60+ Books to Read Before You Become an Adult

If you want a degree, you can spend 240k to go to Harvard, if you want an education, you can get it for free.

If you want a degree, you can spend 240k to go to Harvard, if you want an education, you can get it for free.

Several years ago I mentored a high school student who wanted to improve his grades. He lived in rural Michigan. He had an imperfect family structure around him. But, loved reading. As a child, he read Ranger’s Apprentice, a great set of stories that help build personal character.

Once he was in high school he wanted more.

So, I made a list of all the books I thought he should read before graduating high school. These form a basis of general knowledge.

He read about 4 books a term (3 terms). Each time I had him write a short book report on the book. By 10th grade spring, he was a 4.0 student.

Reading the books helped him build discipline, but it also helped him engage people around him. Having the references from the books, it gave him confidence.

Confident, smart and informed is a good result of education.

Here they are….

Novels — Classics

• Adventures of Huckleberry Fin — Ernest Hemingway declared that “all modern American literature stems from this one book,” while T. S. Eliot called Huck “one of the permanent symbolic figures of fiction, not unworthy to take a place with Ulysses, Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Hamlet.”

• Adventures of Tom Sawyer

• All Quiet on the Western Front

• Animal Farm - an account of a group of barnyard animals who revolt against their vicious human master, only to submit to a tyranny erected by their own kind, can fairly be said to have become a universal drama.

• Beowulf

• Brave New World

• Bridges of Madison County

• Canterbury Tales

• Catcher in The Rye

• Cheaper by the dozen

• Count of Monte Cristo

• Crucible

• David Copperfield

• Death of a Salesman

• Fahrenheit 451

• For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway)

• Frankenstein

• Good Earth

• Grapes of Wrath

• Great Expectations

• The Great Gatsby

• Hamlet

• Heart of Darkness

• Holy Bible

• Importance of Being Earnest

• Inherit the wind

• Invisible Man (the)

• Jane Eyre

• Julius Caesar

• The Jungle

• King Lear

• Lord of the Flies

• Macbeth

• Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

• Mice and Men

• Midsummer Nights Dream

• Moby Dick

• Mutiny on the Bounty

• 1984

• The Odyssey

• Of Mice and Men

• Old Man and the sea

• Oliver Twist

• Othello

• Pearl

• Pride and Prejudice

• Prince

• Red Badge of Courage

• Road to Serfdom

• Robinson Crusoe

• Scarlet letter

• Shackleton

• Slaughterhouse Five

• Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

• Sun Also Rises

• Tale of Two Cities

• Time Machine (the)

• Tuesdays with Morrie

• War of the Worlds

• Wuthering Heights

Politics and Liberty

• Advise and Consent — A sweeping tale of corruption and ambition cuts across the landscape of Washington, DC, with the breadth and realism that only an astute observer and insider can convey.

• All the Kings Men — Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this classic book is generally regarded as the finest novel ever written on American politics. It describes the career of Willie Stark, a back-country lawyer whose idealism is overcome by his lust for power.

• Democracy in America — Tocqueville / Mansfield — Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) came to America in 1831 to see what a great republic was like. What struck him most was the country’s equality of conditions, its democracy.

• Federalist Papers

• Lincoln, a Novel, by Gore Vidal

• Road to Serfdom

• Walden and Civil Disobedience *(read excerpts in 11th grade)

Historical

• Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors (easy read)

• Heart of the Sea

• Rumor of War

Novel with the political tone

• Atlas Shrugged

• Catch-22

• Fountainhead

Other Interesting — Because he liked the military, tech, and sailing

• France to France — An American in the Vendée Globe, Racing Solo, Non-Stop, Around the World

• Godforsaken Sea — Godforsaken Sea is the hair-raising account of the world’s most demanding, dangerous, and deadly sailing race — following the field of the 1996–1997 Vendée Globe through a grueling four-month

• Horse Soldiers-the dramatic account of a small band of Special Forces soldiers who secretly entered Afghanistan following 9/11 and rode to war on horses against the Taliban.

• I Dare You

• Soul of the New Machine

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Authors

• Steinbeck

• Hemingway

• Oscar Wilde

• Dickens

• Mark Twain

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