50 Books To Read Before You Die

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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Author: Cormac McCarthy
Released: 2005
Genre: Crime thriller

When the Coen brothers turned Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men into the 2007 Academy Award-winning hit movie, they displayed tremendous filmmaking prowess, sure, but even Joel and Ethan themselves would admit that, really, they mainly just stayed true to McCarthy's novel. The greatness was already present in the esteemed author's dark meditation on violence, lawlessness, and helplessly watching the world change for the worst.

Fun Fact: It makes sense that No Country for Old Men eventually made a splash in multiplexes; originally, McCarthy wrote it as a screenplay, but he was never able to sell it as such.

Author: Gabriel García Márquez
Released: 1967
Genre: Epic, fantastical drama

For many, Gabriel García Márquez's expansive One Hundred Years of Solitude was their first exposure to Latin American literature, an introduction that, for better or for worse, raised the bar incredibly high. Which isn't fair, really, since García Márquez is a writer of extraordinary talents, and this, his second, and best, novel, is truly remarkable.

One Hundred Years of Solitude depicts every high (family bonds, sparked love connections, ascension into heaven) and dire low (civil war, suicide, widespread insomnia) encountered by the Buendía family, living in the fictional land of Macondo. García Márquez handles every event with such consistent expertise that the shifts from realism to fantasy are never jarring; rather, they're seamless.

Fun Fact: For years, García Márquez's non-secretive views toward US imperialism led to his visas being denied by US immigration officers, but when Bill Clinton started his presidency, he changed that ruling. Clinton also said that One Hundred Years of Solitude was, at the time, his favorite book.

Author: Haruki Murakami
Released: 1982
Genre: Mystery/fantasy

How's this for a crazy plot: A young, hotshot advertising executive innocently uses a postcard, sent by a friend, for one of his ad campaigns, not realizing that the image also includes a malformed sheep, one that a mysterious man commands the ad exec to either locate or die trying.

If that doesn't sell you on why Japanese author Haruki Murakami's dazzling A Wild Sheep Chase is a must-read, then you're better off reading sub-par crap like Fifty Shades of Grey. Those wise enough to join Murakami's unnamed narrator on his bizarre, dreamlike journey will no doubt get enraptured by a detective novel unlike any other.

Fun Fact: A Wild Sheep Chase is actually a sequel to Murakami's 1980 novel Pinball, 1973, and the third in his "Trilogy of the Rat" series, which follows the same unnamed narrator and his pal, "the rat."

Author: Richard Wright
Released: 1940
Genre: Drama

Even though its set way back in the 1930s, Richard Wright's powerful, crucial novel Native Son is fully capable of resonating with tremendous force when read in today's society. The protagonist, a black Chicago resident named Bigger Thomas, kills a white lady in an impulsive mistake of a reaction, and, naturally, he's on his way to the big house. But Wright, who held a Ph.D in biology from Harvard before passing away in 1960, doesn't paint Thomas as a villanous scoundrel; rather, the character is a tragic representation of inner city oppression.

Fun Fact: Wright loosely based Native Son on the real-life case of Robert Nixon, a black serial killer from Louisiana who was executed by electric chair in 1939.

Author: Franz Kafka
Released: 1915
Genre: Dark comedy

It sounds like something we'd catch late night on cable television and laugh at Mystery Science Theater 3000 style: A poor bastard—here, named Gregor Samsa—wakes up one day to see that he's turning into a huge bug, a discovery from which dark comedy ensues. But what gives Franz Kafka's classic The Metamorphosis the narrative flourishes needed to lift it above hokey genre fiction are the ways that Gregor copes with his physical change.

Instead of becoming a scary monster, a la, say, The Fly, he tries to adapt into society so as not to makes his loved ones' lives more difficult. The laughs flow naturally from that conceit, yet The Metamorphosis hits hard with its tragic conclusion and Gregor's empathetic demeanor.

Fun Fact: In the 2001 comic book anthology collection Bart Simpson's Treehouse of Horror Spine-Tingling Spooktacular, The Simpsons playfully spoofed Kafka's story in a passage titled "Metamorphosimpsons."

Author: James Joyce
Released: 1914
Genre: Coming-of-age drama

To write A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, supreme Irish novelist James Joyce pulled from his own life experiences to craft a deeply textured look at Stephen Dedalus, an incessantly fascinating character. Born into a devoutly Catholic family, Stephen, as he enters the stages of adulthood, begins to question his parents' beloved religion, and Joyce's prose and signature employment of the third-person voice provide an observational and non-intrusive point-of-view for every leap of self-imposed faith Stephen takes.

Fun Fact: Joyce's first draft of the novel was titled Stephen Hero, and featured several inconsequential Portrait characters in much larger roles. Stephen Hero was released in 1944, three years after Joyce's death.

