Even Business Insider Knows Everyone Needs to Read Some Sci-Fi Before They Die

The list as a whole is a fascinating. Some of the books and authors are what you would expect: To Kill a Mockingbird. Camus’s The Stranger. Catch 22. Hemingway, John Steinbeck, two by Dostoyevsky. Herman Melville is there, but represented by the novella-length Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street, instead of Moby Dick. And there are four notable non-fiction books, including Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. But among other more unusual choices—Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, written in the 1930s, and Shel Silverstein’s moving children’s book The Giving Tree—there is that unexpected preponderance of sci-fi and fantasy, hardly typical for any “must-read” list without a specific genre bent.
It’s only a slight stretch to say there are five fantasy titles on the list—true, you won’t find epic, urban, high, or heroic fantasy selections, but four of the books I knew—Watership Down, Richard Adams’ tale of rabbits in peril; Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s fabulous One Hundred Years of Solitude; George Orwell’s Animal Farm; and The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery—certainly qualify. The fifth, Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami, was the only book and author on the entire list that was totally unknown to me. But the article described it as “mind bending” and “a metaphysical journey filled with magical realism” so it seemed to fit my loose fantasy definition. (I subsequently learned that Murakami is a favorite author of this blog’s editor, but that had no impact on my decision.) [Read some Murakami, Tim. – Ed.]

The 11 science fiction novels on the list fit any definition of the genre. There are Hugo/Nebula winners (Dune and The Forever War), and classic dystopian works by authors not typically lumped in with SF authors (Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984). (George and Dostoyevsky are the only authors to make the list twice.)
There are several that frequently show up on general best novel lists because they are considered “literature” rather than SF—Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Finally, three books that usually do not appear on any list not specific to the genre: Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

If you read all 35 of these books, how would you rate on the SFF-meter?  For fantasy, not too well. You would be covered for talking animals and magical realism, but missing The Lord of the Rings, Conan the Barbarian, Ursula LeGuin, Andre Norton, Brandon Sanderson, and your Harrys, both Potter and Dresden. You would have no idea that winter is coming. (Unless you get HBO, I suppose.) But for science fiction, this list is a good start.  Add a little space opera and cyberpunk to broaden your horizons. Read Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke, Brackett, Bujold, and Cherryh, and you’re golden.
But, of course, by now you may be wondering how you’ll have time to read these 35 books, plus “Bloomsbury’s 100 Must Read Science Fiction Novels”, plus NPR’s Top 100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books, plus the thousands recommended in posts on this blog, not to mention all the other lists of books you should be reading when you aren’t reading lists of books you should be reading. Well, Time’s Motto has advice on that score, too: some CEO figured out how you could read 54 books a year even if you are insanely busy. His secret: read books that average 80,000 words in length, at 200 words per minute, for an hour a day. He must have a MBA to have figured that out.