Essential Books for your Home Library!
You’re finally in your new home – or maybe still searching for the perfect fit – and have come to realize that one of the things you’ve always wanted to do is build a fantastic home library. After all, it’s proven that children’s brains reach 90% of their adult weight by the end of their third year. What better way to help them develop their mind power than to read to them? And isn’t a great example to set for your kids when they see you nose-deep in a book or poring over a magazine? And in this day of staring into screens, wouldn’t it be great to get your kids hooked on Kindle instead of video games?
The Ernest Homes team has put together a list of “must haves” for your home library, spanning several categories and all age ranges. Here’s twenty of our favorites in four categories. Some are classics, some are modern best sellers, and some are things you should have read in school…and didn’t. There’s a few unusual titles you’ve probably never heard of before; some outrageous, some shocking, some enlightening.
Top Children’s Books
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
- Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
- The “Little House” series by Laura Ingalls Wilder
- Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
- Alice in Wonderland by Louis Carroll
- James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
- If You Give a Mouse a Cookie (and other If You Give… books) by Laura Joffe Numeroff and Felicia Bond
- Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett
- Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown
- Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
- The “Percy Jackson” series by Rick Riordan
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn/The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
- Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
- The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
- Are You My Mother? By P.D. Eastman
- The “Harry Potter” series by J.K. Rowling
- Superfudge by Judy Blume
- ANY Dr. Seuss book!
Top Adult Fiction
- The Help by Katherine Stockett
- A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
- Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
- All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
- Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
- The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
- We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy
- Life of Pi by Yann Martel
- Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy by Steig Larsson
- 11/22/63 by Stephen King
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
- Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
- Possession by A.S. Byatt
- The Secret History by Donna Tartt
- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
- The “Vampire” series by Anne Rice
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Top Classic Fiction:
- 1984 by George Orwell
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Lord of the Rings series by J.R.R. Tolkien
- Dracula by Bram Stoker
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Pick a Bronte, any Bronte…Jane, Charlotte or Anne
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
- Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
- Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Top Non-Fiction Books:
- Night by Elie Wiesel
- The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls
- Outliers – The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
- Unbroken by Lauren Hillenbrand
- How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
- The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert
- Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
- Becoming by Michelle Obama
- A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
- The Feminine Mystique by Betty Freidan
- Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
- And I Don’t Want to Live This Life by Deborah Spungen
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson
- On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
- The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore
- A Trust Betrayed: The Untold Story of Camp Lejeune and the Poisoning of Generations of Marines and Their Families by Mike Magner
- Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 by Stephen Pule
- American Sniper by Chris Kyle
- The 100 Greatest Disasters of All Time By Stephen J. Spignesi
Add as many of your personal favorites that will fit your space as well. We all have a book or two that makes us feel…well, like we’ve come home.