Author: Philip K. Dick
Released: 2002
Genre: Short story collection

If you're even a casual science fiction fan, whether you realize it or not, you've already experienced the inventive, clever, and altogether exceptional storytelling of the late Philip K. Dick. Have you ever seen Total Recall? Well, it's based on Dick's short story "We Can Remember It for You for Wholesale." How about Minority Report? Yup, that's another Dick-derived classic, from his tale of the same name. This definitive collection gathers 21 of the sci-fi legend's most memorable works.

Fun Fact: Dick was also an accomplished novelist, and two of his full-length books have spawned movies: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (filmed as Blade Runner) and A Scanner Darkly.

Author: Roberto Bolano
Released: 1998
Genre: Drama

Don’t be put off by the poetry, or that all the characters are writers (even though writers are, admittedly, tough people to spend time with)—The Savage Detectives is a sad-beautiful novel about losing.

Anyone walking upright knows what it's like to grow old, to experience loss. The massive cast that fills the pages of this novel with their voices, they were all young once. They cared about something. They cared about art. As they age—the novel spans decades—they come to understand how hard it is to hold on to the things you care about, how you lose everything by degrees.

No writer has done a better job of expressing the utter silliness of art in the face of its magnificent power. Art is a joke. Art is all that matters. Life is a joke. Life is all that matters. That’s one possible summary of Bolano’s novel. Likely you’ll have another.

Fun Fact: Most of the characters in The Savage Detectives are based on Bolano and his real-life friends. Arturo Belano, for instance, is Bolano himself, and Ulises Lima is his good friend Mario Santiago, who was killed in 1998.

Author: Denis Johnson
Released: 1992
Genre: Short story collection

If you’ve ever been in a creative writing class, then you know how often drug abuse comes up in amateur fiction. In an ideal world, every creative writing prof would hand the student enamored with mind-altering highs and sordid violence a copy of Jesus’ Son, and then that student would stop. The student would stop because he isn’t Denis Johnson, and will never be. Johnson is too good.

Jesus’ Son, taking its title from The Velvet Underground’s “Heroin,” follows a junkie as he stumbles toward salvation in a broken American Midwest. Johnson takes him low before any hope appears, crafting some of the most electrifying prose in American fiction along the way. For a taste, here’s Johnson describing a transcendent moment at the bar:

“She poured doubles like an angel, right up to the lip of the cocktail glass, no measuring…You had to go down to them like a hummingbird over a blossom. I saw her much later, not too many years ago, and when I smiled she seemed to believe I was making advances. But it was only that I remembered. I’ll never forget you. Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.”

Fun Fact: In the 1999 film adaptation, co-starring Dennis Hopper, Denis Leary, Jack Black, and Michael Shannon, Denis Johnson, the author, appears as a man with a hunting knife stuck in his skull.

Author: David Mitchell
Released: 1999
Genre: Drama

Ghostwritten is, in many ways, the text equivalent to the Oscar-winning flick Crash, but David Mitchell's sweeping novel should be immune to the hatred spewed toward director Paul Haggis' overrated slice of racially charged melodrama.

In Ghostwritten, Mitchell skillfully weaves together the stories of nine vastly different characters, including a terrorist living in Okinawa, an English musician, and an NYC radio DJ, in unpredictable, happenstance ways. And, fortunately, none of them act like Ludacris or Brendan Fraser.

Fun Fact: It's easy to see why David Mitchell's novels, from Ghostwritten to 2004's time-spanning Cloud Atlas, feature characters from various parts of the world—throughout his life, Mitchell has lived in England, Sicily, Hiroshima, and Ireland.

Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Released:
Genre: Short story/poetry collection

The definitive collection of writings from one of the most important scribes to ever grab a pen. Forget that shitty movie John Cusack made about the almighty Edgar Allan Poe (The Raven) and acquaint yourself with some of the scariest, most thought-provoking, and gorgeously written stories of terror and darkness out there.

Fun Fact: From 1960 through 1965, B-movie-maker extraordinaire Roger Corman and star Vincent Price made six films together based on Poe's work, the best of which are The House of Usher (1960) and The Pit and the Pendulum (1961).

Author: Sarah Hall
Released: 2004
Genre: Coming-of-age

The Electric Michelangelo is practically begging for a movie adaptation—if novels could actually plead. Taking place between 1910 and 1940, Sarah Hall's delicate coming-of-age saga follows a tattoo artist learning about culture and life from a variety of circus performers and "freaks," before falling in love with a particularly tough woman who allows him to sketch over 100 pieces of ink on her physique.

So, basically, you'd have a romantic epic akin to Water for Elephants, but, hopefully, minus Robert Pattinson.

Fun Fact: When The Electric Michelangelo, her second novel, was published, Sarah Hall was only 30 years old.

Author: Italo Calvino
Released: 1979
Genre: Dark comedy

Imagine that you and a buddy decide to start reading the same book at the same time, in a race to see who'll finish first. But, along the way from the novel's opening chapter to the finale, forces beyond your control prevent you from completing the task.

Now imagine that but told through the words of the friend as he struggles with every chapter and you've got Italo Calvino's structurally unconventional and seriously addictive If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, a thriller of sorts told with comedy pushed to the forefront.

