100 Must-read Books: The Essential Man’s Library Novels & Stories

“It was a fucking library” Neat and surprisingly well-maintained, the library was lit with a dim, golden glow. A fireplace in the corner lent a soft warmth to the room, making it feel oddly inviting. Towering shelves lined the walls, packed tightly with books. I stepped inside, the faint creak of the wooden floor breaking the silence. I picked a book at random, scanning its title: Leadership for the Ruthless. My nose wrinkled. “Why would anyone willingly read this?” Another title caught my eye: Tactics of Power. I rolled my eyes. Of course. What did I expect? The library of a Mafia Don would be filled with books on control and domination.

“Ariadne.” Even the books here were ones I’d already read repeatedly. There were only so many times I could read about the '100 Greatest Battles of Wolf Kind' or 'The Twenty Steps of a Successful Luna' before beginning to hate even the thought of picking a book up. But even if I asked someone to go to the library for me, it was unlikely there would be many books in there that I hadn’t already read at least once. 'Three hundred and eighty-four… three hundred and eighty-five… three hundred and eighty-six….'

Arian's pov I never thought a book club meeting could feel like a battlefield. Today, we are reading The Art of Forbidden by Linda Lively, and from the very moment I flipped through its pages, my face had been hot. The story is about a powerful president who was secretly in love with his male secretary, and if that wasn’t bold enough, the prose was filled with intimacy, longing, and heat. Naturally, everyone thought it would be for people to take turns reading aloud. But I wasn't really in the mood to read, not after what the police said to me.

he shrugged, stepping closer. "A little? You have at least thirty books on that shelf." His lips twitched with a smile. "Thirty five," "Oh my god! I can't believe this. I thought you'd be like a forty eight laws of power kind of man. Or Atomic Habits. You're reading Harlequin and Silhouette desires!" I gaped.

"The greater the contrast, the greater the potential. Great energy only comes from a correspondingly great tension of opposites." -Carl Jung- *** Levana got the key to the library and unlocked it. The library was not as huge as some of the rooms in the house and it was a little dusty. Looked like the space has not been used in a while, which was understandable considering no one in the house seemed to be into reading. She walked through the book aisle and realized the collections they had there were really great. Whoever gathered these books together must have a passion for them.

“Then what are some of your favorites?” “Would it be cheesy to say that all of these are?” She pulled out a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude. “You’ve read all these? Impressive. I don’t know if I’ve read thirty percent of the books on my shelf.” “I only keep the ones I like. I have a rule that if I don’t read a book within a year of buying it, I donate it.” She laughed. “If I had that rule, I wouldn’t have any books left.” Placing the book in her hand back onto the shelf, she continued looking before taking out another one. “Lady Chatterley’s Lover, huh? I have read this one.”

He returned his attention to the bookshelf at the rear of his office, the one he’d been browsing when he’d first heard the strange sounds outside, only being made by the cats, after all. The top shelf held purely “literary works.” Poetry collections of Blake, Yeats, Robert Frost, and Shakespeare. Prose collections of Zora Neal Hurston, Hemingway, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Flannery O’Connor, and folktales collected by the Brothers Grimm. Novels, from The Man in the Iron Mask to Madame Bovary, to Villette and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, to A Passage to India by E. M. Forster.

I said, and my breath finally evened out. “Why do you need more books from him? You have a ton of them in the library.” He frowned. “Because there’s no such thing as too much book.” I rolled my eyes so hard that they almost tumbled from my head. He was a reader, so why the weird question? Every reader knew there was no such thing as too many books. It was like one of the biggest anti-reader lies in history. “Besides, the books in the library are mostly horrors. The ones he promised to give me are romance. I’ve been dying to have them since their release.”

I even found the karma sutra amongst what I can only classify as the ‘self help’ section, opening it and then quickly closing it in case Enzo or his mother entered the room. A large book at the end of the shelf entitled “The Power and Responsibility of Men” caught my eye. It seemed to be more weathered than the rest of the books, but I didn't get why. “Who would be drawn to a book like that?” I asked myself, pulling it from the shelf.

- M His heart slammed against his ribs. He stared at the message, knowing it was an invitation to the edge of a cliff. He typed a reply, deleted it, typed another. Finally, he sent one word: Okay. The main house was tomb-silent. He found her in the library, a two-story room lined with rich mahogany shelves and leather-bound volumes his father never read. She was perched on the top rung of a rolling ladder, reaching for a book on a high shelf. She wore tight, faded jeans that hugged the sublime curve of her ass and a simple white tank top, no bra. He could see the clear outline of her nipples, dark and peaked against the thin cotton.