Ten Books I Believe You Should Read Before You Die

 Not because they are universally the greatest books ever written, but because each of them has something to say about being human that is difficult to forget.

There are books we read because everyone tells us we should. There are books we read for pleasure and put back on the shelf. And then there are books that stay with us in ways we don't quite expect. A character may return to us years later; a particular scene may acquire a different meaning after a marriage, a loss, a disappointment or simply the accumulation of age. Some books alter the way we see the world. Others alter the way we see ourselves.

If I had to make a small shelf of books that I would not want to leave unread, these ten would be on it. They are not arranged as a ranking, because I don't believe literature can be measured that way. Nor are they all books I would describe as easy or pleasurable. Some are disturbing, some demanding, some heartbreaking. One of them is deeply controversial. One is about a man whose life appears almost uneventful. Another begins with a man discovering that he has become an insect. What connects them is not genre, period or style, but the fact that each has made me think more seriously about human beings and the lives we make for ourselves.

So, this is my list. You may disagree with it. I hope you do, at least with some of it. A personal reading list becomes much more interesting when another reader comes along and says, “How could you possibly leave out that book?”

1. The Old Man and the Sea — Ernest Hemingway

 

Few books have said so much with so little. Santiago is an old fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish. When he finally encounters an enormous marlin far out at sea, the struggle becomes much larger than the question of whether he will return with a catch. It becomes a test of endurance, pride, dignity and the stubborn human desire to keep going even when the odds are against us.

What moves me about Santiago is not that he is an unbeatable hero. He is old, tired and vulnerable. His body has its limitations. The sea does not care about his hopes, and nature does not arrange itself according to the justice of human wishes. Yet he goes out again. Hemingway strips away almost everything unnecessary until what remains is a man confronting difficulty without surrendering his sense of who he is.

That is a lesson that changes with age. When we are young, we tend to imagine life in terms of victories: examinations passed, careers built, ambitions fulfilled, obstacles overcome. Later, we discover that there will be battles we cannot completely win. Sometimes the dignity lies in having made the attempt, in continuing to do the work, in refusing to let disappointment decide the value of our lives. The Old Man and the Sea is a small book with an unusually large heart, and I think it deserves to be read at least twice—once when we are young and again when we have acquired a few scars of our own.

 

2. The Metamorphosis — Franz Kafka

 One morning Gregor Samsa wakes up and discovers that he has been transformed into a gigantic insect. Kafka offers no comfortable explanation for this astonishing event. There is no scientific reason to be uncovered and no neat symbolic key that solves the story. The transformation simply happens, and the real horror begins afterwards.

Gregor has been the family's breadwinner. His value has been tied, at least partly, to his usefulness. Once he can no longer work, earn money or move through the world as an ordinary man, the family's relationship with him changes. Shock gives way to embarrassment, embarrassment to inconvenience, and eventually to the terrible question of what to do with someone who has become a burden.

That is why The Metamorphosis feels far more disturbing than its premise suggests. Kafka is not merely asking what it would be like to become an insect. He is examining the fragile relationship between usefulness and human worth. What happens when the person who has always taken care of others becomes the person who needs to be taken care of? How much of our identity depends upon the roles assigned to us by family and society? And what remains when those roles disappear?

It is a remarkably short book, but its questions are not. I would recommend it especially to readers who think a classic has to be long and solemn to be important. Kafka proves otherwise.

 

3. One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel García Márquez

 Some novels are stories we follow. Others become places we inhabit for a while. Macondo is one of those places. Across generations, the Buendía family experiences love, ambition, war, desire, madness, political upheaval and loss, while the boundaries between the ordinary and the miraculous disappear almost completely.

A girl rises into the sky. A plague of insomnia affects an entire community. Ghosts coexist with the living. Yet García Márquez never treats these events as spectacles requiring explanation. They belong to the world of Macondo, just as naturally as rain, hunger, family quarrels and political violence do. That is the genius of the novel's magical realism: the extraordinary becomes so ordinary that we begin to pay closer attention to the emotional truth beneath it.