Fun Fact: Sting titled his 2009 LP If On a Winter's Night... in honor of Calvino's book.

Author: Raymond Chandler
Released: 1939
Genre: Crime fiction

In the pulpy days of Raymond Chandler's fiction, crime tales were teeming with ruthless dames, complicated antihero P.I.'s, and more double-crosses than a one-on-one game between Chris Paul and Russell Westbrook. The Big Sleep, which marked the debut of Chandler's staple character, detective Philip Marlowe, is universally hailed as the writer's tightest work, a hotbed of blackmails, deception, and, of course, murder.

Fun Fact: The character of Philip Marlowe has appeared in nine of Chandler's novels, as well as five of the author's short stories.

Author: Junot Diaz
Released: 2007
Genre: Coming-of-age drama

The quest to lose one’s virginity has formed the basis for many memorable novels; it’s the backbone of Oscar Wao, a discursive novel that takes long, hysterical detours through the history of the Dominican Republic, where Diaz was born. Oscar, the novel’s protagonist, is an overweight nerd who wants to get laid, but the going is tough; Akira is a text of biblical importance for this kid. It might be for you, too.

Pop culture as kinship is key in Diaz’s novel, a story of one nation’s history as told through one family. Full of stylistic flare—footnotes and slang abound—Diaz is a postmodern writer with a beating bloody heart, capable of making you feel and understand a place and culture your school textbook might’ve been quick to forget.

Fun Fact: Amongst the various major awards won by Junot Diaz for Oscar Wao was the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 2008.

Author: Ray Bradbury
Released: 2010
Genre: Short story collection

The world lost a literary giant this June 5, when the irreplaceable Ray Bradbury passed away from natural causes at the age of 91. For those who sadly don't recognize the man's name, we could sit here and write about how without Bradbury we'd have no Stephen King or any other respected author of science fiction, dark fantasy, or horror. But we'd prefer that you check out this indispensable, robust collection of 100 short stories.

While doing so, play a little game we like to call "Name That Subsequent Author's Work That Was Totally Inspired By The Current Bradbury Story You're Reading." It's hours upon hours of fun.

Fun Fact: Bradbury's stories were so beloved and respected that, in 1985, he was given the power to create, executive produce, and serve as a Rod Serling type for an anthology TV show based on his works, called The Ray Bradbury Theater. It lasted for six seasons, with 65 total episodes.

Author: Chuck Palahniuk
Released: 2005
Genre: Horror fiction

Chuck Palahniuk is that rare kind of author, a wholly original manipulator of words, sentence structures, and readers' psyches whose books defy categorization. Especially Haunted, his most ambitious novel to date, and the ultimate writing-can-be-hell testament.

Seventeen aspiring writers are locked inside an abandoned theater for three months, with unlimited amounts of food, water, and electricity as they're told to each write their masterwork, and over the course of Haunted their 23 "original" stories increase in strangeness as they quickly lose their own minds. It's hilarious, frightening, odd, and purely Palahniuk.

Fun Fact: There have been over 60 accounts of people passing out while Palahniuk recited the Haunted story "Guts" at public readings, due to its graphic descriptions of masturbation via carrot into rectum and a boy's crotch region getting sucked into a pool filter, causing his innards to clog up the drain.

Author: Raymond Carver
Released: 1981
Genre: Short story collection

Widely acknowledged as a master of the short story, Raymond Carver specialized in sparse, lean, yet immensely impactful tales about working-class people, and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, his second collection, is the man at his unapologetic best. One of the 17 included stories, in fact, titled "Why Don't You Dance?," was the source behind the underrated 2010 Will Ferrell dramedy Everything Must Go.

Fun Fact: One of Carver's earliest jobs was that of a textbook editor for the Palo Alto, CA, company Science Research Associates, a personality-deficient gig that, unsurprisingly, he was fired from because of his unsuitable writing style.

Author: Theodore Roszak
Released: 1991
Genre: Psychological horror

Flicker is a movie lover's dream centered around one movie lover's ultimate nightmare. Theodore Roszak's thoroughly engrossing novel is at times placed firmly within the parameters of psychological horror, but it's also quite funny and far more concerned with its richly developed characters than genre conventions.

Over the course of the story, Jonathan Gates evolves from wide-eyed college student to UCLA-employed film scholar, and it's his later phase that leads him to become obsessed with an obscure silent film director named Max Castle.

The deeper he gets into Castle's history, the more enamored Gates gets with the possibilities of occult influences, global conspiracies, and what kinds of subliminal fuckery really hides inside celluloid. Within the first 20 pages, you'll be just as obsessed as Gates is.

Fun Fact: At one point, director Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan) and Jim Uhls (who wrote Fight Club for David Fincher) were hired to film a Flicker adaptation, but nothing more than an early draft of a script ever materialized.

