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Here at FFL, we love to promote literacy and a love of reading. Many of our readers are college aged and young professional women.  We know that reading is hard to prioritize when you’re writing papers, doing problem sets, or working a 9-5. No matter how much time you have to commit to reading, and whether you read one book a year or a hundred, reading is important.

Today, I want to recommend thirty classic novels to you that everyone should read before their 30. Classic novels often get shoved to the back of the bookshelf.  They often get thought of as stuffy and old-school.  I promise you, there is a reason they are classics.  Make time every year to read some classic novels. Their stories pervade our society.  You’ll not only be a better reader and connoisseur of literature, but you’ll be able to connect better with the world around you, a world that is so often full of adults who were raised on these classics.

    1. The Beautiful and Damned by F Scott Fitzgerald

    2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare

    3. 1984 by George Orwell

    4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

    5. Emma by Jane Austen

    6. Beloved by Toni Morrison

    7. Moby Dick by Herman Melville

    8. House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

    9. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

    10. Paradise Lost by John Milton

    11. God and Man at Yale by William F Buckley Jr

    12. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

    13. Tess of the D’urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

    14. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

    15. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

    16. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

    17. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

    18. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

    19. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

       

  1. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

  2. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

  3. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

  4. Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

  5. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

  6. A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch

  7. Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare

  8. The Oedipus Cycle by Sophocles

  9. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

  10. Atonement by Ian McEwan

  11. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

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Aryssa D
FFL Cabinet Member

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