Ten Works of Fiction You Should Read

According to Theon Ultima

1. Middlemarch - George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

Set in late Georgian England but written in the thick of the Victorian era, Middlemarch is a sweeping novel about ambition, compromise, and the quiet complexity of everyday life. At its center is Dorothea Brooke, a young woman driven by big ideals and a desire to do good in the world; only to find herself trapped in a marriage that tests her spirit. Around her spins a whole town’s worth of intersecting lives, each rendered with empathy and psychological depth.

Eliot doesn’t deal in caricatures or archetypes. Her characters are flawed, thoughtful, sometimes foolish, but ultimately always human. It’s a novel about love, politics, money, and the long struggle to live a meaningful life even in the quaintest of places. If you want Victorian fiction with heart, intellect, and some of the richest character work ever written, Middlemarch is essential.

Mary Ann Evans wrote under a man’s name because Victorian England wasn’t ready for a woman with a brain the size of Jupiter. She was way too serious for the Brontës and too smart for Dickens. If you’ve ever quietly judged someone for being insufferably idealistic and still rooted for them, you’re already in Eliot territory. Her masterpiece, Middlemarch is often hailed as one of the greatest novels in the English language.

P.S. The BBC TV adaption has been highly recommended to me by other readers.

2. Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

“That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating on anything is very hard work.”

Where to start with this infamously & legendarily dense novel? It's got footnotes on footnotes, demands at least three bookmarks, and assumes you're working with a vocab that borders on pathological. And yet, it’s not as incomprehensible as people love to claim. I've read Gravity's Rainbow (this ain't nuthin' in comparison).

Often called postmodern, I’d argue Infinite Jest is something else entirely. It’s metamodern: genuinely sincere one moment, absurdly ironic the next. At its core are three main threads—Hal Incandenza, a gifted but emotionally locked-down tennis prodigy; Don Gately, a recovering addict trying to keep it together at a halfway house; and a Quebecois separatist cell of wheelchair-bound assassins (Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents) chasing a the eponymous film that’s so pleasurable it kills.

There’s also an undercover agent, a disfigured beauty, a lothario wannabe punter with delusions of grandeur, and a dead father who made avant-garde films, spectroscopic breakthroughs and tennis champions. It’s sprawling, out of order, and deeply weird…somehow, it all comes together. Read it if you want a novel that’s maximalist, hilarious, devastating, and occasionally transcendent.

Published in the '90s, Infinite Jest was eerily prescient. It wrestles with addiction, not just to substances, but to entertainment, attention, stimulation. It saw the rise of hyperreality coming before we had a word for the phenomenon. DFW understood our tragic relationship with dopamine traps and media, and how the pursuit of pleasure can quietly become a form of despair. If anything, the book reads more urgently now than it did then.

DFW was the guy who could explain Wittgenstein, take down cruise culture, and write the best footnote you've ever read: all in one breath. A genius, but also a self-lacerating Midwestern overthinker who never fully trusted his own ability. He wore the bandana unironically (supposedly it helped him relax). You don’t read him to chill; you read him because he’s trying to figure out how to be a human without rolling his eyes at the whole idea. He is one of the few fellow materialists out there that seriously grappled with the tragedy of nihilism. He lost that battle in the end sadly, but he should be remembered for his enduring fight.

P.S. Check out the film The End of The Tour if you’re interested in more DFW

3. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“He sank into the rocking chair, the same one in which Rebecca had sat during the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amarana Ursula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past.”

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the novel that defined magical realism. In Macondo, the fictional town at the center of the story, the boundary between the miraculous and the mundane doesn’t exist. A girl ascends into the sky mid-laundry. A plague of insomnia wipes out memory. Ghosts stay for dinner. These aren’t simply curiosities; they’re history rendered truthfully because for Márquez, myth is how a people remember what official history forgets.

The novel follows the Buendía family across a century of births, deaths, passions, and failures. But more than a family saga, it’s a portrait of Latin America’s political and cultural cycles; how elites consolidate power, how revolutions promise change and deliver disappointment, the complicated relationship between foreign empires and their posessions. That tension between the powerful and the powerless doesn’t just sit in the background. Every generation is shaped by it, silently warping their desires, ambitions, and sense of reality.

At its core, the novel is about solitude (surprise!)—not just personal loneliness, but the solitude of nations, of memory, of people cut off from one another. The Buendías aren’t just characters; they’re a metaphor for how history repeats itself when it’s unexamined, and how that repetition leaves people isolated in the very world they helped build.

You should read this novel because it tells the truth about how memory fades, how humanity repeats itself, and how whole histories can disappear unless someone writes them down, even if they have to do it with myth. This book is not just “about” Latin America—it is Latin America: beautiful, brutal, complicated, and seemingly stuck in a perpetual cycle.