Author: Aldous Huxley
Released: 1931
Genre: Science fiction

You know that whole "birds and the bees" conversation you once had with mom and dad? Well, in the universe of Aldous Huxley's satiric sci-fi novel Brave New World, it's more about "the guys in lab coats and their trusty incubators."

Set in a futuristic society where babies are created in laboratories, as a way to control the status quo and eliminate individuality, Brave New World shows how one lovestruck guy, Bernard Marx, upends his prefixed world just to discover the true meaning of the L-word. Why Bernard would give a damn about that in a world where sex is merely a recreational sport is beyond us, though. What a dumbass.

Fun Fact: The book's title comes from a line in the fifth act of William Shakespeare's play The Tempest.

Author: Douglas Adams
Released: 1979
Genre: Science fiction

Some might opt for Mel Brooks' Spaceballs, but, for our money, the funniest piece of absurdist science fiction ever conceived is Douglas Adams' five-novel series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, all of which are collected here, in this one-stop-shop of intergalactic silliness. Spacebound travelers Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect get into all kinds of ridiculous shenanigans, contending with beastly aliens and the ramifications of time travel while thirsting for fresh tea and awkwardly laughing their way through it all.

Fun Fact: Adams, a highly respected humorist, is only of two people who aren't a part of Monty Python to receive a writing credit on the infamous British comedy troupe's sketch show Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Author: H.P. Lovecraft
Released: 2011
Genre: Short story collection

Edgar Allan Poe receives the majority of the horror genre's "most influential writer" praise, and Stephen King is our modern-day titan of fear, but H.P. Lovecraft is undoubtedly just as crucial, if not more so, than those other guys.

Back in the 1920s and '30s, the reclusive, eccentric Rhode Island native wrote wildly imaginative short stories bathed in his command of atmospheric terror, invention of the Necronomicon (a fictional book of the dead), and the game-changing Cthulhu Mythos, that of universe dominated by cosmic monsters and supernatural gods.

All of that, plus several weird tales that don't necessarily fit into those parameters, can be found in this exhaustive collection of Lovecraft's renown classics and overlooked gems.

Fun Fact: Lovecraft shared close, letter-form, frequently exercised correspondences with authors Robert Bloch (Psycho) and Robert E. Howard (the Conan the Barbarian series).

Author: Colson Whitehead
Released: 1999
Genre: Fantastical drama

That one of the most important novels about race to be released in the last 20 years concerns two competing schools of thought about elevator repair is a testament to the genius of Colson Whitehead, one of the greatest living American authors. Whitehead understands the usefulness of genre in the same way that Tarantino does.

But Whitehead is smarter than the auteur, and his work demonstrates a more nuanced (if nihilistic) understanding of what it means to be lonely and human. Or, let Whitehead tell it, lonely because you’re human. The Intuitionist is a mish-mash of noir, Afrofuturism, and Kafka. It’s cerebral, challenging, and belongs on your bookshelf.

Fun Fact: In addition to writing novels, Whitehead also has a successful side hustle as a contributor to publications like The Village Voice and The New York Times.

Author: Richard Matheson
Released: 1954
Genre: Horror fiction

Forget that decent but ultimately failed adaptation starring Will Smith. Richard Matheson, the hugely influential novelist, short story writer, and Twilight Zone screenwriting all-star, delivered the best vampire book this side of Bram Stoker's Dracula with I Am Legend, and no filmmaker has yet to do it any sufficient justice.

The last man standing in a post-apocalyptic wasteland overrun by talking, mind-game-playing bloodsuckers, protagonist Robert Neville fends off creatures at night while studying to better understand the cataclysmic disease by day. Reminiscent of Matheson's best Twilight Zone episodes, I Am Legend culminates with a brilliant and unexpected resolution that's thematically devastating and shockingly real.

You know, the polar opposite of how Big Willie Style's flick ended.

Fun Fact: In past interviews, Night of the Living Dead writer-director George A. Romero admitted that his seminal zombie movie classic was, in many ways, "ripping off" I Am Legend.

Author: Clive Barker
Released: 1984-1985
Genre: Short story collection

In 1984, British author Clive Barker, along with his perverted imagination and superlative prose, burst onto the horror scene with authority, blindsiding fans with the first of his six classic Books of Blood, the first of three of which are collected in this filler-less collection.

The stories included here, from the visceral slasher movie by way of H.P. Lovecraft "The Midnight Meat Train" to the Satanic sports oddity "Hell's Event" and the fornication-fueled creepshow "Sex, Death, and Starshine," exemplify the horror genre at its sickest, not to mention its most impressive.

Fun Fact: Four of the stories featured in Barker's Books of Blood series have been turned into movies: The Book of Blood, The Midnight Meat Train, Dread, and Rawhead Rex.

Author: Shirley Jackson
Released: 1959
Genre: Horror fiction

The haunted house is one of horror's oldest staples, done to death by both filmmakers and authors, often with poor results but, every now and then, executed with mastery. Without a doubt, though, every creative mind that imagines a new spooky crib plot is either inspired by Shirley Jackson's masterpiece The Haunting of Hill House or just shamelessly ripping it off.

