Books open doors in our minds, allowing us to live an entire lifetime and travel the world without even leaving the comfort of our chairs. When we read a book, we step into someone else’s shoes, see the world through someone else’s eyes, and visit places we might never otherwise go, whether a tiny village in India or the green fields of Narnia. Books teach us about love, heartbreak, friendship, war, social injustice, and the resilience of the human spirit. Here are 15 must read books especially for novel lovers, and you should read them at least once.
HERE IS THE LIST OF NOVELS EVERY BOOK LOVER SHOULD RAED AT LEAST ONCE,
1) PRIDE AND PREJUDICE by Jane Auston.
The opening line of this classic novel, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” is one of the most recognizable first lines of fiction. Yet Jane Austen’s most famous work is more than a comedy of manners about the marriage market and the maneuvers of navigating polite society in 19th-century England. Pride and Prejudice remains one of the most enduring works of English Literature not because we find such rewarding pleasure in watching sparks fly between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy (though that’s certainly reason enough). Readers embrace the novel because Austen candidly captures the human character with all of its beauties and its imperfections. Pride and Prejudice is a novel about overcoming differences of cast and class, about learning to laugh at life even when it’s grossly unfair, and about recognizing that loving someone often means accepting them in spite of rather than because of who they are.
2) THE SISTER BROTHERS by Patrick DeWitt.
Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers is a perfect Western, which is why it’s so startling that it’s a comedy about a protracted existentialist crisis. The Gold Rush-era story of two bounty-hunters, the philosophical Eli and his rowdier, more impulsive brother Charlie, it unfolds slowly as they head from Oregon to California to kill a prospector-alchemist named Hermann Kermit Warm at the behest of a shady figure known as the Commodore. Eli doesn’t exactly love what they do for a living, while Charlie doesn’t question it. As they make their way south, in a picaresque-fashion they stumble from one misadventure to the next, and eventually wind up teaming up with Warm when they finally find him. The best part of the novel is the narration; Eli is the ambivalent moral compass normally absent from Westerns, a kind of extreme normalcy and humanity amidst a desolate and unforgiving landscape and livelihood. He is ever-loving towards his cruel and reckless brother, a little anxious about his weight, and gets extremely excited when he purchases a toothbrush for the first time. Charlie, on the other hand, is scary and you’ll spend pages worrying that the complicated, loving bond between them will be Charlie’s to selfishly, stupidly break. Eli’s sincerity is what keeps everything afloat, as well as makes it all feel so precarious.
3) A LITTLE LIFE by Hanya Yanagihara.
A Little Life is a polarizing book. There are those who love it, who hate it, and who spend their entire reading experience vacillating between these extremes. As one of the book’s advocates, even I experienced moments when I felt like throwing the book across the room. But the brilliance of this book is in the unbearable suffering it causes its characters; if the Bible was about how to survive the arbitrary punishments of angry Lord to such figures as Job, then A Little Life is about how to stay friends with Job, without forcing Job to, well, get better. A Little Life follows four college friends through the ups and downs of their lives in any-time New York City, but is primarily focused on Jude, the survivor of an unimaginable childhood, grimly detailed in the most horrifying sections of the book. All this suffering sets Jude up for a central conflict between his friends, who want him to be happy, and his own understanding that the best he can aim is not to be happy but instead to just be.
4) THE KITE RUNNER by Khaled Hosseini.
Told against the backdrop of the changing political landscape of Afghanistan from the 1970s to the period following 9/11, The Kite Runner is the story of the unlikely and complicated friendship between Amir, the son of a wealthy merchant, and Hassan, the son of his father’s servant until cultural and class differences and the turmoil of war tear them asunder. Hosseini brings his homeland to life for us in a way that post 9/11 media coverage never could, showing us a world of ordinary people who live, die, eat, pray, dream, and love. It’s a story about the long shadows that family secrets cast across decades, the enduring love of friendship, and the transformative power of forgiveness.
5) THE SYMPATHIZER by Viet Thanh Nguyen.
