Hello and happy Friday. The other day I was listening to a book about books and I came up with the idea to have ChatGPT generate a list of “must reads.” I know these lists exist already, and maybe if I’m super bored or feeling creative and productive I might contrast one made by human intelligence and this one, but today’s not the day.

I’ll be crossing out the titles I’ve already read, but I’m not challenging myself to go over the other titles any time soon, but you know me. I might revisit this list in the future.

To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

1984 – George Orwell

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Moby-Dick – Herman Melville

Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë

Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky

Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë

The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger

Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde

The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky

One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez

Les Misérables – Victor Hugo

The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes

The Iliad – Homer

Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe

The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho

The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy

Blindness – José Saramago

Season of Migration to the North – Tayeb Salih

Snow – Orhan Pamuk

The Book Thief – Markus Zusak

A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov

Persepolis – Marjane Satrapi

Meditations – Marcus Aurelius

Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor E. Frankl

The Republic – Plato

The Art of War – Sun Tzu

The Prince – Niccolò Machiavelli

Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari

Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman

The Denial of Death – Ernest Becker

The Myth of Sisyphus – Albert Camus

Civilization and Its Discontents – Sigmund Freud

A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking

The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins

The Double Helix – James D. Watson

Silent Spring – Rachel Carson

The Sixth Extinction – Elizabeth Kolbert

Guns, Germs, and Steel – Jared Diamond

Cosmos – Carl Sagan

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks – Rebecca Skloot

Why We Sleep – Matthew Walker

Braiding Sweetgrass – Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Art of Happiness – Dalai Lama & Howard Cutler

The Book of Joy – Dalai Lama & Desmond Tutu

The Sabbath – Abraham Joshua Heschel

Ethics of the Fathers (Pirkei Avot) – Mishnah

Letters to a Young Poet – Rainer Maria Rilke

The Prophet – Kahlil Gibran

Waking Up – Sam Harris

The Tao of Pooh – Benjamin Hoff

Anatomy of the Spirit – Caroline Myss

Beloved – Toni Morrison

Life of Pi – Yann Martel

The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini

Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro

White Teeth – Zadie Smith

The Road – Cormac McCarthy

Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides

Americanah – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Educated – Tara Westover

Becoming – Michelle Obama

The Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank

Night – Elie Wiesel

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou

When Breath Becomes Air – Paul Kalanithi

Long Walk to Freedom – Nelson Mandela

Born a Crime – Trevor Noah

The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion

The Glass Castle – Jeannette Walls

The Second Sex – Simone de Beauvoir

The Feminine Mystique – Betty Friedan

The Souls of Black Folk – W.E.B. Du Bois

The Fire Next Time – James Baldwin

No Logo – Naomi Klein

The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels

A People’s History of the United States – Howard Zinn

Orientalism – Edward Said

Nickel and Dimed – Barbara Ehrenreich

The Warmth of Other Suns – Isabel Wilkerson

The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone – J.K. Rowling

Dune – Frank Herbert

Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury

The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. Le Guin

Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card

Dracula – Bram Stoker

The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco

And Then There Were None – Agatha Christie

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut