Best Books of All Time - Top Reading Fiction and Non-fiction
Discover the best books of all time with our curated list of top fiction and non-fiction reads. Find your next favorite book and explore must-read classics and modern masterpieces for every reader.
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The New Jerusalem Bible
by Henry Wansbrough
Contains the complete text of the ancient canon of scripture, along with up-to-date and extensive introductions and notes. Eight pages of color maps and indexes, including biblical themes, personal names, and major footnotes.
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The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
In 1327, finding his sensitive mission at an Italian abbey further complicated by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William of Baskerville turns detective.
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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
by Philip K. Dick
A masterpiece ahead of its time, a prescient rendering of a dark future, and the inspiration for the blockbuster film Blade Runner One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years By 2021, the World War has killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remain covet any living creature, and for people who can’t afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacra: horses, birds, cats, sheep. They’ve even built humans. Immigrants to Mars receive androids so sophisticated they are indistinguishable from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans can wreak, the government bans them from Earth. Driven into hiding, unauthorized androids live among human beings, undetected. Rick Deckard, an officially sanctioned bounty hunter, is commissioned to find rogue androids and “retire” them. But when cornered, androids fight back—with lethal force. Praise for Philip K. Dick “The most consistently brilliant science fiction writer in the world.”—John Brunner “A kind of pulp-fiction Kafka, a prophet.”—The New York Times “[Philip K. Dick] sees all the sparkling—and terrifying—possibilities . . . that other authors shy away from.”—Rolling Stone
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Catechism of the Catholic Church
by Catholic Church
Here it is -- the first new Catechism of the Catholic Church in more than 400 years, a complete summary of what Catholic throughout the world believe in common. This book is the catechism (the word means "instruction") that will serve as the standarad for all future catechisms. The Catechism draws on the Bible, the Mass, the Sacraments, Church tradition and teaching, and the lives of saints. It comes with a complete index, footnotes and cross-references for a fuller understanding of every subject. Using the tradition of explaining what the Church believes (the Creed), what she celebrates (the Sacraments), what she lives (the Commandments), and what she prays (the Lord's Prayer), the Catechism of the Catholic Church offers challenges for believers and answers for all those interested in learning about the mystery of the Catholic faith. Here is a positive, coherent and contemporary map for our spiritual journey toward transformation. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is, as Pope John Paul II calls it, "a special gift."
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A Fish Caught in Time
by Samantha Weinberg
The coelacanth (see-lo-canth) is no ordinary fish. Five feet long, with luminescent eyes and limb like fins, this bizarre creature, presumed to be extinct, was discovered in 1938 by an amateur icthyologist who recognized it from fossils dating back 400 million years. The discovery was immediately dubbed the "greatest scientific find of the century," but the excitement that ensued was even more incredible. This is the entrancing story of that most rare and precious fish -- our own great-uncle forty million times removed.
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A Scanner Darkly
by Philip K. Dick
A drug dealer of the future periodically moves away from his spaced-out world to become an informer for narcotics agents until he becomes unable to separate his two personalities.
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Rosemary's Baby
by Ira Levin
Young wife Rosemary Woodhouse is drawn into a nightmare when she is selected by a coven to bear the son of Satan.
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The Naked Lunch
by William S. Burroughs
The anarchic, phenomenally strong-sellling classic from the godfather of the Beats.
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The Stand
by Stephen King
Horrific disaster as a plague virus sweeps the U.S., leaving only a handful of survivors.
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It
by Stephen King
A group of teenagers stumbles upon an evil force that will eventually draw them all back to Derry, Maine, for a final showdown. Reissue.
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Batman
by Frank Miller
The classic story by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli is released in an all-new deluxe hardcover edition! A young Bruce Wayne spent his adolescence and early adulthood traveling the world so he could hone his body and mind into the perfect fighting and investigative machine. But now as he returns to Gotham City, he must find a way to focus his passion and bring justice to his city. Retracing Batmans first attempts to fight injustice as a costumed vigilante, we watch as he chooses the guise of a giant bat, creates an early bond with a young Lieutenant James Gordon, inadvertently plays a role in the birth of Catwoman, and helps to bring down a corrupt political system that infests Gotham. This edition includes new introductions by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli, development art with commentary by Mazzucchelli, script pages, thumbnails, promotional art, samples and a look at Richmond Lewiss groundbreaking color.
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Nineteen Eighty-four
by George Orwell
Eternal warfare is the price of bleak prosperity in this satire of totalitarian barbarism.
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Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury
Guy Montag is a fireman, his job is to burn books, which are forbidden.
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Dracula
by Bram Stoker
The classic tale of the bizarre Carpathian count, who drinks human blood to stay alive, and the Englishman who knows his secret
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The Lord of the Rings
by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
In time for the golden anniversary of the arrival of part one of Tolkien's epic masterpiece on these shore comes a spectacular new edition of "The Lord of the Rings." The text is fully correctedQunder the supervision of Christopher TolkienQto meet the author's exacting wishes, and includes two large-format fold-out maps, a ribbon placemarker, and exceptionally elegant packaging. 0-618-51765-0$100.00 / Houghton Mifflin
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The Hobbit, Or, There and Back Again
by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
Bilbo Baggins, a respectable, well-to-do hobbit, lives comfortably in his hobbit-hole until the day the wandering wizard Gandalf chooses him to take part in an adventure from which he may never return.
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Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five is “a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century” (Time). Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time • One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.” An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing—the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit—that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it. Authors as wide-ranging as Norman Mailer, John Irving, Michael Crichton, Tim O’Brien, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout, David Sedaris, Jennifer Egan, and J. K. Rowling have all found inspiration in Vonnegut’s words. Jonathan Safran Foer has described Vonnegut as “the kind of writer who made people—young people especially—want to write.” George Saunders has declared Vonnegut to be “the great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us . . . a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.” More than fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut’s portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.
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Ubik
by Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick's searing metaphysical comedy of death and salvation is a tour de force of panoramic menace and unfettered slapstick, in which the departed give business advice, shop for their next incarnation, and run the continual risk of dying yet again.
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The Exorcist
by William Peter Blatty
A young girl becomes possessed by the devil and causes several violent deaths before she can be cured.
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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
by Hunter S. Thompson
50th Anniversary Edition • With an introduction by Caity Weaver, acclaimed New York Times journalist This cult classic of gonzo journalism is the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest journeys ever undertaken. Also a major motion picture directed by Terry Gilliam, starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro.
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The Wasp Factory
by Iain Banks
Powerful, perverse, and engrossing, this controversial novel offers a graphic portrait of a serial killer told in the first-person. "Read it if you dare!"--"The Daily Express".
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The Satanic Verses
by Salman Rushdie
Just before dawn one winter's morning, a hijacked jetliner explodes above the English Channel. Through the falling debris, two figures, Gibreel Farishta, the biggest star in India, and Saladin Chamcha, an expatriate returning from his first visit to Bombay in fifteen years, plummet from the sky, washing up on the snow-covered sands of an English beach, and proceed through a series of metamorphoses, dreams, and revelations.