100 Books Every Man Should Read

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Reading allows you to borrow someone else’s brain. It makes you smarter, richer intellectually, more interesting, and a better person.

So here’s an eclectically curated list, albeit slanted by my personal preferences, of books that every man should read — replacing a handful of the obvious classics with a few obscure choices, and a few books left off lists in the name of political correctness:

1. The Sun Also Rises — Ernest Hemingway
2. Lonesome Dove — Larry McMurtry
3. Dubliners — James Joyce
4. Bonfire of the Vanities — Tom Wolfe
5. The Collected Poetry of William Butler Yeats — William Butler Yeats
6. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — Ken Kesey
7. The Road — Cormac McCarthy
8. Manual for Living — Epictetus
9. A River Runs Through It — Norman MacLean
10. Meditations — Marcus Aurelius
11. The Private Life of Chairman Mao — Li Zhi-Sui
12. The Picture Of Dorian Grey — Oscar Wilde
13. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater — Kurt Vonnegut
14. A Confederacy of Dunces — John Kennedy Toole
15. Hard Times — Charles Dickens
16. Infinite Jest — David Foster Wallace
17. The Book of Deeds of Arms and Chivalry — Christine de Pizan
18. The Big Rich — Bryan Burrough
19. The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky
20. Fahrenheit 451 — Ray Bradbury
21. The Odyssey — Homer
22. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Series — Douglas Adams
23. Catch-22 — Joseph Heller
24. Candide — Voltaire
25. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — Hunter S. Thompson
26. A Man Called Ove — Fredrik Backman
27. The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald
28. Revolutionary Road — Richard Yates
29. The Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger
30. The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling — Rudyard Kipling
31. The Things They Carried — Tim O’Brien
32. Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad
33. Things Fall Apart — Chinua Achebe
34. The Corrections — Jonathan Franzen
35. Endurance — Alfred Lansing
36. East of Eden — John Steinbeck
37. Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoyevsky
38. The Stranger — Albert Camus
39. Lord of the Flies — William Golding
40. For Whom the Bell Tolls — Ernest Hemingway
41. How to Win Friends and Influence People — Dale Carnegie
42. When Breath Becomes Air — Paul Kalanithi
43. Atlas Shrugged — Ayn Rand
44. 1984 — George Orwell
45. The Count of Monte Cristo — Alexander Dumas
46. Reminiscences of a Stock Operator — Edwin Lefevre
47. Oil! — Upton Sinclair
48. The Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck
49. The Holy Bible
50. Don Quixote — Miguel de Cervantes
51. Duluth — Gore Vidal
52. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin — Benjamin Franklin
53. Killing Pablo — Mark Bowden
54. Over The Edge Of The World — Laurence Bergreen
55. American Psycho — Bret Easton Ellis
56. Against the Gods — Peter Bernstein
57. The Fountainhead — Ayn Rand
58. Into Thin Air — Jon Krakauer
59. The Maltese Falcon — Dashiell Hammett
60. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — Robert Pirsig
61. Genealogy of Morals — Fried Nietzsche
62. Fight Club — Chuck Palahniuk
63. A People’s History of the United States — Howard Zinn
64. Essential Manners for Men — Peter Post
65. Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman
66. Thus Spoke Zarathustra — Friedrich Nietzsche
67. Guns, Germs, and Steel — Jared M. Diamond
68. The Republic — Plato
69. A Short History of Nearly Everything — Bill Bryson
70. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
71. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry — Neil deGrasse Tyson
72. The Social Contract — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
73. All Quiet on the Western Front — Erich Maria Remarqu
74. The Wealth of Nations — Adam Smith
75. The Theodore Roosevelt Trilogy — Edmund Morris
76. On the Road — Jack Kerouac
77. The Histories — Herodotus
78. Ulysses — James Joyce
79. The Prince — Niccolo Machiavelli
80. Nicomachean Ethics — Aristotle
81. The Naked and the Dead — Norman Mailer
82. The Greatest Generation — Tom Brokaw
83. A Tale of Two Cities — Charles Dickens
84. The Sound and the Fury — William Faulkner
85. Man’s Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl
86. Fear and Trembling — Soren Kierkegaard
87. The Elements of Style — William Strunk, Jr
88. Out of Africa — Isak Dinesen
89. In Cold Blood — Truman Capote
90. If This Is a Man — Primo Levi
91. Alexander Hamilton — Ron Chernow
92. Cognitive Psychology — E. Bruce Goldstein
93. Common Sense and the Rights of Man — Thomas Paine
94. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds — Charles MacKay
95. Den of Thieves — James B. Stewart
96. The Divine Comedy — Dante Alighieri
97. Into Africa — Martin Dugard
98. One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel Garcia Marquez
99. Communist Manifesto — Karl Marx
100. Sapiens — Yuval Noah Harari

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John LeFevre is the creator of @GSElevator, the founder of a fashion line, a podcast host, and the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Straight To Hell: True Tales of Deviance, Debauchery, And Billion-Dollar Deals, currently in development as a major motion picture.

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