50 books that everyone should read

I read somewhere that reading great books is like borrowing the mind of a genius, and being able to keep it. I love that idea, and I'm an adherent to it. Through the Covid lockdowns I redoubled my reading and I was reminded of this idea. Amongst others I reread Michel Houellebecq's brutal and acerbic Atomized, Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies; and 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. All three are so wildly different, but all three shared something in common: I'd peered into the minds of literary prodigies. And all of them evoked the same sense of depth that I'd forgotten about in long books. We're become so inured to consuming information in bit-sized snippets that even reading a four page article in The Economist feels like a journey. But it's not. Articles are thin layers of frosting on the reality of the world; social media barely sprinkles.

To journey into a subject, deeply, I'd contend that the book you're reading must be an inch thick, probably two. But everyone's time poor these days it seems. Who has the hours to put aside to 'waste time productively', as my uncle so wrying calls reading. (He's a voracious reader.) And it's true that time seems against us, concertinaed and squeezed between a hundred different obligations. And so lovers of learning have adopted new strategies with audio books and podcasts. "Read-and-drive", "read-and-ride", "read-and-exercise". A great strategy to get more out of time, but an imperfect one to really savour the work of a great writer. There's something about sitting down and turning a page, developing a character's voice from your own imagination, not outsourced to a narrator with a mellifluous or stentorian voice. In creating those tones with your own mind you go a little of the way to convening with the writer yourself, a choreography between you and a great.

A million or more books get published a year, just in English, so even if you could read one a week, your consumption couldn't even get close to a hundredth of a percent of books published. It caused me another thought. What are fifty books that everyone should read in their lives? At least everyone who has a love of reading.