Homebuilding Insights

Editor’s Note (Updated 2025): Building a home library is one of the easiest and most meaningful ways to make your new Ernest home feel warm, inspiring, and uniquely yours. Whether you're a lifelong reader or hoping to spark a love of books for your children, this curated list includes timeless titles every home library should have.

You’re finally in your new home—or still searching for the perfect fit—and have decided that creating a cozy, inspiring home library is a must. Reading is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself and your family. It sparks imagination, strengthens the mind, and provides endless adventures without ever leaving your home.

The Ernest Homes team has put together a list of “must-have” books for your home library across multiple categories and age ranges. Some are cherished classics, some modern bestsellers, and others hidden gems you may not have discovered yet.

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
• The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
• Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
• If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff & 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 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 Stieg Larsson
• 11/22/63 by Stephen King
• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
• The 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 Chronicles” 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 by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• 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 Misérables by Victor Hugo

Top Non-Fiction Books

• Night by Elie Wiesel
• The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
• Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
• Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
• How to Win Friends & 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 Friedan
• Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
• On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
• The Radium Girls by Kate Moore
• Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood by Stephen Puleo
• American Sniper by Chris Kyle
• The 100 Greatest Disasters of All Time by Stephen J. Spignesi

Add as many personal favorites as your shelves will allow. After all, every great home library is built one cherished book at a time.