As a novel, The Sympathizer is a roiling, darkly comic, propulsive literary thriller set in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War, as a North Vietnamese mole keeps watch on the exiled South Vietnamese government in Southern California it is compulsive reading, arresting in its language, unforgettable in its imagery. But it is more than that. By simply writing the words “Vietnam War” I am able to conjure an entire American mythology, the 40-year cultural byproduct of so much not-quite propaganda/not quite art: long-haired protesters in the streets, Rustbelt grunts wading through steaming jungles, a flock of juddering choppers against an enormous foreign sun, broken men returning to a country that does not want them. This is the “American” version of the war, a story we’ve told “ourselves” that, while not particularly flattering, is as narrow and myopic as any campfire epic. The Sympathizer is an American novel about an American War, a devastating and needless conflict that created hundreds of thousands of refugees, new Americans who found a home in the empire that displaced them, and who’ve made it better. Our cultural account of the American war in Vietnam has never been fully “ours” because it has neglected and actively excluded the perspectives of these refugees and their descendants. The Sympathizer is a vital work of art that begins to redress that imbalance.
6) THE READER by Bernhard Schlink.
Set in late-20th Century Germany, this novel boldly confronts long-standing German national guilt over the Nazi war crimes of the Holocaust through the strange, intergenerational relationship between 15 year-old Michael Berg and 36 year-old Hannah Schmitt, an illiterate tram operator and former Auschwitz prison guard. As Michael teaches Hannah to read books, Hannah teaches Michael to read the human character, and he comes to learn about the nuances between good and evil and of living with the consequences of one’s choices. The Reader is a story about personal as well as national guilt, about the consequences of keeping secrets, and about the power of redemption.
7) TO KILL A MOCKING BIRD by Harper Lee.
This one’s gotten a lot of attention with the recent announcement that Lee will be releasing a prequel this summer, so even if you’ve read it before, now might be a good time to revisit it. Told through the point of view of the 6 year-old Scout Finch, the story recounts a crisis that rocks her Alabama hometown when the African American Thom Robinson is accused of raping a young white woman. Scout’s father, Atticus Finch, is the lawyer appointed to represent Robinson. Alternately humorous and brutally honest, the novel looks critically at social issues of class, race, and sex politics and the sometimes ironic injustice of the American legal system.
8) MILKMAN by Anna Burns.
Anna Burns’s Milkman requires a little commitment. I don’t particularly hold to the idea that some books are “easy” while some are “hard” but Burns’s unspooling story of a young woman in Belfast during The Troubles ask of its readers that they be good listeners, that they might have the patience to let the novel’s speech-driven rhythms carry them along, its endless clause-laden sentences tugging like a current toward some unknown destination. The novel doesn’t specifically locate us in Belfast, nor does it give us an exact era in fact, the only character that’s ever granted a name is the “Milkman,” an IRA higher up who may or may not be courting the main character, who’s something close to 18. Already deemed odd for her habit of walking the (menacing) streets with her nose in a book, the attentions of the older man he shows up at random in his white van has people talking. Milkman is all menace and mood, its ambiguities like dark corners, places of concealment, its violence latent throughout, ready to explode.
9) THE OUTSIDERS by S. E. Hinton.
Hinton penned this novel when she was only 16 because she was tired of reading fluffy romances. She wanted a story about the harsh realities of being a teenager in mid-20th century America, and since none existed, she wrote one herself. Told from the perspective of orphan Ponyboy Kurtis, this multiple award-winning young adult novel tells the story of a group of rough, teenage boys on the streets of an Oklahoma town, struggling to survive and stick together amidst violence, peer pressure, and broken homes. The novel reminds us that growing up is never easy and that pain, loss, friendship, and love are universal experiences that both create and dissolve socio-economic boundaries.
10) THE GIRL WHO FELL FROM THE SKY by Heidi Duro.
This novel tells the story of Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and black father. When Rachel, her mother, and her younger brother fall nine stories from an apartment building, Rachel is the only survivor, and she’s taken in by her black grandmother in a predominantly white Portland neighborhood. With her brown skin and blue eyes, Rachel faces the challenge of learning what it means to be biracial in a black and white world. Duro offers a masterful novel that interrogates the cultural construction of race in America and challenges us to confront our own prejudices.
11) INDIAN HORSE by Richard Wagamese.
