Literary fiction need not be frightening. Here’s a list of some of great literary works worth reading … in no particualr order:

1.   Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
2.   V. by Thomas Pynchon
3.   Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
4.   Jane Erye by Charlotte Bronte
5.   Lord of the Flies by William Golding
6.   Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
7.   Moby Dick by Herman Melville
8.   War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
9.   David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
10. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
11. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
12. 1984 by George Orwell
13. Beloved by Toni Morrison
14. White Noise by Don Delillo
15. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
16. Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
17. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
18. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
19. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
20. Atonement by Ian McEwan
21. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
22. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
23. Herzog by Saul Bellow
24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
25. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
26. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
27. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
28. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
29. The Trial by Franz Kafka
30. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

I know this list is short, but if anyone were to read all the books on it, they would have read about 30% of the “best of” lists made over the years.