50 Books To Read Before You Die

If you don't get to these good reads before the coming apocalypse, your life will be a complete fail. Don't say Complex and the Mayans didn't warn you!

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Just a heads up: As of today, July 11, 2012, there are only 163 days left before the world ends. At least according to the ancient Mayan calendar, which will officially stop counting days on December 21, 2012, signifying, in the eyes of many paranoid loons and conspiracy theorists, the arrival of doomsday. Will the sky fall? Oceans flood our dry land? Fireballs pop through the soil like Whac-A-Mole heads? Worst of all, will we not be able to see Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained when it opens on Christmas Day? Oh, the horror!

If you’re anything like us, you’ve already started finalizing a bucket list and have immediate plans to begin knocking entries off in a mad dash to 12/21/12. Aside from having Kate Upton do the “Cat Daddy” dance in your bedroom, one of your top priorities should be to finally sit back, take a load off, and bask in the beauty and complexities of great literature—seriously.

Anyone who’s spent hours inside a Barnes & Noble knows how daunting it is to select the right books, though, which is why we here at Complex have decided to provide a diverse end-of-days literary list, a.k.a. 50 Books To Read Before You Die, one that’s been compiled from the personal libraries of each staff member.

Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone) and Ross Scarano (@RossScarano)

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No Country for Old Men

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One Hundred Years of Solitude

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A Wild Sheep Chase

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Native Son

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The Metamorphosis

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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

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Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick

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The Savage Detectives

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Jesus' Son

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Ghostwritten

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The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

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The Electric Michelangelo

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If On a Winter's Night a Traveler

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The Big Sleep

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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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The Stories of Ray Bradbury

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Haunted

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

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Flicker

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Brave New World

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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction

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The Intuitionist

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I Am Legend

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Books of Blood

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The Haunting of Hill House

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Lolita

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The Notebook

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The Stranger

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A Clockwork Orange

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Watchmen

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The Fortress of Solitude

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Lord of the Flies

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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

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Catch-22

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Frankenstein

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House of Leaves

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1984

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The Great Gatsby

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Earth Abides

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The Shining

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Heart of Darkness

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Breakfast of Champions

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The Things They Carried

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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

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Wonder Boys

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White Noise

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Under the Volcano

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I Wish Someone Were Waiting for Me Somewhere

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The Divine Comedy

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