My niece recently asked me what books she should read to become a well-read person. Here's the list I gave her, off the top of my head.
Fiction:
Rob Roy – Sir Walter Scott
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
King Solomon’s Mines – H. Rider Haggard
Beau Geste – P.C. Wren
Beau Sabreur – P.C. Wren
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkein
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzenheitzen
Little House on the Prarie – Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Scottish Chiefs – Jane Porter
Harry of Monmouth – A.M. Maugham
The Last of the Mohicans – James Fennimore Cooper
Animal Farm – George Orwell
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
A Tale of the Western Plaines – G.A. Henty
Adam Bede – George Eliot
Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain
Madeleine Takes Command – Ethel C. Brill
The Aubrey-Matarin Novels – Patrick O’Brien
The Blackford Oakes Novels – William F. Buckley Jr.
Non-Fiction:
Longitude – Dava Sobel
A History of the English Speaking Peoples – Winston Churchill
After the Flood – Bill Cooper
Heroes – Paul Johnson
Ronald Reagan, How an ordinary man became an extraordinary leader – Dinesh D’Souza
Manhunt: the 12-day chase for Lincoln’s killer – James L. Swanson
A History of the American People – Paul Johnson
The Fall of the Berlin Wall – William F. Buckley Jr.
The Secret Kingdom – Pat Robertson
Dictatorships and Double Standards – Jeanne Kirkpatrick
The Forgotten Man – Amity Shlaes
The Long Walk – Slavomir Rawicz
My Early Years – Winston Churchill
Men and Marriage – George Gilder
Up From Liberalism – William F. Buckley Jr.
Free to Choose – Milton Freedman
America the Last Best Hope – William J. Bennett
Architects of Victory: 6 Heroes of the Cold War – Joseph Shattan
The Genesis Flood – Harold Morris
Don’t Tread On Me – H.W. Crocker
Trafalgar: an Eyewitness History – Tom Pocock
America Alone – Mark Steyn
Liberty & Tyranny – Mark Levin
Coolidge – Robert Sobel
Economics in One Lesson – Henry Hazlitt
Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage – Tyndale House
