There are different types of reading, as Mortimer J. Adler pointed out. We read to get information. We read to learn. We read to experience something deeply satisfying that we could not ordinarily touch.
All of the books listed below have been used to challenge me and change me. This list is in no way exhaustive or finished. I plan to add to it as I encounter other deeply satisfying authors and their books.
May the books unfamiliar to you offer points to consider, investigate, and dialogue about.
Send any reading suggestions here.
Sacred
The Old Testament
The New Testament
Fiction
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Silence by Shūsaku Endō
The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Works of William Shakespeare
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Dubliners by James Joyce
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Biography & Memoirs
My Lady Suffolk by Evelyn Read
The Five Silent Years of Corrie Ten Boom
Lady Jane Grey by Hester Chapman
The Secret Confessions of an Unlikely Convert by Rosaria Butterfield
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Philosophy
Propaganda by Jacques Ellul
Pensées by Blaise Pascal
What is Art? by Leo Tolstoy
Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard
Works of Love by Søren Kierkegaard
A Little Manual for Knowing by Esther Lightcap Meek
Psychology / Counseling
The Broken Image by Leanne Payne
The Restoration of the Christian Soul by Leanne Payne
Connecting by Larry Crabb
Boundaries by Cloud and Townsend
The Wounded Heart by Dan Allender
Faith / Christianity
The Presence of the Kingdom by Jacques Ellul
Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright
Works of Francis Schaeffer
The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis
Creed or Chaos by Dorothy Sayers
Eternity in Their Hearts by Don Richardson
On Prayer by E.M. Bounds
How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth by Gordon Fee
Pagan Christianity? by Frank Viola and George Barna