Reading lists

19 lists · 320 entries · every text free to read online

The lists

1. Ten classics to start with — 10 books. If you have not read any nineteenth-century fiction since school, this is the order we would suggest. The list is arranged roughly by how easy each book is to get into, not by importance, and every title here can be read free and in full online.
2. Gothic and strange: twelve unsettling classics — 12 books. These books are often grouped together, but they are frightening in quite different ways: a creature that can argue, a house that will not let go, a portrait that keeps a record, a ship's log that does not add up, a wallpaper pattern, and a theology that licenses murder.
3. Sixteen classics for younger readers — 16 books. Written for children, or long since adopted by them. We keep the original English text rather than simplified retellings, and every title here is old enough to be free of copyright in the United States. A few contain attitudes that a parent may want to discuss.
4. Eight detective classics before the genre settled — 8 books. The detective story was invented in the nineteenth century and codified in the twentieth, and these eight books catch it in between: sensation novels with lawyers, a priest who solves crimes by sympathy, a locked-room diamond and a chase across Scotland.
5. Ten books for the sea — 10 books. A voyage is the oldest plot device in fiction: it puts a character somewhere with no way back. These ten books use ships, rivers and islands to test what people are willing to do when the land is out of sight.
6. Twenty-six American classics — 26 books. From the whaling ports of New England to the stockyards of Chicago, this is a working shelf of American writing before 1930: novels about money and race and ambition, plus the essays and poems that argued with them.
7. Forty British novels, 1814 to 1925 — 40 books. The core of the collection. Forty novels written in Britain and Ireland across a century, arranged here from the historical romance to the modernist interior, with the industrial novel, the sensation novel and the comic masterpiece all present.
8. Twelve books of argument — 12 books. Non-fiction that still reads as argument rather than monument: a naturalist's voyage, a case for liberty, a defence of culture, a study of magic and religion, and two American attempts to describe what race and money do to a society.
9. Twelve poetry books worth owning — 12 books. Poetry is the hardest thing to read on a screen, so these are the books we would print if we could: Middle English narrative, Romantic travel verse, American free verse, devotional lyrics and two small collections that fit in a pocket.
10. Twenty-eight books that go somewhere — 28 books. Travel writing proper, plus novels that are inseparable from a place: Venice, Florence, Rome, Paris, Cairo, the Nile, the Mississippi and the Karoo. Use it as a reading list or as a substitute for a ticket.
11. Ten books from Ireland — 10 books. Ireland produced a disproportionate share of the books that changed English prose, and most of them were written in exile. This list keeps the Dubliners, the Gothic novelists and the playwrights together, where they can argue.
12. Twelve books about war and empire — 12 books. Fiction and reportage from the century in which Britain and the United States became global powers, and from the places that power was exercised. Some of these books are complicit in what they describe; that is part of why they are worth reading.
13. Nine books that broke the nineteenth-century novel — 9 books. Between 1899 and 1927 the novel stopped explaining itself. These nine books, from Conrad's river to Woolf's single day, show the technique changing in real time. Read them in publication order if you want the argument to make sense.
14. Twenty novels about money — 20 books. Inheritance, debt, credit, marriage settlements and the price of a good dinner: these novels are about the arithmetic that Victorian criticism preferred to call fate. Read them together and the marriage plot starts to look like an accounting problem.
15. Eighteen short books for a long evening — 18 books. Everything here can be read in a day, and several in an hour. Short novels, novellas, plays and one long short story, chosen because they are concentrated rather than slight.
16. Fourteen books of letters, journals and travel notes — 14 books. Books written as they happened, or close to it: letters from Egypt, an eighteenth-century tour in epistolary form, a printer's autobiography, and travel journals that were never meant to be read as literature and are all the better for it.
17. Twenty marriage plots — 20 books. The marriage plot is the engine of nineteenth-century fiction, and these twenty books take it apart in different ways: proposals refused, settlements negotiated, reputations ruined and one very long engagement.
18. Sixteen novels about families — 16 books. Inheritance, siblings, bad fathers and the rooms people cannot leave: the family is the smallest unit of social pressure and the novel's favourite subject. These sixteen books take it seriously as a structure rather than a background.
19. Twenty-seven Victorian novels — 27 books. A chronological shelf of the period that invented the modern novel, from Pickwick to Dracula, with the industrial novel, the sensation novel and the marriage novel all in place. If you only read one list on this site, make it this one.

Reading free, in practice

Every title in these lists was published before 1930 and is in the public domain in the United States. Modern annotated editions can carry separate copyright in their introductions and notes. If you plan to republish a text rather than simply read it, check the rules in your own country first.