And beneath all the magic lies a darker pattern. The Buendías seem unable to escape themselves. Names recur. Mistakes recur. Desires recur. The family carries its history forward without fully understanding it. Loneliness becomes less a matter of physical isolation than of an inability to truly reach another person.

I love the novel because it makes family history feel almost physical. We inherit more than possessions and surnames. We inherit habits, fears, expectations and unfinished stories. Sometimes we spend years repeating patterns before recognising that we are repeating them. One Hundred Years of Solitude turns that human tendency into an entire universe.

 

4. The Fountainhead — Ayn Rand

 This is the book on my list most likely to make some readers disagree with me. That is one reason I have included it.

The Fountainhead is inseparable from Ayn Rand's philosophy of individualism, and many readers strongly reject aspects of that philosophy. I don't think that makes the novel unworthy of reading. Quite the opposite. Literature does not exist only to confirm what we already believe.

Howard Roark refuses to compromise his artistic vision to satisfy convention, fashion or public approval. Through Roark and the other characters, Rand turns questions of independence, ambition, integrity and conformity into dramatic conflicts. The novel can be excessive, polemical and frustrating, but it is rarely passive. It wants the reader to take a position.

That makes it valuable even for someone who disagrees with Rand. Where does independence become arrogance? When does compromise become necessary rather than cowardly? Can an individual pursue complete self-determination while remaining part of a society? What do we owe our own ideals, and what do we owe the people around us?

I don't think you need to accept The Fountainhead's worldview to appreciate what it does as a novel. In fact, I would encourage reading it critically. Underline the passages that infuriate you. Argue with the characters. Close the book and disagree with it. A book that sends you to the other side of the room still thinking about an argument has earned its place in your life.

 

5. To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee

 Scout Finch is a child when she begins to understand that the adult world is not governed by the fairness she once assumed. Her father, Atticus Finch, agrees to defend Tom Robinson, a Black man accused of raping a white woman in the deeply segregated American South. The courtroom becomes the centre of the novel, but the real story is Scout's education in the complicated nature of prejudice, courage and justice.

What has stayed with me is the gradual loss of innocence. Scout learns that respectable people can behave cruelly, that prejudice can live comfortably beside ordinary manners, and that doing the right thing does not guarantee that the right thing will win. Atticus cannot simply make injustice disappear because he believes in justice. His task is more difficult: to act according to his conscience when he knows the outcome may be against him.

That is an important lesson for anyone growing into adulthood. Moral courage is rarely glamorous. Often it means standing in an unpopular place and remaining there. It means trying to understand another person's life before judging it. It means recognising that our first impression of someone is not necessarily the truth about them.

To Kill a Mockingbird remains powerful because it gives these lessons to us through the experience of a child who is slowly discovering how complicated the world really is.

 

6. Man's Search for Meaning — Viktor E. Frankl

 There are books we read for pleasure and books we read because we believe they may change something in us. Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning belongs to the second category.

Frankl, a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, writes about his experiences in Nazi concentration camps and about the psychological ideas that emerged from those experiences. The book does not make suffering sentimental. It does not pretend that terrible experiences are secretly good for us. Instead, it asks what happens to the human capacity for meaning when almost everything external has been taken away.

That question gives the book its extraordinary force. Most of us are fortunate enough to live with choices that can sometimes make meaning seem effortless: work, family, ambition, friendship, art, faith, responsibility. Frankl examines what remains when those ordinary sources of security are stripped away. His answer is deeply connected to the possibility of finding meaning even when circumstances cannot be changed.

You may not agree with every philosophical conclusion in the book. I don't think agreement is the point. Its value lies partly in the seriousness of the questions it places before us. What makes a life meaningful? What remains within our control when circumstances are not? How do we continue when the future is uncertain?

Some books entertain us. Some educate us. A few ask us to examine the life we are actually living. This is one of those books.

 

7. East of Eden — John Steinbeck

 East of Eden takes the biblical story of Cain and Abel and turns it into a sprawling family novel about love, jealousy, inheritance, guilt and the possibility of choosing differently.

