Most Addictive Reads of All Time

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Here it is —the ultimate reading list for book mavens. These are the pages we could not stop turning – the books we've never stopped talking about and recommending – the novels that represent the very essence of why we love to read. The majority of them have been made into movies or TV series, and there's a good reason for that, but what we're telling you is, forget the screen version. Read the book. Open the book, at least -- then see what happens.

Here it is: the ultimate reading list for book mavens. These are the pages we could not stop turning, the books we've never stopped talking about and recommending, the novels that represent the very essence of why we love to read. The majority of them have been made into movies or TV series, and there's a good reason for that, but what we're telling you is forget the screen version. Read the book. Open the book, at least—then see what happens.

The Secret History, by Donna Tartt

You knew we'd start here, with the gang of classics students at a Vermont college (Bennington?), right? Combining psychological thriller, campus satire, and Greek tragedy, their story begins with a murder whose details take forever to emerge—the kind of forever that dazzles with insight and cleverness on every page.

Such a Fun Age, by Kiley Reid

So sharp it almost hurts, this comedy of manners is the story of a Black nanny in Philadelphia and her privileged employers, who obviously, definitely, could not possibly be racist. So smart about social media and regular media and female friendship, this book disappears faster than a bag of potato chips.

The World According to Garp, and A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving

The world has two kinds of people—those who prefer Garp and those who prefer Meany. Irving's beloved tragicomedies, both essentially coming-of-age stories set in New England, imbue the issues of sexual violence and the Vietnam War with humanity, humor...and wild, quirky plotting.

Crazy Rich Asians, Trilogy box set,

by Kevin Kwan

How can these books, basically fairy tales drenched in luxury porn and descriptions of Asian food, be so...damn...good? These are the novels you need on a 20-hour-airplane flight or in a hospital waiting room, with a spirit of fun and a brand of escapism so potent, it's surprising it's legal.

by Kevin Kwan

amazon.com

$26.08

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Things don't turn out as swimmingly for the crazy rich white people in Fitzgerald's slim volume, and perhaps that's why we love it so. Behind the icon this novel has become lies a gorgeously written book, full of fine sentences, great characters, and a fictional estate in a made-up town that glows with the broken heart of the American dream.

Normal People, by Sally Rooney

The first great millennial novelist reinvents Romeo and Juliet for her generation—a deeply hot, hopelessly neurotic, insanely verbal romance between the brilliant Marianne and her family's housecleaner's son, the equally brilliant Connell. If this doesn't take you back to your own first love, nothing will.

Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter

It's not just the setting (the Italian coast, Hollywood) or the characters and the cameos (a lovelorn innkeeper, a dying starlet, Richard Burton) or the gorgeous, funny sentences. Okay, it's all of these, plus a dazzling roller coaster of a storyline that offers a quick trip to total escape.

The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison

We hear you out there muttering, “Not Beloved? Not Sula? Not Song of Solomon?” Yes, all of them. Morrison's oeuvre is a treasure chest of compulsively readable—and relentlessly brilliant—storytelling that began here, with the story of an 11-year-old Black girl in a world that worships blond, blue-eyed children. It reaches straight through the heart of this country's racial hatred and racist beauty myths.

The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green

The YA audience this book was meant for could never have kept Green's adorable, heartbreaking characters, Hazel and Augustus, members of the cancer kids support group, to themselves. Forget the kids; even adults who think they don't like to read will be won over by this tear-soaked dreamcatcher of first love.

The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende

To see just how magical realism can get, we return to the debut novel of this great Chilean author. At the heart of the saga of the Trueba family is a little girl who can see the future and move objects with her mind; she grows up to become the matriarch of a line marked by its passions, its hatreds, and its quest for justice. Delicioso.

Carrie, by Stephen King

While we're on the subject of debut novels and little girls who can move objects with their minds, let us remember that the master's first remains one of his best. When a bunch of teenage dolts are mean to the wrong person, bad things can happen, and have they ever been more horrific and fantastic than that bucket of pig's blood?

The Hunger Games series, by Suzanne Collins

Who among us did not nab these books from our child's nightstand and go into hiding for days? No matter how much you think you know about Katniss Everdeen—by now, a cultural landmark as much as a character—you'll never experience the full thrilling horror of the games themselves until you read the books.

The Color Purple, by Alice Walker

Breaking the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, Celie's story brought Black women’s literature to the attention of the world and inspired generations of writers and artists. It's also one of the most banned books of all time: Its honesty, its brutality, and its full-hearted happy ending are that terrifying to the ignorant and small-minded.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, By David Wroblewski

At the intersection of "dog person" and "book person," you'll find the myriad fans of this novel, the tragic adventures of a boy and his dog in the American heartland: Edgar, who does not speak, and Almondine, who is smarter, and certainly better behaved, than most people. Psst: A prequel is coming in the summer of 2024.

Severance, by Ling Ma

If you ever owned a copy of this crazily prescient millennial novel, you surely loaned it out during the pandemic and never got it back. When an airborne virus strikes, Candace Chen is forced to leave her Manhattan office building and bear witness to the devastation. A searing sendup of the way we live now, or did a little while ago, anyway.

An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones

The picture-book life of a well-heeled Black couple in Atlanta is shattered when he is arrested on a trumped-up rape charge. But wait, did he definitely not do it? This book fully inhabits the gray areas in a Black and white world, and that's just one of the reasons people have never stopped talking about it.

