on liberty is pretty meh imo, there were some notable sections and quotes but aside from that it was hard to get through.

I tried to do this and found that I can't really compare fiction and non-fiction. So, I made two lists.

Fiction:

• George Orwell - 1984
• Ernest Hemingway - "The Snows of Kiliminjaro" (short story)
• Charles Dickens - Great Expectations
• Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
• Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451
• Joseph Heller - Catch-22
• J. R. R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings
• Richard Adams - Watership Down
• Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange
• Ken Kesey - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Those are the first ten works of fiction I'd recommend to a friend looking for something to read. I find them all both profound and entertaining. It hurt me to omit my all-time favourite writer, P. G. Wodehouse, but he doesn't have one definitive work.

Non-fiction:

• Viktor Frankl - Man's Search for Meaning
• Richard P. Feynman - Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
• Douglas R. Hofstadter - Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
• Plato - The Republic
• The Bible
• The Quran
• Charles Darwin - On the Origin of Species
• Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil
• Henry David Thoreau - Walden
• Truman Capote - In Cold Blood

The five in the middle are books I've read that I think deserve to be read by everybody, and the other five are personal favourites. A couple of them check both boxes.

Seriously? You think people actually need to read the Bible?? As elphenor would no doubt say, the biggest propaganda production ever released by Christianity?

My own work has made me cry, but I'm not sure if tears of frustration count.

Know the enemy.

I've read all of the Bible. The interesting stuff is easy to miss because it's buried in mounds of repetitive boringness. You have to be alert.

Regardless, it and the Quran shouldn't be on a non-fiction list.

I'm not sure if the Bible is plot driven enough to be fiction. I guess because there are stories buried in an endless list of names and temple dimensions and exaltations. I doubt more than 1 percent of people with Ph.D's in Divinity have actually read it. It's excruciating. So is Darwin. Which I also felt like I needed to put myself through.

1. Whether or not you agree with the ideas in the Bible and the Quran, they have shaped the world. Without understanding those ideas, you cannot understand the history of the past 2000 years. It would be like trying to understand the history of the Soviet Union without reading the Communist Manifesto.

2. "Non-fiction" does not mean the same thing as factual. If it did, Nietzsche and Plato would have to be removed from the list.