Márquez didn’t invent magical realism. He did however, provide the first real encapsulation of what it means. He understood that in places where history is unstable, the line between the real and the impossible gets blurry, and maybe that’s the only honest way to tell the truth. He was a journalist first, a novelist second, but he never stopped being both. His work doesn’t ask for your belief; it assumes it. He wrote like memory actually worked: circular, unreliable, full of gaps, always reaching for meaning. No one else made the myth feel this close to the ground.

4. The Secret History - Donna Tartt

“There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.”

I’ve already written about the deeper themes of The Secret History here (spoiler warning), so I’ll keep this brief. This novel was made for readers who love the reason and philosophy of the classics, but also crave the shadowy maneuvering and cold ambition you find in a 17th-century English play.

We follow a tight-knit group of elite college students, guided by their erudite and unsettlingly urbane professor, and led by the brilliant, unknowable Henry Winter. The murder of one of their own is the novel’s pivot point. Everything before and after spirals around that act. Tartt doesn’t focus on the mystery of what happened, but on the moral and psychological fallout. It's not about guilt or justice so much as beauty, detachment, and what happens when naive young people start to believe they’re above consequence.

Tartt writes like someone who rewrites every sentence; every beat, every measure must be perfect. She takes her time (decades between books) but doesn’t waste yours. She’s obsessed with beauty, with danger, and the mutual cost of both. Her characters tend to be aesthetes, loners, or obsessive strivers; often people who want something bigger than themselves and usually end up crushed by it. Her novels feel like they were written in silence, with no internet anywhere nearby. That’s very much a compliment.

P.s. I highly recommend the audiobook version of the novel read by Tartt herself. There’s something incredibly endearing about a woman with a thick Mississippian accent providing the voices for Northeastern WASP elites.

5. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes

“It is not the responsibility of knights errant to discover whether the afflicted, the enchained and the oppressed whom they encounter on the road are reduced to these circumstances and suffer this distress for their vices, or for their virtues: the knight's sole responsibility is to succour them as people in need, having eyes only for their sufferings, not for their misdeeds.”

The classic of classics. The first modern novel. The book that gave us the word quixotic and reshaped literature forever. It’s been quoted, adapted, borrowed from, and reimagined more times than anyone can count, but none of that matters if you haven’t actually read it!

At its heart, it’s the story of a rural Spanish gentleman who’s read too many chivalric romances and decides to become a knight. His imagination does the rest: windmills become giants, a broken-down nag becomes a noble steed, a garlic-eating peasant girl becomes the Lady Dulcinea of Toboso, and a clueless farmer Sancho Panza becomes his loyal squire. The book is funny, but not just funny. Cervantes is constantly playing with genre, tone, and expectation. He even includes two standout stories embedded in the novel: The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious, where a man tests his lover’s loyalty to his own destruction, and The Captive’s Tale, based partly on Cervantes’ own experience as a prisoner of war.

It’s also a meta-novel. After a fake sequel to the first volume was published, Cervantes responded in volume two, mocking the impostor and folding the real and fake narratives into the text itself. For a book written in the early 1600s, it’s weirdly modern in all the right ways: self-aware, skeptical, and deeply human.

We read Don Quixote because he’s someone who loses himself in fiction for reasons us book enjoyers probably understand all too well.

Cervantes fought in wars, got shot, was captured by pirates, spent years in prison, and still somehow managed to invent the modern novel. He was skeptical of institutions, bored by convention, and clearly amused by the idea that anyone takes stories, or themselves too seriously. It’s difficult to imagine he knew he’d change literature forever with Don Quixote, but all the same he did.

P.S. Man of La Mancha is a banger musical.

6. Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.”

One of the most brutal novels ever written and somehow one of the most beautiful. Blood Meridian doesn’t flinch. It stares directly into the raw, primordial violence that shaped the American West and makes no excuses for it. The story follows the historical Glanton gang, who roam the borderlands of Mexico and the U.S. in the mid-1800s, ostensibly hunting Amerindian scalps for bounty. In reality, they murder indiscriminately—raiding villages, slaughtering innocents, and passing off the carnage as commerce.

Hovering over all of it is the Judge: a towering, hairless, philosophical monster with endless knowledge, uncanny abilities, and absolute moral vacancy. He’s both a man and an idea: war incarnate, calmly offering lectures on geology one moment and orchestrating atrocities the next. He doesn’t just haunt the novel; he is the novel’s gravitational center.

There’s little in the way of conventional plot or comfort here. What you get instead is a vision; of man as a creature of violence, of history as blood-stained myth, and of nature as something that doesn’t care if you understand it. The prose is biblical, stark, hypnotic. Every sentence feels like it was etched in stone.

McCarthy didn’t waste words. He stripped language down to the bone and left the violence intact. His characters rarely speak, and when they do, it’s usually about death, god, or nothing at all. He had no use for sentiment or comfort; what he gave us instead were novels that felt ancient, like they’d always existed, and he just dug them out of the ground. If there’s a writer who captured the darkness at the core of American mythology better than McCarthy, I haven’t read them.

P.S. Evidently there’s been quite a few short-lived attempts to make this novel into a film or TV series. I can’t possibly imagine how that could be done without losing some much of the terror that makes this thing special.

7. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison

“I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.”

This was a challenging read for me and a formative one. Invisible Man didn’t just make me think differently about race in America; it launched my own ongoing political journey. It’s interesting that a novel about Black nationalism, the legacy of slavery, and identity within a partially foreign culture ended up shaping my personal journey with nationalism and identitarianism—one that is still ongoing.

Ellison’s narrator is nameless, a self-described specter moving through the world unseen. He’s pulled in all directions: Black nationalists, Marxist organizers, benevolent white liberals, and institutions that claim to help but really just absorb or erase. The novel explores, in part, the tension between the competing post-slavery visions of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois: gradualist uplift versus urgent resistance, accommodation versus assertion. Ellison places his protagonist squarely in that conflict—part of the so-called “Talented Tenth,” but unsure of what that means or what it demands.

The book is about race, power, invisibility, and the brutal complexity of forging an identity in a country that insists on defining you first. But it’s also about not being claimed. About resisting every ideology that says it has the whole answer. Ellison’s narrator doesn’t arrive at clarity; he arrives at a kind of refusal, which might be the more honest response after alll.

Ellison refused to flatten anything. He wrote about race, but never in a way that made it easy for the reader, or easy to categorize. He was skeptical of movements, suspicious of simple answers, and unwilling to let ideology do the thinking for him. Invisible Man is more than a novel; it’s a rejection of being reduced, whether by friend or enemy. Ellison believed in complexity, contradiction, and the dignity of figuring it out for yourself, even if it means never fully arriving. Something that deeply resonates with your humble author.

P.S. There was some wonderful photography done to capture some of the scenes from the novel. Check em out.

8. Zadig - Voltaire

“An Opportunity of doing Mischief, says Zoroaster, offers itself a hundred Times a Day; but that of doing a Friend a good Office but once a Year.”

Everyone knows Candide, but Zadig is Voltaire’s other great work of philosophical fiction, and IMO the more interesting one. Less overtly satirical, more structurally curious, Zadig blends fiction and philosophy in a way that questions how we think about fate, morality, and meaning.

The story follows Zadig, a Babylonian philosopher who keeps getting crushed by life despite his intelligence and good intentions. Fate, or maybe chaos—keeps interfering. Voltaire uses this journey to challenge the Christian moral framework of his day. Instead of clear good and evil, we get ambiguity, irony, and outcomes that hinge more on chance than virtue. “Nothing is either good or bad without the juxtaposition of one with the other” is the core idea, and Voltaire leans into it. Zoroastrianism functions in the novel as both a setting and a philosophical contrast: a belief system without the neat binaries of Christian Manichaeism, where light and dark are always at war and people are sorted accordingly.

If you want to engage with Enlightenment thought without parsing the dense tracts of Kant give Zadig a read.

Everyone knows Voltaire was a critic of religion, but more importantly, he was a critic of certainty. He distrusted dogma in all forms and wrote fiction to expose how absurd most of it is when played out in real life. He wasn’t trying to burn it all down like Monsieur Rousseau—just to force people to think harder before believing anything too completely.

9. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

“They're trying to kill me," Yossarian told him calmly.
No one's trying to kill you," Clevinger cried.
Then why are they shooting at me?" Yossarian asked.
They're shooting at everyone," Clevinger answered. "They're trying to kill everyone."
And what difference does that make?”

This might be the funniest novel I’ve ever read. It’s pure farce. and one of the few novels to make me audibly LOL. However, under the jokes is a brutal logic that never lets you forget how insane war actually is. Set during the Italian campaign of WWII and partly based on Heller’s own experience as a bomber pilot, the novel follows a U.S. air squadron where bureaucracy is more dangerous than bullets.

At the center is Captain Yossarian, a sardonic, deeply paranoid bombardier who’s just trying to survive while everything around him gets progressively more unhinged. The story isn’t told in order; time bends, loops, doubles back, but it works. The cast is a parade of absurdity: Major Major Major Major, only allows people to visit his office when he isn’t there; Milo Minderbinder, a war profiteer so committed to capitalism he contracts bombings against his own side for a cut of the profits; and a dozen others equally broken by the system they serve.

The novel’s namesake, Catch-22, is the perfect trap: if you're sane enough to want out of combat, you're too sane to be declared insane. It’s logic as weapon, as prison. Heller doesn’t simply mock military absurdity. He shows how absurdity becomes the only way to survive something as deeply horrifying as modern war. Humor and horror aren’t opposites here; they’re inseparable.

Heller understood that the real horror of war wasn’t just violence; it was the logic that justified it. He took military bureaucracy, stripped it of heroism, and exposed it for what it was: absurd, circular, and often more dangerous than the enemy. Catch-22 became shorthand for how systems trap people while pretending to serve them. Heller saw it early and wrote it sharp

The last selection has some personal importance and relevancy to my own life so you’ll have to help me get that pure orange checkmark to see it.