10 Books Everyone Should Read Once in Their Lifetime

There are thousands of books worth reading, but every once in a while, you come across a novel that feels different. It changes the way you see the world, introduces you to characters you never forget, or leaves you thinking about it long after you’ve turned the final page.

Those are the books that readers tend to recommend over and over again.

Ask a group of readers which books everyone should read at least once and you will get dozens, probably hundreds, of different answers. Goodreads even has a reader-voted list dedicated entirely to the subject, with more than 124,000 voters contributing to it. Reader discussions across Reddit produce similarly passionate recommendations.

And while no book is truly for everyone, there are certain novels that offer an experience worth having at least once.

Some are heartbreaking. Others are adventurous, thought-provoking, hopeful, or uncomfortable. The best of them tend to be several of those things at once.

If you’re looking to add a few unforgettable books to your reading list, these ten deserve a spot.

10 Books Everyone Should Read at Least Once

1. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
2. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas 
3. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
4. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak 
5. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
6. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
7. The Color Purple by Alice Walker  
8. Watership Down by Richard Adams
9. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
10. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

1. East of Eden by John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck wrote several novels that have become staples of American literature, but East of Eden may be his most ambitious.

Set largely in California’s Salinas Valley, the sprawling family saga follows the intertwined lives of the Trask and Hamilton families across generations. At its heart is a story about family, jealousy, love, rejection, guilt, and the constant struggle between good and evil.

It is a big novel in almost every sense.

Yet what makes East of Eden so memorable isn’t simply its length or scope. Steinbeck takes enormous philosophical questions and makes them feel personal. His characters make terrible decisions, hurt the people closest to them, search for acceptance, and wonder whether they are destined to repeat the mistakes of the people who came before them.

Penguin continues to include East of Eden among its essential classics, and the novel also continues to surface in reader discussions about books worth experiencing in a lifetime.

Why you should read it once: Few novels explore the question of whether we can choose who we become quite as powerfully.

2. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

If the size of The Count of Monte Cristo has kept you from reading it, don’t let the page count scare you.

This is one of literature’s great revenge stories.

Edmond Dantès is a young sailor with a promising future when betrayal destroys everything. Wrongfully imprisoned, he spends years behind bars before an extraordinary sequence of events gives him the opportunity to escape and reinvent himself.

What follows is an elaborate plan for revenge against the people responsible for his downfall.

But Dumas isn’t interested only in whether Dantès gets his revenge. The novel gradually asks a much more interesting question: What happens to a person when revenge becomes the purpose of his life?

There are secret identities, betrayals, fortunes, conspiracies, romance, prison escapes, and enough twists to fill several modern thrillers.

Despite being a 19th-century novel, it can feel surprisingly modern once the story gets moving. Penguin continues to publish it as one of its major classics, while readers regularly name it in discussions of books worth reading once in a lifetime.

Why you should read it once: It is a massive adventure that also has something meaningful to say about justice, obsession, mercy, and revenge.

3. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

You do not have to be a fan of Westerns to love Lonesome Dove.

In fact, many readers who normally have little interest in Western novels end up discovering just how much more Larry McMurtry’s epic has to offer.

The story centers around former Texas Rangers Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call as they set out on an enormous cattle drive from Texas toward Montana.

What starts as an adventure gradually turns into something much bigger.

McMurtry fills the journey with friendship, danger, violence, romance, loneliness, regret, and loss. The landscapes may be enormous, but the characters are what make the book unforgettable.

At more than 800 pages in many editions, Lonesome Dove is a commitment. But it is also the type of long novel that readers often wish were even longer once they become attached to its characters.

The novel won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and remains one of McMurtry’s defining works.

Why you should read it once: Few novels make friendship, aging, adventure, and the passing of an era feel this alive.

4. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

There are countless novels set during World War II. The Book Thief finds an unforgettable way to tell another story from that period.

For starters, the narrator is Death.

The story follows Liesel Meminger, a young girl living with a foster family in Nazi Germany who discovers comfort in books and words while the world around her becomes increasingly dangerous.

That unusual perspective allows Markus Zusak to create something that is simultaneously beautiful and devastating.

Books become much more than entertainment for Liesel. Stories are an escape, a connection to other people, and eventually a form of resistance.

Twenty years after the novel’s publication, Zusak reflected on its continued life among readers, while publisher Knopf marked the anniversary with a special edition, an indication of just how enduring the novel has become.

It is difficult to finish The Book Thief without thinking about the power words have, for good and for evil.

Why you should read it once: It is a moving reminder of why stories matter most when the world seems determined to silence them.

5. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

A Thousand Splendid Suns is not always an easy novel to read emotionally.

But it is incredibly difficult to forget.

Khaled Hosseini follows Mariam and Laila, two Afghan women from different generations whose lives become intertwined by war, loss, family, and circumstances beyond their control.

Against decades of upheaval in Afghanistan, the novel focuses intensely on the personal lives of these women. Penguin Random House describes it as a story spanning roughly thirty years of Afghan history while remaining centered on family, friendship, faith, and love.

That combination is what makes the novel work so well.

Historical events aren’t merely things occurring somewhere in the background. We see how political upheaval enters people’s houses, marriages, relationships, and daily routines.

But despite the darkness in the story, A Thousand Splendid Suns is also about endurance and the extraordinary relationships people can form under impossible circumstances.

Why you should read it once: It puts human lives at the center of history and creates characters who are incredibly difficult to leave behind.

6. The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road is bleak.

There isn’t really a way around that.

Cormac McCarthy imagines a devastated world in which civilization has collapsed following an unspecified catastrophe. A father and his young son travel through the remains of that world searching for food, safety, and some reason to keep moving.

