taken from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/20/30-books_n_3949614.html

• The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich
• Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
• The Secret History by Donna Tartt
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
• A Collection of Essays by George Orwell
• Hamlet by William Shakespeare
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
• Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage by Alice Munro
• Native Son by Richard Wright
• Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
• Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
• Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
• Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
• The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
• You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers
• How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti
• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
• Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley
• Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
• Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens
• A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
• The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
• Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
• Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley
• A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
• Birds of America by Lorrie Moore