• The Illiad and The Odyssey - Homer 8th century B.C.
• Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri 1321
• War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy 1869
• 1984 - George Orwell 1949
• Moby Dick - Herman Melville 1851
• Ulysses - James Joyce 1922
• Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov 1955
• The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner 1929
• Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
• Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
• Persuasion - Jane Austen
• Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 1813
• Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison 1952
• To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf 1927
• Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer 15th century
• Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift 1726
• Middlemarch - George Eliot 1874
• Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe 1958
• The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger 1951
• Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell 1936
• One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 1967
• The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925
• Catch-22 - Joseph Heller 1961
• Beloved - Toni Morrison 1987
• The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck 1939
• Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie 1981
• Brave New World - Aldous Huxley 1932
• Time Must Have a Stop - Huxley
• Island - Huxley
• Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf 1925
• Native Son - Richard Wright 1940
• Democracy in America - Alexis de Tocqueville 1835
• Origin of Species - Charles Darwin 1859
• The Histories - Herodotus 440 B.C.
• The Social Contract - Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1762
• Das Kapital - Karl Marx 1867
• The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli 1532
• Confessions - St. Augustine 4th century
• Leviathan - Thomas Hobbes 1651
• The History of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides 431 B.C.
• The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien 1954
• Winnie-the-Pooh - A. A. Milne 1926
• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis 1950
• A Passage to India - E. M. Forster 1924
• On the Road - Jack Kerouac 1957
• To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 1960
• The Holy Bible. Revised Standard Version. NA
• A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess 1962
• Light in August Light in August - William Faulkner 1932
• The Souls of Black Folk - W. E. B. Du Bois 1903
• Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys 1966
• Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert 1857
• Paradise Lost - John Milton 1667
• Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 1877
• Hamlet - William Shakespeare 1603
• King Lear - William Shakespeare 1608
• Othello - William Shakespeare 1622
• Sonnets - William Shakespeare 1609
• Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman 1855
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain 1885
• Kim - Rudyard Kipling 1901
• Frankenstein - Mary Shelley 1818
• Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison 1977
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey 1962
• For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway 1940
• Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut 1969
• Animal Farm - George Orwell 1945
• Lord of the Flies - William Golding 1954
• In Cold Blood - Truman Capote 1965Ž
• The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing 1962
• Remembrance of Things Past - Marcel Proust 1913
• The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler 1939
• As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner 1930
• The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway 1926
• I, Claudius - Robert Graves 1934
• The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers 1940
• Sons and Lovers - D. H. Lawrence 1913
• All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren 1946
• Go Tell It on the Mountain - James Baldwin 1953
• Charlotte's Web - E. B. White 1952
• Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad 1902
• Night - Elie Wiesel 1958
• Rabbit, Run - John Updike 1960
• The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton 1920
• Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth 1969
• An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser 1925
• The Day of the Locust - Nathanael West 1939
• Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller 1934
• The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett 1930
• His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman 1995
• Death Comes for the Archbishop - Willa Cather 1927
• The Interpretation of Dreams - Sigmund Freud 1900
• The Education of Henry Adams - Henry Adams 1918
• Quotations from Chairman Mao - Mao Zedong 1964
• The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature - William James 1902
• Brideshead Revisited Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh 1945
• Silent Spring - Rachel Carson 1962
• The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money - John Maynard Keynes 1936
• Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad 1900
• Goodbye to All That - Robert Graves 1929
• The Affluent Society - John Kenneth Galbraith 1958
• The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame 1908
• The Autobiography of Malcolm X - Alex Haley and Malcolm X 1965
• Eminent Victorians - Lytton Strachey 1918
• The Color Purple - Alice Walker 1982
• The Second World War (The Gathering Storm; Their Finest Hour; The Grand Alliance; The Hinge of Fate; - Winston Churchill 1948
• Agatha Christie's books :)
• Kafka, Dostoiévski...
• 2010 reading list:
• The Savage Detectives (F)

Author: Roberto Bolaño Suggested by: Andrew Price, Senior Web Editor Why read? Bolaño's wit and sexual energy flies off the page as the novel's journeymen romp through Mexico City, Barcelona, Israel, Liberia, and a desert in Northern Mexico. If you finish it in the next few months, you will be ready for its companion 2666, whose English translation is coming this year available now.

• Anna Karenina (F)

Author: Leo Tolstoy Suggested by: Siobhan O’Connor, Features Editor Why read? Because you've been hearing train-related questions on Jeopardy for years, and it's finally time you got in on those jokes. It doesn't hurt that Tolstoy is an undeniable master of the written word.

• Fast Food Nation (NF)

Author: Eric Schlosser Suggested by: Siobhan O’Connor, Features Editor Why read? All your friends have read it. And while you think you get the gist of its message, an overview is no substitute for a real experience—especially when we're talking about what we put into our bodies. Consider pairing with The Omnivore's Dilemma and a viewing of Food, Inc. to ensure you never look at lunch the same again.

• Open: An Autobiography (NF)

Author: Andre Agassi Suggested by: Ben Goldhirsh, Founder Why read? Most media conversations regarding Agassi's memoir reduced the book two talking points: his drug use and his wig. Hot topics, sure. But they're really just footnotes in an brutally honest, thoroughly inspirational story of human endurance.

• The Stranger (F)

Author: Albert Camus Suggested by: Sebastian Buck, Strategy Why read? Because it has one of the best opening lines in the history of the printed word—depending on your translation: "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know." And what follows is utter brilliance.

• Point Omega: A Novel (F)

Author: Don DeLillo Suggested by: Zach Frechette, Editor in Chief Why read? That it's a DeLillo book set in the middle of a desert "somewhere south of nowhere," where a war adviser has gone "in search of time and space," should be compelling enough. That it's a slim 160 pages makes it rather brisk for a meditation on death. Consider pairing Point Omega with his more hefty Underworld and you've got yourself some time for pondering the subject.

• Going Rouge: An American Nightmare (NF)

Authors: Richard Kim and Betsy Reed Suggested by: Eric Small, VP of Product Technology Why read? Sarah Palin wears a lot of different hats—church-goer, hockey mom, sex symbol, media-hating politician, member of the media—and Kim and Reed explore them all. Consider pairing this exploration of American obsession with Palin's own memoir for a fun game of conflicting histories.

• Freedom (F)

Author: Jonathan Franzen Suggested by: Patrick James, Associate Editor Why read? The 9,000-word Freedom excerpt "Good Neighbors" that appeared in The New Yorker's June, 2009 Fiction Issue was vintage Franzen, pitting hapless middle class families against each other during two decades of gentrification in a St. Paul neighborhood. And a hilarious, teeth-baring, full-length follow-up to The Corrections is long, long overdue. (Though we'll have to wait until fall for this one.)

• This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (NF)

Author: Daniel J. Levitin Suggested by: Tali Catz, Print Distribution Coordinator Why read? For most of us, attempting to explain why, precisely, a certain song resonates so deeply would be an exercise in futility; it's ineffable, we might say. For Daniel Levitin, there are scientific explanations behind the rhythms, keys, and time signatures that move us, and he's willing to fill you in on them.

• Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (NF)

Author: Mary Roach Suggested by: Tali Catz, Print Distribution Coordinator Why read? Roach, a Salon and Reader's Digest columnist, has gone to great lengths to turn dead bodies into a hilarious—and thought-provoking—subject. It's probably the most informative take on a macabre topic of the past decade.

• Strength In What Remains (NF)

Author: Tracy Kidder Suggested by: Amanda Millner-Fairbanks, Education Editor Why read? Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains is an undeniable modern classic. In Strength, the author follows Deogratias, a young medical student from the central African nation of Burundi forced to flee his home during a time of ethnic violence. The improbable journey takes the young man to New York City and back to Burundi, where he attempts to build a medical clinic. "Above all," Kidder says, "this is a book about coming to terms with memories."

• Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (NF)

Authors: Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler Suggested by: Hillary Newman, Community Manager Why read? Obesity, smoking, and happiness, Christakis and Fowler find, are all socially transmitted behaviors. That means that what you do can be determined by the people you know—as what they do is contagious. (For more, read Andrew Price's interview with Fowler.)

• PayPal Wars (NF)

Author: Eric M. Jackson Suggested by: Craig Shapiro, President Why read? In a little over a decade, PayPal has become a ubiquitous service, but its birth and short life have not been without its fair share of growing pains. Industry insider Jackson recounts the turbulent history with wit, energy, and plenty of dirt.

• Rework (NF)

Authors: David Fried and David Heinemeier Hanson Suggested by: Craig Shapiro, President Why read? Mark Cuban, the billionaire co-founder of HDNet and Broadcast.com and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, puts it best: "If given a choice between investing in someone who has read Rework or has an MBA, I'm investing in Rework every time. This is a must read for every entrepreneur." The book outlines the business principles behind the successful web application company and blog 37signals, and does it with grit.

• Wisdom Book (NF)

Author: Andrew Zuckerman Suggested by: Atley Kasky, Designer Why read? Inspired by the idea that wisdom gained from life experience is the best gift one generation can pass down to the next, and assembled with the help of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Wisdom is a collection of stunning photography and riveting interviews with such luminaries as Clint Eastwood, Buzz Aldrin, Jane Goodall, Nelson Mandela, Yoko Ono, Madeleine Albright, Frank Gehry, and many, many more. Each copy comes with a 60-minute film.