The ultimate ghost story, Hill House is an exercise in first-class restraint and subtle terror, as well as the best evidence to support the claim that the late Ms. Jackson is an all-time master of genre fiction.

Fun Fact: Hollywood filmmakers have twice tried to bring Jackson's story to life; one version, Robert Wise's 1963 classic, is a masterwork, while Jan de Bont's special effects orgy in 1999 is simply abysmal.

Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Released: 1955
Genre: Tragicomedy

In theory, Humbert Humbert, the primary character in Vladimir Nabokov's controversial and critically lauded novel Lolita, is a reprehensible human being. A fully grown man, his lust and obsession over a 12-year-old girl, Dolores Haze, is textbook "jail bait" fodder, but Nabokov doesn't allow for such easy, on-the-surface convictions.

Fleshing the double-named Humbert out with genuine empathy and multi-layered complexities, the Russian writer does a superb job of conjuring sympathy for a bad, bad man out of his readers.

Fun Fact: In his 1998 short story collection Pure Drivel, funnyman Steve Martin included "Lolita at Fifty," a tongue-in-cheek look at what might have happened to Dolores Haze in her later years. As his story goes, she can't hold a marriage down to save her life.

Author: Agota Kristof
Released: 1986
Genre: Coming-of-age, psychological drama

Don't expect Disney to ever back an adaptation of Hungarian author Agota Kristof's viciously brutal debut novel The Notebook. Despite the fact that its two central protagonists are children, The Notebook is anything but kiddie, showing how the shell-shocked youngsters adapt to a homelife riddled with sadism and sexual misconduct, all carried out under the watch their grandmother, whom they unpassionately refer to as "witch," in Eastern Europe during WWII.

Yeah, that doesn't exactly scream, "Let's cast those two funny kids from Modern Family!"

Fun Fact: The Notebook is the first part of a trilogy, followed by The Proof (1988) and The Lie (1991).

Author: Albert Camus
Released: 1942
Genre: Drama

Be warned, Albert Camus' The Stranger, an existential brain-challenger of a novel, isn't ideal summer beach reading. More suitable for a cold winter full of nights spent indoors, The Stranger is, nevertheless, a required page-turner for those partial to allegorical character studies.

Here, the main character is Meursault, an Algerian man who murders an Arab guy, heads to prison, and awaits his execution. Camus splits the narrative into two parts, focusing on Meursault's mind-state before the killing and after the deed, the latter portion of the novel transpiring behind bars and with probing insight.

Fun Fact: In one scene from Will Ferrell's Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Sacha Baron Cohen, as French race car driver Jean Girard, is seen reading a copy of The Stranger while in mid-race.

Author: Anthony Burgess
Released: 1962
Genre: Dystopian fiction

How demanding of a read is Anthony Burgess' futuristic look at criminal reform, A Clockwork Orange? Most modern editions include a dictionary in order for readers to decipher every strange, unintelligible bit of slang that Burgess sprinkles throughout.

The extra work required from its readers aside, A Clockwork Orange is perhaps pop culture's greatest indictment of governmental treatment of prisoners. Its despicable protagonist, Alex, who rapes women and torments homeless people with his fellow "droogs," undergoes a cruel and unusual punishment that turns him into a softie repulsed by even the slightest inkling to engage in "ultra-violence."

Like Stanley Kubrick's pitch-perfect 1971 movie adaptation, Burgess' novel drops you into a familiar yet largely foreign world where morality is flimsy, payback seriously is a bitch, and Beethoven's Ninth is an unnverving trouble-starter.

Fun Fact: To create the characters' made-up language, which Burgess dubbed Nadsat, the author combined Slavic words with Russian dialect and his own, self-made gobbledygook.

Author: Alan Moore
Released: 1986
Genre: Science fiction/fantasy

The greatest superhero story ever told? In terms of Alan Moore's monumental graphic novel Watchmen, that's certainly debatable, but what's not up for questioning is the fanboy tome's status as the most inventive and dangerously subversive look at the masked avenger culture on the shelves. Deconstructing the likes of Batman and Superman, Watchmen imagines a society where caped crusaders aren't all that revered. In fact, they're downright villainized.

Fun Fact: Before director Zack Snyder's somewhat successful big-screen adaptation premiered in March 2009, several notable filmmakers tried, but were never fully able, to bring Alan Moore's daunting opus to life, including Terry Gilliam (Brazil, 12 Monkeys), Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan), and Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum).

Author: Jonathan Lethem
Released: 2003
Genre: Coming-of-age drama

Resplendent with pop culture allusions, Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude examines the friendship between two boys in the gentrifying Brooklyn of the '70s. Dylan Ebdus is white, Mingus Rude is black, and nothing is easy. Lethem draws on his own coming of age in BK to craft lyrical, powerful prose that acts as a snapshot of a place, much like Joyce’s Dubliners. Graffiti, the rift between punk and funk, racial tension in rapidly changing neighborhoods—they all find a natural place in Lethem’s masterpiece.