That last idea is what makes the novel so compelling to me. None of us begins with complete freedom. We arrive inside families and histories we did not choose. We inherit temperaments, expectations, wounds and sometimes the consequences of decisions made before we were born. Children can spend years trying to win the approval of parents who are themselves carrying unresolved disappointments.

Steinbeck does not reduce people to heroes and villains. His characters can be loving and selfish, generous and destructive, sometimes within the same relationship. That complexity gives the novel its emotional weight. We recognise ourselves not in one character but in fragments of several.

The older I get, the more convincing I find the idea that inheritance does not have to become destiny. We cannot choose everything that happens to us, and we cannot rewrite where we began. But there are moments when we can choose what we do next. East of Eden is ultimately interested in that possibility, the small but enormous space between what has been given to us and what we decide to make of it.

 

8. Beloved — Toni Morrison

 Some histories are so painful that societies would rather turn them into dates, statistics and chapters in textbooks. Toni Morrison refuses that distance in Beloved.

Set after the American Civil War and rooted in the history of slavery, the novel centres on Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman whose past remains intensely present. Morrison does something remarkable with time: the past does not simply appear in recollection. It enters the house, the body and the relationships between people. What has happened cannot be neatly separated from what is happening now.

The novel's treatment of motherhood is particularly devastating because it refuses easy moral judgments. Sethe's choices are inseparable from a world in which slavery has made ordinary ideas of family, ownership, protection and freedom almost impossible. Morrison makes the reader confront what happens when people are forced to make terrible choices under terrible circumstances.

Beloved is not always an easy book. Its structure can be fragmented, its language dense and its subject matter painful. But that difficulty is part of its power. It asks us not merely to know that slavery happened, but to understand that historical violence continues through the lives of people who survive it.

Literature cannot undo history. It can, however, prevent us from looking away.

 

9. The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky

 There are novels that tell us what happened, and there are novels that make us wonder why human beings are capable of what they do. The Brothers Karamazov belongs firmly to the second category.

Dostoevsky places three very different brothers at the centre of a deeply troubled family. Dmitri is passionate and impulsive; Ivan is intellectual, sceptical and tormented by questions of faith and suffering; Alyosha is compassionate and spiritually inclined. Their father, Fyodor Pavlovich, is selfish, vulgar and irresponsible. Around them, Dostoevsky builds a story involving desire, murder, religion, guilt and family conflict, but the novel continually reaches beyond its plot.

What makes it extraordinary is the seriousness with which it treats questions that many of us eventually encounter in one form or another. Why does suffering exist? What makes an action morally right? Can human beings be truly free? What happens when reason and faith cannot reconcile themselves? Are we responsible only for what we do ourselves, or also for the suffering we allow around us?

It is a demanding book, and I would never recommend rushing through it simply to say that you have read it. Take your time. Stop. Think. Argue with Ivan. Be irritated by Dmitri. Spend time with Alyosha. Return to passages that trouble you.

A great novel does not always leave us with answers. Sometimes its achievement is to make the questions impossible to ignore.

 

10. Stoner — John Williams

 I have deliberately placed Stoner last because it may be the book on this list that surprises people most.

There is no epic adventure. No magical town. No spectacular career. No grand historical sweep. William Stoner is born into a poor Missouri farming family, goes to university, becomes an academic, teaches literature, marries, experiences love and disappointment, encounters professional conflict and grows old.

And that is precisely why the novel is so powerful.

We are accustomed to judging lives by their visible achievements. We celebrate people who become famous, wealthy, powerful or extraordinary. Stoner asks us to look at a life that contains none of those conventional triumphs and to consider it with the same seriousness we would give an epic life.

Stoner makes mistakes. He misses opportunities. He experiences an imperfect marriage and an imperfect love. His professional life contains both satisfaction and frustration. He is neither a hero nor a failure in any simple sense. He is a man who lives, works, loves, suffers disappointment and eventually dies.

There is something almost unbearably tender about that.

