30 Books Worth Adding To Your Reading List

I'll be honest, whenever I see a 'you must read these books to be smart list' I get super annoyed. The list are often filled with the classics that were shoved down our throats in school that were dry, boring and written by cranky old men. Not that I don't love some of them, rather that they seem like too obvious a choice. "Hey you! If you read Mark Twain and Hemingway, you are so smart!"

Except you didn't read it by choice, it was assigned to you, and let's be honest, you hated every minute of it. Yeah, buddy, I'm on to you. To be fair, everyone has a list like this that could and frankly should be shared. After all, the books we read are part of what helps create our many, varied layers.

So what books would I recommend if you wish to feel more learned, well read or just a little more enlightened? Here are some in both the fiction and non-fiction categories. In no particular order:

1. Consider the Oyster by M.F.K. Fisher
2. The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side by Agatha Christie
3. Bitter is the New Black by Jen Lancaster
4. Persuasion by Jane Austen
5. Strange Fruit: the Biography of a Song by David Margolick
6. Farehenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
7. The Unfinished Clue by Georgette Heyer
8. Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson
9. In the Devil's Garden by Stewart Lee Allen
10. The Twisted Root by Anne Perry
11. Passing by Nella Larsen
12. The Stranger by Albert Camus
13. In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
14. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
15. My Life in France by Julia Child
16. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
17. Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
18. Faust by Goethe  
19. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
20. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
21. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
22. Oranges are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
23. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda
24. Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
25. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
26. Last Seen Wearing by Colin Dexter
27. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tenessee Williams
28. Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
29. A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare
30. Don't Bet on the Prince edited by Jack Zipes

Happy Reading!