Serious reading

[xealix]

Reading, I never took it upon myself to become into it while I was in school. I am just now starting to regret this, and I would like to hear recommendations of what books you in the FFR populace have found noteworthy. I don't care if they are books everyone has heard of, or books no one has heard of. Post the title, author, and genre here along with a reason you recommend the book. Hopefully people will take it upon themselves to read the books posted here.

I am starting this thread, because I will be starting college soon and I want to get to a point in which I feel confident in my knowledge of literature. Any help will be greatly appreciated.


Book List: All Books that have been suggested in this thread. They are in no specific order and I tried my best to keep from doing repeats. Updated to post 24 at the moment. Please tell me if any titles or italics are wrong.

Homer's: Illiad and Odyssey
Plato's: Republic
Virgil's: Aeneid
Euclid's: Elements
Sophocles': Oedipus Rex
George Orwell's: 1984 and Animal Farm
Chinua Achebe's: Things Fall Apart
John Steinbeck's:The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men
Albert Camus': The Stranger
Joseph Heller's: Catch-22
Anthony Burgess': A Clockwork Orange
F. Scott Fitzgerald's: The Great Gatsby
Ray Bradbury's: Fahrenheit 451
William Golding's: Lord of the Flies
Jack Kerouac's: On The Road
Kurt Vonnegut's: Slaughterhouse Five
JD Salinger's: The Catcher in the Rye
Aldous Huxley's: Brave New World
Lois Lowry's: The Giver
Marcel Proust's: A la Recherche du Temps Perdu
Jostein Gaarder's: Sophie's World
Ayn Rand's: Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and Anthem
Ernest Hemingway's: The Old Man and the Sea
Elie Wiesel's: Night
Alan Paton's: Cry, the Beloved Country
Leo Tolstoy's: War and Peace and Anna Karenina
Hermann Hesse's: Siddartha
Toni Morrison's: Song of Solomon
Robert Jordan's: Wheel of Time series
Bret Easton Ellis': American Psycho
JRR Tolkien's: The Lord of the RingsTrilogy, and the Hobbit
Stephen Hawking's: A Brief History of Time, andThe Grand Design
William Gibson's: Neuromancer
Neal Stephenson's: Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon
Richard Dawkins': The Selfish Gene, The God Delusion, and The Greatest Show on Earth
William Shakespeare's: Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, The Tempest, and Much Ado About Nothing
Douglas Adams': Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Stephen King's: The Stand
Frank Herbert's: Dune
James Clavell's: Shogun
Arthur Golden's: Memoirs of a Geisha
Jared Diamond's: Guns, Germs, and Steel
Yann Martel's: Life of Pi
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's: Freakonomics
JK Rowling's: Harry Potter series
Robert Ludlum's: Bourne trilogy
David Guterson's: Snow Falling on Cedars
David Sedaris': Me Talk Pretty One Day and Naked
Barbara Kingsolver's: The Poisonwood Bible
Khaled Hosseini's: The Kite Runner
Margaret Atwood's: The Blind Assassin
Nick Hornby's: High Fidelity
Alice Sebold's: The Lovely Bones
Jeffrey Euginides': Middlesex
Laurie Halse Anderson's: Speak
Audrey Niffenegger's: The Time Traveler's Wife
Orson Scott Card's: Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow
Nicholas Taleb's: Fooled by Randomness
Norton Juster's: The Phantom Tollbooth
Alain de Botton's: On Love
Douglas Hofstadter's: Gödel, Escher, Bach
Alexandre Dumas': The Count of Monte Cristo
Dostoevsky's: The Brothers Karamazov
Baldwin's: Giovanni's Room
John Grisham's: The Chamber, and A Time to Kill
Cormac Mccarthy's: The Road
Katherine Dunn's: Geek Love
Oscar Wilde's: Picture of Dorian Gray
Vonnegut's: Sirens of Titan, and Cat's Cradle
David and Leigh Edding's: The Redemption of Althalus
Roger Zelazny's: The Book of Amber
Guy Gavriel Kay's: Tigana
Bernard Cornwell's: Sharpe's
Jim Butcher's: The Dresden Files
Terry Pratchet's: Jingo
Patrick Rothfus': The Name of the Wind
David Weber's: By Schism Rent Assunder
Neal Stephson's: The Baroque Cycle, and Diamond Age