Fun Fact: Lethem clearly knows a thing or two about old-school hip-hop: Throughout The Fortress of Solitude, his characters reference songs from artists like N.W.A. ("Straight Outta Compton"), Run-DMC ("Walk this Way"), and Digital Underground ("Foghorn Leghorn").

Author: William Golding
Released: 1954
Genre: Drama

Take away our electronic devices, store-bought food, and every other luxury we take for granted, and you'll be left with scared survivors willing to do anything to regain even a semblance of power.

Back in 1954, novelist William Golding certainly understood that truth, going so far as to present it through a group of schoolboys left stranded on a deserted islanded. With only their wits at their disposal, the kids gradually turn on one another, resorting to savagery in a collective pursuit of a dominant order. The tragedies and sadness that follow haunt us even more every time we revisit The Lord of the Flies.

Fun Fact: In 1980, U2 closed their debut album with a track called "Shadows and Tall Trees," in reference to the title of the book's seventh chapter.

Author: Hunter S. Thompson
Released: 1971
Genre: Comedic adventure

It takes a true literary master to make the hallucinogenic experience of taking every major drug in the cops' don't-mess-with-it handbook feel tangible on page.

Thus, consider Hunter S. Thompson precisely that. Based on his own road trip experiences, ones he unabashedly recounts in all of their intoxicated and phantasmogorical glory, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is regarded as the defining novel of the "dope decade" for good reason: With its trippy prose and combustible structure, Thompson's book was penned under the influences of both narcotics and impeccable skill.

Fun Fact: Before the characters of Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo were ultimately played by Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro, respectively, in Terry Gilliam's 1998 movie, an impressive list of actors (Jack Nicholson, Marlon Brando, Dan Aykroyd, and John Belushi) were attached to the roles, while Gilliam's job was originally linked to both Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone.

Author: Joseph Heller
Released: 1961
Genre: Satirical, historical fiction

As Joseph Heller's undisputed classic of battlefield fiction, Catch-22, reiterates, war is, indeed, hell. But at least it's also a hell of a lot of fun to read about when conveyed through Heller's vibrant prose and darkly hilarious storytelling. Set amidst the gory horrors of World War II, Catch-22 touches upon the mentally taxing effects of fighting for one's country, but with a keen sense of humor and an unflinching gusto that renders the violence suitably shocking.

Fun Fact: Before he became a professional writer, Heller served as a bombardier during World War II, which inspired Catch-22.

Author: Mary Shelley
Released: 1818
Genre: Horror fiction

When you think of Frankenstein, chances are the image of Boris Karloff lumbering around in the classic 1931 movie come to mind. As excellent as that film is, though, Mary Shelley's original novel will forever remain the best option for basking in all of Dr. Victor Frankenstein's morbid experimentation.

That lab work, of course, consists of creating a man from pieces of various corpses, an unforgettable example of an overzealous guy's tragic God complex, told by the extremely gifted Shelley with deeper meaning and scarier implications than any motion picture ever could.

Fun Fact: Shelley first began writing Frankenstein thanks to a challenge from friend Lord Byron while she was visiting his Villa Diodati, by Lake Geneva, in 1816. In addition to Shelley's productivity, that evening also led to John Polidori's The Vampyre, and in 1986 director Ken Russell fictionalized that fateful night at Lord Byron's villa in the movie Gothic, which starred the sexy Natasha Richardson as Shelley.

Author: Mark. Z Danielewski
Released: 2000
Genre: Horror fiction; bizarre romance

To call Mark Z. Danielewski's bewildering novel House of Leaves "one of a kind" would be accurate, but also slightly misleading. Containing two individual storylines that are connected in the loosest sense possible, this sprawling, difficult, and utterly genius horror/fantasy/who-the-fuck-knows book is actually one of two kinds, both of which are insane.

On one hand, you've got award-winning photojournalist Will Navidson, who, along with his family, moves into a bizarre house that's somehow bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, and it's also a supernatural hotbed; on the flipside, you've got Johnny Truant, a debaucherous tattoo shop worker who's reading about Navidson's experiences through a mysterious stack of papers compiled by a blind guy. And Johnny's also losing his mind.

Got all of that? Trust us, it doesn't get any less complicated once you've read House of Leaves, oh, let's say, three times, which we have. Yet, Danielewski's novel, with its multiple pages adorned with sideways text and other pages with hardly two words, won't ever lose its batshit singularity.

Fun Fact: Danielewski has made it clear that he'd prefer readers interpret House of Leaves as more of a romantic story than one of sheer horror, going so far as to call its genre distinction as a "marketing tool."

Author: George Orwell
Released: 1949
Genre: Science fiction

Individuality is all but dead in George Orwell's dystopian classic 1984, one of the scariest books of all time simply because its implications are so intensely reality-based. Through the eyes of a rebellious Ministry of Truth employee named Winston Smith, Orwell's chilling evisceration of tyrannical, governmental rule depicts a world in which free thought is forbidden and "Big Brother" is always watching. Try reading it without succumbing to acute paranoia.

