Best Books of All Time

Some books have a universal and timeless appeal. What makes them the best books of all time is the fact that they contain the 'core' of great thought inside, clothed in a fine raiment of appealing prose that mesmerizes you. Of course, what may be the best book ever read for a person, could be the worst for another. It is largely a matter of taste. Which book will strike a chord with which reader is unpredictable. In this article, I present a list of best books to read in the English language. These are not the best books of the decade but best books of all time! Also I only present a few works of fiction here. They are all novels that have delighted readers all over the world.

You will find a range of human emotions portrayed in these books. Writers have this great intuitive capacity of looking at the big picture, while not missing the smaller details. What I experience reading some of these books is a kind of resonance, when I read a thought that exactly conveys how I feel inside. The best books of all time are the ones that help us make sense out of all the chaos around us and show a way out of it. When you have good books to read, time flies!

Best Books of All Time (Fiction)
Here I finally present the list of some of the best books ever written. However, be aware that this is only the tip of the iceberg that English literature is. There are many books that are gems but still lie in obscurity and you might discover them in some old bookshop somewhere in some corner of the world. They may never make it to the list of the world's bestselling books of all times, but they have a charm of their own that appeals to you. Reading books and especially a novel is 'experiencing' it. Hope you have a great experience reading some of these books, that are voted as the best of all time. I haven't ranked them but only listed them as I personally think that they should not be compared with each other. Each of them has something different to offer.

• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• 1984 by George Orwell
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
• The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
• Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
• Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
• Atonement by Ian McEwan
• For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
• Deliverance by James Dickey
• A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man by James Joyce
• The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner
• Under The Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• The Way Of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
• Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
• Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
• A Passage to India by E.M.Forster
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
• Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
• The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
• Fear by L. Ron Hubbard
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
• The Native Son by Richard Wright
• Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler
• The Wings Of The Dove by Henry James
• Appointment In Samarra by John O'Hara
• The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
• The Stranger by Albert Camus
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Trial by Franz Kafka
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
• Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville

What marks some books to be the best books of all time is the fact that you discover something new in them during every read. Some of these books like 'To Kill A Mocking Bird' are the best books for young adults. The same book that you read during your teen years may convey something different when you read it as an older person. The book grows on you and you grow with the book! I have some personal favorites that I refer to when I need direction. Hope you do find time to read some of these best books of all time. Even if you manage to read fifty of these in your lifetime, you will be left enriched with wisdom.