Read the book before you watch it, or afterwards, to find what the screen left out. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights and Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein are already out. A new Sense and Sensibility opens in US theaters on October 16, 2026, and Netflix's Pride and Prejudice follows on December 3.
Homer
Emily Brontë
Jane Austen
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Bram Stoker
William Shakespeare
Agatha Christie
Alexandre Dumas, Auguste Maquet
Henrik Ibsen
John Galsworthy
H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
Erich Maria Remarque
D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
Ghost stories, haunted houses and things better left buried, for the long evenings of October. Dracula and Frankenstein are one row up. Start here instead: Carmilla, the vampire who came a quarter of a century before Dracula; M. R. James, whose ghosts are still the most unsettling in English; and Lovecraft at the bottom of the world.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Henry James
Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
Oscar Wilde
Washington Irving
Arthur Conan Doyle
H. P. (Howard Phillips) Lovecraft
Algernon Blackwood
M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James
William Hope Hodgson
M. G. (Matthew Gregory) Lewis
John William Polidori
Start on Saturday, finish by Sunday night. Each of these can be read in an afternoon or two: a play that takes one sitting, a clerk who would prefer not to, a sled dog's education in the Klondike, and a New England winter you will not forget.
Edith Wharton
Jack London
Bernard Shaw
Stephen Crane
Herman Melville
Mark Twain
Ayn Rand
Rudyard Kipling
The country house, the locked room, the impossible alibi. This is where the detective story learned its tricks: Holmes in Baker Street, Poirot's first case at Styles, Miss Marple's first at the vicarage, Sam Spade in San Francisco. Most of them play fair, with the clues on the page before the detective explains them.
Wilkie Collins
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
Dashiell Hammett
Maurice Leblanc
A. A. (Alan Alexander) Milne
Gaston Leroux
Dorothy L. (Dorothy Leigh) Sayers
Ellery Queen
Anthony Berkeley
Mary Roberts Rinehart
The decade that invented the modern novel, and one whose books have only just come out of copyright. Gatsby's parties, Mrs. Dalloway's single day in London, Hemingway's war and Faulkner's South, alongside the bestsellers the twenties themselves were reading.
F. Scott (Francis Scott) Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
Virginia Woolf
William Faulkner
E. M. (Edward Morgan) Forster
Elizabeth Von Arnim
Sinclair Lewis
Jean Toomer
John Dos Passos
Edna Ferber
Hermann Hesse
Aldous Huxley
Love stories that make you wait for it. A second chance eight years late, a governess who will not be talked down to, a mill owner and the woman who thinks she despises him. Nobody here falls in love by chapter two.
Charlotte Brontë
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
Thomas Hardy
Anne Brontë
Jean Webster
Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
R. D. (Richard Doddridge) Blackmore
Edmond Rostand
Maps, duels, shipwrecks and narrow escapes. These are the books that taught every adventure film how it is done: a treasure map and a one-legged cook, three musketeers who are really four, a wager to circle the world in eighty days.
Jules Verne
H. Rider (Henry Rider) Haggard
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Johnston McCulley
John Buchan
Anthony Hope
Daniel Defoe
James Fenimore Cooper
Howard Pyle
Time machines, Martians and societies that never were, written before anyone called it science fiction. Wells and Verne are here, and so are the books they made possible: the Russian novel Orwell read before writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, a country with no men in it, and a world with only two dimensions.
Evgenii Ivanovich Zamiatin
Edwin Abbott Abbott
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Thea von Harbou
David Lindsay
The best book club nights are the ones where nobody agrees. Was Nora right to walk out? Is Huck's story a masterpiece or a problem? Each of these has divided readers since the day it was published, and none of them has been settled yet.
Joseph Conrad
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Upton Sinclair
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
James Joyce
Mary Wollstonecraft
Stories that were written to be heard. A rabbit hole, a yellow brick road, a secret garden and a wooden boy who cannot tell a lie without it showing. Good for bedtime, long car journeys, and adults who never quite grew out of them.
Lewis Carroll
L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
J. M. (James Matthew) Barrie
L. M. (Lucy Maud) Montgomery
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Carlo Collodi
Hugh Lofting
Johanna Spyri
Felix Salten
Lives told by the people who lived them. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs on escaping slavery, Shackleton on the ice, Thoreau at the pond, a nurse who paid her own way to the Crimean War. No biographer in the way.
Solomon Northup
Frederick Douglass
Harriet A. (Harriet Ann) Jacobs
Henry David Thoreau
Ernest Henry, Sir Shackleton
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Graves
Booker T. Washington
Paramahansa Yogananda
Olaudah Equiano
John Muir
Mary Seacole
Old books that are still funny. Three men who should never have been allowed near a boat, a valet cleverer than his employer, a history of England as everyone misremembers it, and a clerk in Holloway who cannot understand why nobody takes him seriously.
Jerome K. (Jerome Klapka) Jerome
P. G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse
George Grossmith, Weedon Grossmith
Walter Carruthers Sellar, Robert Julian Yeatman
Booth Tarkington
Stephen Leacock
Jonathan Swift
The stories under all the other stories. If The Odyssey sent you looking for more, the war that came before it is here, and so is the Trojan who escaped it, along with Beowulf, Dante, King Arthur and the Norse gods.
Dante Alighieri
Thomas, Sir Malory
Virgil
Ovid
H. A. (Hélène Adeline) Guerber
Jessie L. (Jessie Laidlay) Weston
John Milton
Rhodius Apollonius
Andrew Lang
Snorri Sturluson, Sæmundur fróði
Long enough to live in for a month. These are the novels people mean when they say a book changed how they see things, and each one repays the time: a provincial town, a white whale, a Russian marriage, a single day in Dublin.
George Eliot
Leo, graf Tolstoy
Victor Hugo
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Charles Dickens
Henry Fielding
Anthony Trollope
Practical wisdom from people who had to use it. An emperor's private notebook, a former slave's handbook, a prisoner's last consolation, and a short Chinese classic on doing less. Start anywhere; none of them requires a philosophy degree.
Epictetus
Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius
Niccolò Machiavelli
Plato
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Laozi
active 6th century B.C. Sunzi
Bertrand Russell
Boethius
Michel de Montaigne
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Stuart Mill
Matthew Flinders
Anonymous
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Edmund Spenser
Immanuel Kant
Aristotle
Various
Emperor of Hindustan Babur
John Hill Burton
Edward A. (Edward Augustus) Freeman
Mark Twain, Charles Dudley Warner
John Ruskin
da Vinci Leonardo
the Elder Pliny
François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
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