That premise might sound like a typical post-apocalyptic novel.

It isn’t.

McCarthy strips the genre down until almost everything disappears except the relationship between a parent and child.

What does a father owe his son when he can’t promise him a future? How do you teach someone to be good when cruelty appears to be rewarded? What does hope mean when there is almost nothing left to hope for?

Those questions transform a survival story into something much more powerful.

The Road won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and remains one of McCarthy’s best-known works.

Why you should read it once: Beneath all the darkness is one of literature’s most powerful stories about parental love and refusing to surrender your humanity.

7. The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Alice Walker’s The Color Purple is a novel about suffering, but reducing it to that would miss what makes it so powerful.

It is also a novel about finding your voice.

Told largely through letters, the story follows Celie, a Black woman living in rural Georgia in the early 20th century. Celie experiences abuse, separation, racism, and oppression, but her story gradually becomes one of independence, connection, self-discovery, and transformation.

Walker won both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for the novel.

More than four decades later, its central ideas remain remarkably powerful.

The book’s publisher describes its legacy through themes of healing, forgiveness, self-discovery, and sisterhood, all of which help explain why new generations continue to discover the novel.

What makes Celie’s story so memorable isn’t simply everything she survives. It is watching her slowly discover that her life can belong to her.

Why you should read it once: It is a powerful exploration of what can happen when someone who has been denied a voice finally discovers one.

8. Watership Down by Richard Adams

Yes, the main characters are rabbits.

No, Watership Down isn’t simply a cute story about rabbits.

Richard Adams created an elaborate adventure about a group of rabbits forced to leave their home and search for somewhere safe to build a new life.

Along the way, they encounter dangerous environments, predators, rival communities, authoritarian leaders, and internal disagreements about what their new society should become.

Suddenly, the rabbits don’t feel so simple.

Adams builds mythology, traditions, language, leadership struggles, friendships, and political conflicts into their world. What initially looks like an animal adventure becomes a surprisingly sophisticated story about freedom, survival, community, courage, and power.

The novel became a bestseller and earned Adams the Carnegie Medal and Guardian Award for Children’s Literature.

Readers continue to recommend it decades later, including in discussions about books worth reading at least once.

Why you should read it once: You may begin the book wondering how emotionally invested you can possibly become in a group of rabbits. You probably won’t be wondering that by the end.

9. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

War stories often focus on battles.

Tim O’Brien focuses on what people carry away from them.

The Things They Carried blends connected stories about soldiers serving during the Vietnam War with reflections on memory, fear, guilt, storytelling, and what truth really means when people attempt to make sense of traumatic experiences.

The title refers partly to physical objects soldiers carry.

But those objects quickly become symbolic of everything else they carry: memories, relationships, terror, grief, responsibility, shame, and the people they have lost.

The book intentionally complicates the boundary between fiction and reality. Rather than simply asking whether every event happened exactly as described, O’Brien pushes readers toward another question: Can a story communicate an emotional truth even when the details aren’t literally true?

The Things They Carried was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and also received significant literary recognition for O’Brien.

It also continues to surface in reader recommendations of books people should experience at least once.

Why you should read it once: It forces you to reconsider the relationship between memory, storytelling, truth, and war.

10. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

The less you know about Never Let Me Go before reading it, the better.

So we aren’t going to spoil what Kazuo Ishiguro is doing here.

The novel follows Kathy as she looks back on her childhood at an English boarding school called Hailsham and remembers her relationships with Ruth and Tommy.

At first, there is something strangely ordinary about their childhood memories.

Gradually, however, the reader begins to realize that something isn’t right.

Ishiguro uses a restrained, almost quiet style to explore friendship, love, mortality, memory, and what gives a human life value. Penguin Random House describes the novel as a haunting story of friendship and love that subtly reimagines our world.

Its reputation has only strengthened with time. On the novel’s 20th anniversary, writers and artists discussing its legacy with The Guardian highlighted its continuing relevance to questions surrounding technology, identity, agency, and what it means to be human.

That makes it especially fascinating to revisit today.

Why you should read it once: Few novels reveal their true nature so quietly or leave you thinking about mortality for so long afterward.

What Makes a Book Something Everyone Should Read Once?

There can never really be a universal reading list.

One person’s life-changing masterpiece is another person’s three-star read.

And that’s part of what makes reading so interesting.

But the books readers continue recommending across generations usually have something bigger going on underneath their plots.

The Count of Monte Cristo isn’t merely about revenge.

The Road isn’t merely about the apocalypse.

Watership Down isn’t merely about rabbits.

And Never Let Me Go isn’t merely about an unusual boarding school.

Each one uses its story to explore questions that readers recognize in their own lives: Who are we? How should we treat other people? Can we escape our past? What makes life meaningful? What do we owe the people we love?

You aren’t guaranteed to love every book on this list.

You may even strongly dislike one of them.

But sometimes the books worth reading aren’t simply the ones that entertain us. They are the books that challenge us, surprise us, and give us something to think about long after we’re finished.

And these ten novels do exactly that.

Which Book Should You Read First?

If you want an epic adventure, start with The Count of Monte Cristo.

If you want an unforgettable historical novel, try A Thousand Splendid Suns or The Book Thief.

If you want something emotionally devastating, read The Road or Never Let Me Go.

If you want a huge character-driven novel, choose East of Eden or Lonesome Dove.

And if you want something completely different from what you’re expecting, pick up Watership Down.

Whatever you choose, there is a reason readers keep having this conversation.

Great books don’t simply give us a story to read.

The best ones give us something to carry with us.