People occasionally ask me what they should read when they start reading literature again as an adult. Below are 35 volumes, most (though not quite all) of which are on many so-called “Great Books” listings (defined roughly as inexhaustible classics worthy of much enjoyment and study) which have been of great impact and pleasure in my life. On works not written originally in modern English, I have usually suggested my favorite translation in parentheses if I have one. These are in alphabetical order by author, as I could not possibly rank some of these above the others.

1. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy (trans. John Ciardi)
2. Anonymous, Beowulf (trans. Seamus Heaney)
3. Anonymous, Gilgamesh (trans. Herbert Mason)
4. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (trans. Edith Grossman)
5. Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (trans. David Wright)
6. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
7. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
8. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
9. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)
10. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
11. Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo (trans. Robin Buss)
12. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
13. Victor Hugo, Les Miserables (trans. Julie Rose)
14. Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
15. Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird
16. Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera (trans. Lowell Bair)
17. C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
18. C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
19. John Milton, Paradise Lost
20. Moliere, Tartuffe (trans. Richard Wilbur)
21. Sir Thomas Mallory, Le Morte d’Arthur
22. Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood
23. William Shakespeare, Hamlet
24. William Shakespeare, Macbeth
25. William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew
26. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
27. Edmund Spencer, The Faerie Queene
28. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
29. Bram Stoker, Dracula
30. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
31. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
32. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
33. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
34. H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
35. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray