100 Books Every Man Should Read

Most "books every man should read" lists are the same list. The same twenty classics, in a slightly different order, chosen because nobody gets criticized for recommending them.

John LeFevre published his own version in August 2019, and it's a different animal. He opened it with a line that's worth more than most of the lists it competes with:

"Reading allows you to borrow someone else's brain. It makes you smarter, richer intellectually, more interesting, and a better person."

And he was upfront about what kind of list it was:

"So here's an eclectically curated list, albeit slanted by my personal preferences, of books that every man should read — replacing a handful of the obvious classics with a few obscure choices, and a few books left off lists in the name of political correctness."

Below are all 100 books, in John's original order. We've broken the list into four parts and added a few notes, but the picks and the order are his. Each title links to an edition on Amazon.

1–25

1. The Sun Also Rises — Ernest Hemingway
2. Lonesome Dove — Larry McMurtry
3. Dubliners — James Joyce
4. Bonfire of the Vanities — Tom Wolfe
5. The Collected Poetry of William Butler Yeats — William Butler Yeats
6. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — Ken Kesey
7. The Road — Cormac McCarthy
8. Manual for Living — Epictetus
9. A River Runs Through It — Norman MacLean
10. Meditations — Marcus Aurelius
11. The Private Life of Chairman Mao — Li Zhi-Sui
12. The Picture Of Dorian Grey — Oscar Wilde
13. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater — Kurt Vonnegut
14. A Confederacy of Dunces — John Kennedy Toole
15. Hard Times — Charles Dickens
16. Infinite Jest — David Foster Wallace
17. The Book of Deeds of Arms and Chivalry — Christine de Pizan
18. The Big Rich — Bryan Burrough
19. The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky
20. Fahrenheit 451 — Ray Bradbury
21. The Odyssey — Homer
22. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Series — Douglas Adams
23. Catch-22 — Joseph Heller
24. Candide — Voltaire
25. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — Hunter S. Thompson

The first 25 set the tone. Hemingway sits next to Larry McMurtry. James Joyce sits next to Tom Wolfe. Two Stoics, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, land in the middle of a run of novels, and a memoir by Mao's personal physician shows up between them and Oscar Wilde.

Two picks stand out as the "obscure choices" John promised. The Book of Deeds of Arms and Chivalry was written by Christine de Pizan in the early 1400s, and it isn't on many modern reading lists. The Big Rich, Bryan Burrough's history of the great Texas oil fortunes, is the kind of book you only find on a list made by someone who actually reads for pleasure.

26–50

1. A Man Called Ove — Fredrik Backman
2. The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. Revolutionary Road — Richard Yates
4. The Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger
5. The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling — Rudyard Kipling
6. The Things They Carried — Tim O’Brien
7. Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad
8. Things Fall Apart — Chinua Achebe
9. The Corrections — Jonathan Franzen
10. Endurance — Alfred Lansing
11. East of Eden — John Steinbeck
12. Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoyevsky
13. The Stranger — Albert Camus
14. Lord of the Flies — William Golding
15. For Whom the Bell Tolls — Ernest Hemingway
16. How to Win Friends and Influence People — Dale Carnegie
17. When Breath Becomes Air — Paul Kalanithi
18. Atlas Shrugged — Ayn Rand
19. 1984 — George Orwell
20. The Count of Monte Cristo — Alexander Dumas
21. Reminiscences of a Stock Operator — Edwin Lefevre
22. Oil! — Upton Sinclair
23. The Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck
24. The Holy Bible
25. Don Quixote — Miguel de Cervantes

This stretch is where the list earns its "every man" label. War (The Things They Carried, For Whom the Bell Tolls), survival (Endurance), ambition and money (The Great Gatsby, Atlas Shrugged, Oil!), and the quiet desperation of the suburbs (Revolutionary Road).

It also includes a book that shares a name with the author of the list: Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, by Edwin Lefevre. It's the classic market book, a thinly fictionalized account of the life of the speculator Jesse Livermore, and it remains one of the most recommended books among traders.

