As literary critic Harold Bloom once said, "We read against the clock."
As many great book as there are in the world, each of us only have a finite amount of time to actually sit down and enjoy them, immersing ourselves in worlds and situations we never dreamed possible.
With that being said, most readers might want to curate a list of top books to read before they kick the bucket, leaving them satisfied by the amount of remarkable material they've absorbed with each passing year.
Fortunately, various organizations like Penguin Random House have compiled lists of the best books to read before you die. And at the very top of the publisher's list is an ironclad classic in international literature: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
The final novel completed in the legendary writer's lifetime, The Brothers Karamazov follows the eventful murder trial of Dmitri Karamazov, a man who has been accused of murdering his tyrannical father Fyodor.
A suspenseful family drama, immersive thriller and introspective study of morality, religion and free will rolled into one, The Brothers Karamazov is commonly hailed as one of the greatest novels ever written, leaving its high place at the top of Penguin Random House beyond refute.
"Dostoevsky’s last and greatest novel is, above all, the story of a murder, told with hair-raising intellectual clarity and a feeling for the human condition unsurpassed in world literature," the publisher said of the work. "It is a masterpiece that chronicles the bitter love-hate struggle between an outsized father and his three very different sons."
Also appearing in the top five section of Penguin Random House's list is Amy Tan's The Kitchen God’s Wife; Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I; and George Eliot's Middlemarch, among others.