A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading

William Styron

The Reading List 2026

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The Reading List 2026 *

The Dragon’s Promise

Your heart is your home. Until you understand that, you belong nowhere

Elizabeth Lim

The Crucible

Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven

Arthur Miller

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea

Nature's creative power is far beyond man's instinct of destruction

Jules Vernes

Full Circle

Night falls over Machu Picchu to the sound of Abba's 'Dancing Queen’

Michael Palin

Throne of Glass

Libraries were full of ideas—perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons

Sarah J. Maas

Richard III

Bloody thou art, bloody will be thy end;
Shame serves thy life and doth thy death attend

William Shakespeare

Requiem For a Wren

Like some infernal monster, still venomous in death, a war can go on killing people for a long time after it's all over

Nevil Shute

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be

Walter Benjamin

The Fake Up

‘“Fame really is forever, isn’t it? They both looked at each other, the weight of that truth hanging over them for the first time, like a raincloud’

Justin Meyers

A Very Very Very Dark Matter

We co-write them. I just don't do any of the writing. I change the bits I don't like and then erase all the rest from history. I'm more like a German theatre director. Or, y'know, a German generally

Martin McDonagh

A Room of One’s Own

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction

Virginia Woolf

Republic

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing

Plato

King of Envy

Not everyone had the privilege of following their heart

Ana Huang

DNA

I threatened to gouge one of his eyes out.

Dennis Kelly

Ivanhoe

For he that does good, having the unlimited power to do evil, deserves praise not only for the good which he performs, but for the evil which he forbears

Sir Walter Scott

On Human Freedom

What makes for freedom and fluency in the practice of writing? Knowledge of how to write. The same goes for the practice of playing an instrument. It follows that, in the conduct of life, there must be a science to living well

Epicteus

Broken By Daylight

I cannot keep away from you any more than the tides can resist the pull of the moon

Elizabeth Helen

The Visit

The world made a whore of me, now I'll make a whorehouse of the world

Friedrich Dürrenmatt & Tony Kushner

The ABC Murders

It's like all those quiet people, when they do lose their tempers, they lose them with a vengeance

Agatha Christie

50 LGBTQ+ Who Changed The World

How many years has it taken people to realize that we are all brothers and sisters and human beings in the human race?

Florent Manelli

Funny Story

You can’t untell someone your secrets. You can’t unsay those delicate truths once you learn you can’t trust the person you handed them to

Emily Henry

Kindertransport

Diane Samuels

To The Lighthouse

To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!