51–75

1. Duluth — Gore Vidal
2. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin — Benjamin Franklin
3. Killing Pablo — Mark Bowden
4. Over The Edge Of The World — Laurence Bergreen
5. American Psycho — Bret Easton Ellis
6. Against the Gods — Peter Bernstein
7. The Fountainhead — Ayn Rand
8. Into Thin Air — Jon Krakauer
9. The Maltese Falcon — Dashiell Hammett
10. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — Robert Pirsig
11. Genealogy of Morals — Fried Nietzsche
12. Fight Club — Chuck Palahniuk
13. A People’s History of the United States — Howard Zinn
14. Essential Manners for Men — Peter Post
15. Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman
16. Thus Spoke Zarathustra — Friedrich Nietzsche
17. Guns, Germs, and Steel — Jared M. Diamond
18. The Republic — Plato
19. A Short History of Nearly Everything — Bill Bryson
20. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
21. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry — Neil deGrasse Tyson
22. The Social Contract — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
23. All Quiet on the Western Front — Erich Maria Remarque
24. The Wealth of Nations — Adam Smith
25. The Theodore Roosevelt Trilogy — Edmund Morris

If you want the Wall Street shelf, start here and keep going into the next section. Against the Gods, Peter Bernstein's history of risk. Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman's book on how people actually make decisions. The Wealth of Nations. Later on, Den of Thieves and Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

This section is also where the "left off lists in the name of political correctness" line shows. American Psycho and Fight Club sit a few spots away from Essential Manners for Men. Ayn Rand appears twice on this list. So, later on, does Karl Marx. The list doesn't ask you to agree with every book on it. It asks you to read them.

76–100

1. On the Road — Jack Kerouac
2. The Histories — Herodotus
3. Ulysses — James Joyce
4. The Prince — Niccolo Machiavelli
5. Nicomachean Ethics — Aristotle
6. The Naked and the Dead — Norman Mailer
7. The Greatest Generation — Tom Brokaw
8. A Tale of Two Cities — Charles Dickens
9. The Sound and the Fury — William Faulkner
10. Man’s Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl
11. Fear and Trembling — Soren Kierkegaard
12. The Elements of Style — William Strunk, Jr
13. Out of Africa — Isak Dinesen
14. In Cold Blood — Truman Capote
15. If This Is a Man — Primo Levi
16. Alexander Hamilton — Ron Chernow
17. Cognitive Psychology — E. Bruce Goldstein
18. Common Sense and the Rights of Man — Thomas Paine
19. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds — Charles MacKay
20. Den of Thieves — James B. Stewart
21. The Divine Comedy — Dante Alighieri
22. Into Africa — Martin Dugard
23. One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel Garcia Marquez
24. Communist Manifesto — Karl Marx
25. Sapiens — Yuval Noah Harari

The final 25 lean toward history and big ideas: Herodotus, Machiavelli, Aristotle, Paine, Dante, Marx. There's a cognitive psychology textbook in here, which may be the least expected pick on the whole list, and it closes with Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari's sweep through human history.

Den of Thieves deserves a special mention for anyone in finance. James B. Stewart's account of the insider-trading scandals of the 1980s is, in our view, one of the best books written about Wall Street.

How to read it

John has written about how to actually get through a list like this. In Things I've Learned, lesson 12 is "Read more," and the advice that comes with it is the best possible companion to these 100 books:

"Reading allows you to borrow someone else’s brain, and have a conversation with the most consequential minds in history. It’s a learned skill that requires discipline: Make time for reading, preferably right before bed. Keep your phone in another room. Tap out on books you aren’t enjoying and move on. Supplement by carrying a book with you and stealing 5-10 minute intervals when you can, and add audiobooks while exercising to the mix for efficiency. Keep physical copies (trophies) and amass a meaningful library over time."

"Tap out on books you aren't enjoying" is the permission most people need. A list of 100 is not a contract. Start with whatever grabs you, quit what doesn't, and keep the ones you finish on a shelf where you'll see them. That shelf, over time, says more about a man than almost anything else he owns.

Source: John LeFevre, "100 Books Every Man Should Read," Medium, August 27, 2019. Titles and authors are reproduced as John listed them; one author name truncated in the archived copy (Remarque) has been restored. The Graze earns a commission on qualifying Amazon purchases.