy Tales–Brother Grimm
The Undertaking–Thomas Lynch
Emma–Jane Austen
Middlemarch–George Eliot
Abba’s Child–Brennan Manning
Life of Pi–Yann Martel
Angela’s Ashes–Frank McCourt