Fun Fact: You know that undying, ever-annoying Big Brother reality show that continues to bring solid ratings to CBS? It's directly influenced by Orwell's novel, just not nearly as good.

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Released: 1925
Genre: Drama

Before Leonardo DiCaprio popularizes F. Scott Fitzgerald's seminal novel The Great Gatsby in this December's sure-to-be-huge film adaptation, do yourselves a big-time favor and revisit (or, heaven forbid, finally read for the first time) the iconic Jazz Age author's original text. As it follows the endlessly compelling lothario Jay Gatsby, the novel is both an intricate character examination and a celebration of the lively, elegant, and rip-roaring 1920s.

Fun Fact: In the years since The Great Gatsby's release, six authors have either written quasi-spinoff novels showing characters in their later years or remixed Fitzgerald's story into a different time and setting. For example, Ernesto Quiñonez's Bodega Dreams moved the drama to Spanish Harlem.

Author: George R. Stewart
Released: 1949
Genre: Science fiction

Do you love end-of-the-world movies but wish they had as much as brain-power as they do CGI-riddled explosions? Look no further than George R. Stewart's novel Earth Abides, a look at mankind's doom as caused by a devastatingly unstoppable disease and the one man who's immune to its effects.

Fun Fact: Berkeley graduate student Ish, Earth Abides' main character, is rather critical of two classic works of literature, Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson.

Author: Stephen King
Released: 1977
Genre: Horror fiction

If you're ever lucky enough to meet Stephen King, don't tell him that you love Stanley Kubrick's film translation of his novel The Shining—King hates it.

And why? Because Kubrick's interpretation of the Torrance family's nightmarish stay inside the very haunted Overlook Hotel is drenched in cold cynicism and one-note darkness. King's novel, however, while still scary as all hell, is a much more sentimental, and, in turn, emotionally potent yarn, one that's more preoccupied with developing sympathetic characters than it is pounding readers with Kubrick's brand of ghoulishness.

Fun Fact: The Shining derives from an overnight experience King and his wife, Tabitha, had inside the Stanley Hotel, an establishment near the Rocky Mountains, in Colorado, that's said to be haunted.

Author: Joseph Conrad
Released: 1902
Genre: Action-adventure; psychological thriller

Sometimes, the most effectively disturbing stories don't feature any ghouls, goblins, or boogeymen. After all, the scariest monster of all is man, and that's a truth driven home with psychological devastation in Joseph Conrad's seminal adventure novel, Heart of Darkness.

In it, the fearless narrator, Marlow, travels deep into the Congo River to apprehend Mr. Kurtz, a megalomaniacal man who's turned a village of tribesmen and women into his subservient followers. Enter its opening pages looking for a robust thriller, and close the book after its final words scarred by its bleak outlook on humanity.

Fun Fact: Though Marlon Brando's interpretation of Kurtz, in director Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), is the most widely regarded one, both Boris Karloff and John Malkovich have played the character, as well, in a 1958 episode of the CBS anthology series Playhouse 90 and a 1993 made-for-TNT cable movie, respectively.

Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Released: 1973
Genre: Drama

By now, you should have read Slaughterhouse Five, the book that will live long after Vonnegut’s other work falls away, but Breakfast of Champions is more scathing, more madcap, more hilarious. Following the mistakes of Dwayne Hoover, a car salesman learning he has little to lose, and Kilgore Trout, a forgotten sci-fi writer who learned that lesson long before, Breakfast of Champions is a peek inside Vonnegut’s roiling skull. Indeed, he makes that perfectly clear in the early pages of the novel.

Vonnegut stuffs the pages with crude illustrations of assholes, vulvae, guns, and other important things. Because Trout appears elsewhere in Vonnegut’s universe, Breakfast of Champions will only reel you deeper into his body of work. No problem there.

Fun Fact: The novel's title is a direct allusion to the famous Wheaties cereal slogan, but, in the book itself, the "breakfast of champions" statement is used mockingly by a waitress as she serves a martini.

Author: Tim O'Brien
Released: 1990
Genre: Short story collection

The Things They Carried is the closest anyone who wasn't in Vietnam during the controversial war will ever get to stepping on the soil and dodging bullets. Written by Vietnam vet Tim O'Brien, and loosely based on his own experiences, The Things They Carried is an anthology-like assortment of haunting, painful, and always heartfelt wartime recollections, narrated by the ever-fascinating "Tim." You can practically hear the explosions ring and casualties scream as each page turns.

Fun Fact: A unit in O'Brien's division was responsible for the notorious My Lai Massacre on March 16, 1968, when hundreds of unarmed South Vietnamese civilians (including women, children, and the elderly) were murdered.