Most of us (I hope) are at least intellectually aware of the centuries of colonial violence meted out by European settlers upon the Indigenous nations of North America, and though we don’t need to feel something to grasp its injustice, art is here to remind us of the specific human cost of systematized theft and racism. The late Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse recounts the all too familiar story of Indigenous children stolen from their parents to be re-educated in the ways of Christian empire. In this case, that story happens in one of Canada’s notorious “residential schools,” church-run boarding schools that were effectively prisons, in which all traces of First Nations’ culture were forbidden (language), and where neglect, abuse, and even murder, were tragically commonplace. Though the material is necessarily grim, Wagamese doesn’t fetishize despair, and allows his main character, Saul, the chance to feel something like joy as he discovers a preternatural talent for hockey. And though the sport might only represent a brief respite for Saul, from a lifetime of pain and loss, these is the best section that I've ever gone through. (it was first published in 2012 in Canada, then later in 2018 in America).
12) THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS by Kiran Desai.
In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas lives an embittered judge who wants only to retire in peace, when his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judge's cook watches over her distractedly, for his thoughts are often on his son, Biju, who is hopscotching from one gritty New York restaurant to another. Kiran Desai's brilliant novel, published to huge acclaim, is a story of joy and despair. Her characters face numerous choices that majestically illuminate the consequences of colonialism as it collides with the modern world.
13) INLAND by Téa Obreht.
You’d be forgiven, and you wouldn’t be disappointed. This is a lush, wide-ranging, and fully American novel, a revisioning of a classic Western, imbued, as all the best revisionings are, with many of the satisfactions of the trope, but presented alongside a set of new and better ones. For instance, for a Western, it’s not particularly violent or not as violent as you’d expect, though what is there was so well-written as to make me gasp and instead we get the aftermath, the ghosts. Ghosts are everywhere in this novel, reminding us that every place and time has its own history, its own victims, its own way of self-consideration. Both Nora and Lurie see them, though it’s not always clear that they both believe them. We believe them, though: such is the compelling texture of Obreht’s prose. There are two stories at play here: as the novel opens, Nora, a frontierswoman in the Arizona Territory in the late 19th century, waits more or less patiently for her husband and two eldest sons to return, as her water runs out and her youngest son begins to see monsters in the underbrush; then there’s Lurie, the outlaw and immigrant who joins the United States Camel Corps and begins a long trek.
14) THE IDIOT by Elif Batuman.
The Idiot is one of those books that expanded my understanding of what a novel could look like. It is meandering, but it meanders with such gusto that I never doubted that Elif Batuman knew exactly where she was leading me. The Idiot is a campus novel, telling the story of its protagonist’s first year at Harvard. She Selin has a romantic interest but mostly she bobs along. That’s part of it, the bobbing. Selin is something of a buoy in a world of torpedoes. If this sounds tiresome, consider the profound power of the incredibly funny, linguistically virtuosic narrator. The Idiot is occasionally baggy, but its voice is so thoroughly charming that I could have read volumes of it. Selin is, if occasionally bewildered, also full of wonder, without any of the tweeness with which that word is sometimes unfairly burdened. The Idiot is a novel of ideas, a novel of fascination. And it’s just so damn funny. Of the novel’s humor, Cathleen Schine writes, “Language is the medium and language is the comedian, language is the star and the prop, Chaplin and the globe he balances, the hungry fellow and the shoe he dines on.” The Idiot is, for all its shaggy bits, a perfectly self-contained world.
15) A PASSAGE TO INDIA by E. M. Forster.
A Passage To India (Penguin Classics, with an introduction by Pankaj Mishra) is a book about prejudice between British people and Indians in 1920s. The story is set in pre-Independence India, when it was ruled by the British, and it questions whether a friendship between a British person and an Indian would have been possible in those prejudiced times. The book begins with two Englishwomen, the old Mrs Moore and Miss Adela Quested deciding to tour India. Mrs Moor befriends a charismatic Indian doctor named Aziz. A few days later, Aziz offers to take the ladies on a trip to the Marabar Caves. Mrs Moore feels claustrophobic once they are there so she decides to stay behind, and Aziz and Adela continue exploring the caves. In the darkness of the caves, Adela goes missing and Aziz finds her broken spectacles. He searches for her worriedly, only to find her talking to another Englishwoman outside. The two of them leave before he can go up to them, so he returns to the railway station with Mrs Moore. However, Aziz is soon taken into custody for sexually assaulting Adela in the caves. The case causes the racial tension and prejudices between the Indian and the white community to bubble up and boil over. The British people are convinces of Aziz’s guilt because their prejudice directs them to believe that all Indian men cannot contain their lust for British women.
This is the list of Novels every book lover should read at least once, if you find it Interesting please share this with your friends and comment which Novel you loved the most!.. HAVE A GEAT DAY,,.
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