State of Wonder and Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett

Which is the bigger wow, the female Heart of Darkness, with a brilliant scientist researching a game-changing fertillity drug in the snake-infested Amazon, or the ripped-from-the-headlines hostage crisis turned love story set in an opera house? We can't pick, and you don't have to.

Age of Vice, by Deepti Kapoor

The Godfather goes to Delhi in this insanely intense melodrama about a rich playboy, his servant, and a female journalist who falls in love with him. The book opens with a Mercedes plowing over innocent pedestrians in the center of town, and the hundreds of pages it takes to find out what the hell happened there disappear in the blink of an eye.

A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan

Widely known as the best thing that ever happened via PowerPoint, Egan's linked stories (one of which is a slideshow made by a teenage character) whisk us to the world of record exec Benny Salazar and his kleptomaniac assistant Sasha, hopscotching decades and continents. There's nothing else quite like it.

Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Márquez

This is it, the greatest love story of all time. Well, at least the greatest one that involves the protagonist having 622 affairs while he waits a half-century to be united with his married soulmate. Read this book every 10 years and find a different novel every time: It magically addresses you just where you are.

Nobody's Fool, by Richard Russo

We said forget the movie, but in this one case, it's as if the actors inhabit the pages of the book. Sully is Paul Newman, and his nemesis police chief Raymer is Philip Seymour Hoffman, and their story, set in a podunk town in New York State, is the best, funniest, and most cockamamie literary expression ever of Murphy's law.

Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel

With its ultra-lucid, white-knuckle opening scene—a famous Hollywood actor struck dead onstage in the middle of King Lear—this brilliant speculative novel grabs you and never lets you go, as it spins its shambolic story of traveling band of actors roaming the post-apocalyptic landscape in a school bus.

Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese

Charles Dickens meets the surgery channel in this epic saga of two doctors, twin brothers from Addis Ababa whose destiny unfolds around the globe and the narrow bounds of reason. Nowhere else will you find a book so equally devoted to both science and magic (except perhaps Verghese's latest, The Covenant of Water).

Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden

Buckle your seat belts; you're going to a tiny Japanese town circa 1929, where you will be sold into slavery and trained to be a geisha. The 10 years it took Golden to spin this epic are reflected in a story so perfectly imagined, you will forget who you are and all that troubles you for every delicious hour it takes to suck it down.

White Teeth, by Zadie Smith

As 19th-century London had Dickens, so the modern multicultural capital has Smith, whose Dickensian qualities shine in her exuberant debut, the story of a white man married to a Jamaican and his best friend, a Bengali Muslim, both fathers of children growing up in a world they barely understand.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon

Almost a decade before Lessons in Chemistry took the world by storm, this runaway bestseller took readers inside the head of another complex—and magnetic—neurodivergent character.
The stunning 2003 British mystery features a 15-year-old math whiz investigating the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog. Unputdownable, unforgettable, and still, somehow, one of a kind.

A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara

The word little in this title may raise an eyebrow when you first encounter this doorstop; then you're on page 700 before you know it. On one hand, it's a culturally aware drama about a long friendship among four interesting men; buried inside is an abuse plot that ticks like a bomb beneath all the beautiful bougie scenes of their unfolding lives.

Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld

Speaking of books that rule a whole subgenre, there's a reason every new private-school campus novel is called "the next Prep."You'll be obsessed with Lee—intense, insecure, intelligent Lee—and as riveted by her problems as she is, despising the snobs and brats around her as you haven't since you were 14 yourself.

David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens

As Barbara Kingsolver's excellent homage Demon Copperhead recently reminded us, nobody packs a book with plot and character and message like Charles Dickens. Even if you're Team Jarndyce or Team Havisham, you surely have a place in your heart for dear benighted Davy, whose youthful trials are based on Dickens's own.

The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini

The fans of this propulsive, heart-rending coming-of-age story set in Afghanistan include a fair number of people who were forced to read it in high school—and if that doesn't say readable, nothing does. (Despite what the English teacher said, the immediacy and intimacy of its storytelling are so convincing that many of them still think it's a memoir.)

The Plot, by Jean Hanff Korelitz

A has-been writing professor who should know better steals his student's idea, publishes a bestseller, and almost gets away with it—and in that "almost," we hear the whisk of pages flying. Korelitz's publishing satire is a thriller in sheep's clothing—you'll feel very smart if you guess the reveal before she tells you.

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy

Don't do it, Anna! As doomed characters go, none is more charming than dear, desperate Anna, and if only the conventions and hypocrisies that crush her spirit were unique to 19th-century imperial Russia. The greatness of the novel lies both in its timelessness and its preservation of a lost world.

The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen

This Christmas story gone off the rails, with its dysfunctional family at sea (literally—remember the cruise?) is a feel-good book for those who love to hate. Matriarch Enid Lambert is a classic queen of denial, and her troubled family gives her plenty to work with. Nothing makes us happier than reading about families even more effed-up than our own.

Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie

Who's afraid of Salman Rushdie? A lot of people, from those who issued a fatwa ordering his death to those who have never dared to crack one of his books. Midnight's Children is the ultimate gateway drug. The story of Saleem Sinai, born with magical powers on the day India became its own country, is as lively and funny a fairy tale as you'll ever read.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin

If you were one of the people who had to be begged to read this book because you heard it was about video games, you already know: This is a heartthrob of a novel about a triangle relationship between three of the most delightful weirdos to spring from the pages of the early 21st century. More addictive than Minecraft will ever be!

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