Author: Ken Kesey
Released: 1962
Genre: Drama

Deservedly, the brilliant 1975 film adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest receives more acclaim than Ken Kesey's original novel, but it's tough to compete with a flawless Jack Nicholson performance and overall cinematic excellence.

But that shouldn't take away from the masterful work done by Kesey here, who allegorically delivers a classic tale of good versus evil through two larger-than-life characters, the cruel Nurse Ratched and fun-seeking inmate randall Patrick McMurphy butting heads inside of a colorful mental ward. As funny as it is heartbreaking and jolting, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a towering examination of heroism in the least likely of settings.

Fun Fact: At one time in his life, Kesey worked the "graveyard shift" at a mental institution in Menlo Park, CA. During his time on the clock there, he took part in, and tried the drugs LSD and peyote for, the research program Project MKUltra.

Author: Michael Chabon
Released: 1995
Genre: Drama

Though The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay received the most critical accolades, the smaller scope of Wonder Boys allowed Chabon’s gifts as a comic writer to shine. He zeroed in on Grady Tripp (inspired by Chuck Kinder, a writing professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where Chabon did his undergrad work), the hapless writer trapped inside a novel so sprawling that it leaves no character’s dental records undescribed. On top of that, Tripp might be in for a trek through the “elephant-white hills of abortionland,” as he has knocked up the woman he’s creeping with.

There’s also a socially awkward student of Tripp’s, mucking up his day-to-day routine of pot smoking and writing. Then there’s the dead dog, and the beautiful student living in his house. And a jacket of Marilyn Monroe’s that’s gone missing. One of the most humorous and kind portraits of Pittsburgh set to paper, Wonder Boys is that rare book that elicits genuine laughs from the reader. There’s nothing harder than wringing humor from the written word.

Fun Fact: Chabon's novel was adapted by director Curtis Hanson in 2000 into a feature film starring Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, and Robert Downey, Jr., and, surprise, it's actually one of Hollywood's most underrated book-to-film translations.

Author: Don DeLillo
Released: 1985
Genre: Drama

A lesson in postmodern America in one book, White Noise should be the text you reach for when flipping through all the cable stations becomes too much to bear. Not that DeLillo’s words will make the picture rosier—on the contrary, things are just as dire as they appear. But arming yourself with some smart satire is the best defense against an increasingly fractured world.

White Noise begins on the first day of school at a small liberal arts college, where Jack Gladney teaches his famous Hitler Studies class. Death, the world’s most photographed barn, and a powerful drug called Dylar dance onto the scene for a kaleidoscope of scenes that feel familiar and off-kilter all at once.

Disquieting is one word for it. But you’ll be laughing, too, at DeLillo’s idiosyncratic descriptions and dialogue. He’s fathered countless styles, all on the strength of this classic.

Fun Fact: Initially, DeLillo wanted to name the book Panasonic, but the Panasonic Corporation wouldn't allow it.

Author: Malcolm Lowry
Released: 1947
Genre: Drama

One of the best novels ever written about alcoholism's destructive nature, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, inspired by his own struggles with the bottle, is an equal parts unsettling and riveting descent into Lucifer's playpen.

In this case, Hell takes the shape of Quauhnahuac, Mexico, where British consul Geoffrey Fermin spends his last day alive on what also happens to be the country's annual Day of the Dead. That said, Under the Volcano isn't a horror novel, at least not in the traditional sense. It's hard to label a man's losing battle against booze as anything but horrific, though.

Fun Fact: Lowry's original manuscript was nearly lost in a fire, in 1944, that engulfed his shack in British Columbia; thankfully, his wife grabbed the book-in-progress before it could go up in flames along with several other unfinished manuscripts.

Author: Anna Gavalda
Released: 2003
Genre: Short story collection

By nature, short story collection are grab bags filled with varying moods, outlooks, and hooks, whether it's a single-author book or a compendium of numerous writers' tales. I Wish Someone Were Waiting for Me Somewhere, written by Paris, France, native Anna Gravalda, is much more of a uniform effort, with its many stories sharing a uniquely connected bond, that of naturalistic observations of everyday life dashed with just a smidge of danger. And with Gravalda's delicate knack for capturing humanity at its most fragile moments, it's a real eye-opener.

Fun Fact: Gravalda sold her first collection of short stories, Je voudrais que quelqu'un m'attende quelque part, while she was paying the bills as a high school teacher in France.

Author: Dante Alighieri
Released: The earliest manuscripts date back to the 1330s.
Genre: Poetry

It's the ultimate "epic," not to mention one of the most influential works of fiction ever written. In the form of a gargantuan poem, Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, broken up into three sections (Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso), covers the entire spectrum of life: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, all seen through the eyes of protagonist Dante.

With such a massive scope, it's all the more remarkable how Alighieri keeps The Divine Comedy intimately grounded as a character study, which is why we'd curse the bastards who'd ever try to translate it to the big screen. Some works of literature are just too good for multiplexes.

Fun Fact: The entire poem was written over the course of eight years, leading up to 1321, when Alighieri died at the age of 56.