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The List: What books should everyone read before they die?
1,000 Books to Read Before You Die is a personal library of lifetime reading, a compendium of engaging essays (snippets from which appear on this site) presenting insights and reflections gleaned from my life as a reader and bookseller. You can browse and comment on The 1,000 below—or join my ongoing conversation with fellow readers by adding your own favorites to The Next 1,000. I hope you'll buy my book and subscribe to my newsletter, too. Happy reading! — James Mustich
Desert Solitaire
Edward Abbey
James Mustich
Written in the middle of the 1960s, yet composed largely from journals kept a decade earlier during the author’s summers as a backcountry ranger at the Arches National Monument (“among,” as he puts it, “the hoodoo rocks and voodoo silence of the Utah wilderness”), Desert Solitaire evokes the paradox...show more
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Flatland
Edwin A. Abbott
A novel of mathematical whimsy, Flatland is set in the peculiar world that provides the book’s name and is home to its putative author, A. Square, a two-dimensional being in a world inhabited by lines, triangles, circles, and polygons. Ingeniously composed as a kind of dystopian memoir, Flatland is ...show more
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
Composed in English and published in 1958, two years before Nigeria declared independence, Things Fall Apart was the first African novel to attain a wide international readership. It is a short, sparely told tale that nevertheless embraces themes of enormous import: fate and will, the determining i...show more
My Dog Tulip
J. R. Ackerley
When first published in England in 1956, Tulip was considered shocking because of what one reviewer called its “scatological and gynaecological detail.” But while the messy details are certainly present in abundance (chapter 2, for example, is entitled “Liquids and Solids”), to be put off by them is...show more
Moon By Whale Light: And Other Adventures Among Bats,Penguins, Crocodilians, and Whales
Diane Ackerman
This book changed how I thought about writing. I admire how Ackerman dives into her subjects and uses her own narrative to convey facts and compel the reader to care about the threats her subjects face.
Occupied America: A History of Chicanos
Rodolfo Acuña
"You don't know who you are unless you know where you come from." Carlos Stantistevan spoke eloquently about Rodolfo Acuña's book Occupied America: A History of Chicanos in Denver Public Library's January 2024 Battle IV. This book reveals what Santistevan terms "invisible American Chicano history,"...show more
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams
To say that Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a book that captured the zeitgeist of the late 1970s and the 1980s is an understatement. Beginning as a BBC comedy radio series, it would mutate into versions in print, on stage, in comics, and on screens small and big, becoming an ...show more
The Education of Henry Adams
Henry Adams
Surveying national events from his birth through the era of the Civil War and the subsequent economic expansion of the United States, Adams’s distinctive autobiography is also a brilliant work of historical acumen. It depicts, with imaginative aplomb, the cultural transformations set in motion as th...show more
Watership Down
Richard Adams
One of the most phenomenal international bestsellers of the 1970s, Watership Down is an immersive saga that traverses great themes and feelings—courage, frailty, community, ecology, responsibility, friendship, love—while holding readers on the edge of their metaphorical seats. And oh, yes—it’s a 500...show more
Half of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Set in Nigeria during the decade culminating in the 1967–70 Biafran war, a secession conflict that left more than a million dead from violence and famine, this story is at once a historical drama and a tale of family struggles and romances gone right and wrong. Half of a Yellow Sun established Adich...show more
Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
This book changed my view on the world. Really recommend listening to the audio book.
The Oresteia
Aeschylus
If you seek between covers an education in the trials and tribulations, the hopes and fears, the terrors and triumphs of the human spirit, the majestic tragedies of the ancient Greeks are the place to begin, and perhaps the place to end as well. In their beautiful, haunting, unsparing plays, Aeschyl...show more
Aesop's Fables
Aesop
We know next to nothing about Aesop (in fact he may not have even existed) but what he left behind is a series of hundreds of short (and i do mean short, most of these are just a couple sentences) stories starring animals that have indured for centuries after they were written. I'm willing to bet th...show more
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
James Agee and Walker Evans
In the summer of 1936, Fortune magazine commissioned James Agee and Walker Evans to report on the lives of sharecroppers in the Deep South. Agee was a twenty-six-year-old journalist who’d published a volume of poems two years earlier; Evans was a thirty-two-year-old photographer. The assignment took...show more
What Strange Paradise
Omar El Akkad
Ausma Zehanat Khan described this "gut-punch, heart-wound of a book" about a child refugee fleeing war-torn Syria in Denver Public Library's third Battle of the Books in January 2023. What happens when the body of a young boy washes up on the shore of a neighboring country? Is it right or wrong to g...show more
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Edward Albee
At the outset of his long, ever-evolving career as a dramatist, Edward Albee was an American heir to the intellectual energies of the European Theater of the Absurd. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, first staged in 1962, Albee moved his ferocity out of the absurd into a more realistic setting, a ...show more
Fascism: A Warning
Madeleine Albright
Pat Cosentino shared her thoughts on why we must all read Madeleine Albright's book, Facism: A Warning, in our virtual Battle with Byrd's Books of Bethel, CT on July 14, 2020. This personal and urgent examination of facism in the 21st century and how its legacy is shaping today's world is indeed a w...show more
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, the second of four daughters of a noted proponent of Transcendentalism, Bronson Alcott. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a friend of the family, as were Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Despite her transcendentalist pedigree, Louisa May Alcott ...show more
The Timeless Way of Building
Christopher Alexander
Many years ago my wife and I spent a week walking through Umbria, from hilltown to hilltown, marveling at many things, not least the distinctive beauty of each town. Reading Christopher Alexander’s provocative theory of architecture, elaborated in this rich and philosophic book, has given me words t...show more