Perhaps a life does not have to be spectacular to matter. Perhaps doing one thing reasonably well, loving a few people imperfectly, discovering something that gives work meaning and continuing through disappointment can be enough.

I think Stoner becomes an even more affecting book as we grow older, because we gradually understand how much of a human life consists not of dramatic events but of ordinary days whose importance we recognise only afterwards.

 

Why These Ten?

Placed beside one another, these books look almost absurdly different. An old fisherman, an insect, a magical family, an uncompromising architect, a child confronting racism, a psychiatrist writing after the Holocaust, a troubled family in California, a formerly enslaved woman haunted by history, three brothers wrestling with faith and morality, and an ordinary university professor.

Yet I find myself returning to the same underlying concern in all of them: what does it mean to live a human life when circumstances, family, history, society and our own weaknesses are constantly pressing upon us?

Santiago asks us to consider endurance. Gregor Samsa makes us think about human worth when usefulness disappears. The Buendías show us how families and societies repeat themselves. Roark forces us to examine independence and conformity. Scout learns that innocence cannot survive untouched by injustice. Frankl asks what gives existence meaning when almost everything has been taken away. Steinbeck considers whether we can escape what we inherit. Morrison makes history personal. Dostoevsky turns morality into an argument with the soul. And Stoner reminds us that an apparently ordinary life can contain an entire universe.

That, ultimately, is why these are my ten.

Not because I believe I have discovered the definitive list. There is no such list. The books that matter most to us are often shaped by the person we were when we encountered them. A book that leaves one reader cold may arrive in another reader's life at exactly the right moment.

Perhaps that is one of literature's greatest gifts: the same book can meet us differently at different ages.

 

How Many Have You Read?

Now I want to turn the list over to you.

How many of these ten have you read? Which one stayed with you the longest? Is there one you think does not belong here? And, more importantly, which book would you add to my list?

Perhaps you would choose War and Peace, 1984, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, The Remains of the Day, The God of Small Things or a book I have never encountered.

If there is a book on this list you have not yet read, perhaps give it a chance not because a list on the internet has declared it “essential,” but because sometimes a book arrives in our lives at precisely the moment we need it.

A lifetime is not long enough to read every great book.

So perhaps the real question is not which books are the greatest, but which books are worth making room for.

These are ten I would make room for.

 A Small Companion for a Long Book

There is a particular pleasure in reading a physical book and returning to exactly the page where you stopped. I like simple magnetic bookmarks for this reason: they fold over the page, stay in place and are especially handy when a novel takes several evenings or several weeks to finish.

It is a very small thing, but perhaps appropriate for an article about reading: a way of keeping your place while you find your way through a book.

 

About the Author

 

Susmita Mukherjee is an Indian author based in Kolkata. Her fiction explores labour, resilience, displacement, family, and the quiet complexities of human relationships. Her varied professional experiences in teaching, IT education, corporate communications, hospitality education, counselling and coordination have brought her into close contact with people from different social and professional backgrounds, informing the attentive observation of everyday lives that shapes her writing.

A trained classical vocalist with a diploma in Multimedia, Susmita has a longstanding interest in the arts. She has also studied painting, explored screenwriting, and writes poetry alongside fiction.

Her work has appeared in Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi), Muse India, Fractured Lit, Sky Island Journal, Kitaab International, Setu, Fictive Dream, Flash Fiction Magazine, Literary Yard, Intrepidus Ink, Nanum Magazine, BULL Lit Mag, Epistemic Literary Magazine, Gulmohur Quarterly, Literally Stories, Shabdodweep Web Magazine, and other literary publications.

Her short story “Fuchka Geometry” won Second Place in the Inkspot Short Story Competition 2025–26, judged by UK literary agent Kate Nash. She has also received Second Prize in the 3 Minute Arts Story Writing Competition 2025–26 and Second Place in a Flash Fiction Magazine contest.

Her debut poetry collection, When theEarth Sang of Us: A Meditation on Love, Life and Nature, is published by BookLeaf Publishing and is available internationally.

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