BBC’s 100 Books You Must Read Before You Die

(bold & strike-through=read; strike-through only=listened to audio book; red=highly recommend)
  1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen [2014]
  2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien [1998-2001]
  3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
  4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
  5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
  6. The Bible
  7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
  8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
  9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
  10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
  11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott [2014]
  12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
  13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
  14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
  15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
  16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien [1997, 2012]
  17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
  18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger[2018]
  19. The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
  20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
  21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
  22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
  23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
  24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
  25. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
  26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
  27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
  29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll [2010]
  30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
  31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
  32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
  33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
  34. Emma – Jane Austen
  35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
  36. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
  37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
  38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
  39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
  40. Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne [2016]
  41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
  42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
  43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
  45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
  46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
  47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
  48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
  49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
  50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
  51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
  52. Dune – Frank Herbert
  53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
  54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
  55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
  56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
  57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
  58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
  59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
  60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
  62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
  63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
  64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
  65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas [2014]
  66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
  67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
  68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
  69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
  70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville [2014]
  71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
  72. Dracula – Bram Stoker [2011]
  73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett [2012]
  74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
  75. Ulysses – James Joyce
  76. The Inferno – Dante
  77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
  78. Germinal – Emile Zola
  79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
  80. Possession – AS Byatt
  81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens [2010, 2011, 2012, 2013]
  82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
  83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
  84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
  85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
  86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
  87. Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
  88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
  89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
  91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
  92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (in Hungarian) [2005]
  93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
  94. Watership Down – Richard Adams [1997]
  95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
  96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
  97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
  98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
  99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
  100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo [2012]

Library of Congress’ Books that Shaped America

  • Benjamin Franklin, “Experiments and Observations on Electricity”
  • Benjamin Franklin, “Poor Richard Improved” and “The Way to Wealth”
  • Thomas Paine, “Common Sense”
  • Noah Webster, “A Grammatical Institute of the English Language”
  • “The Federalist”
  • “A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible”
  • Christopher Colles, “A Survey of the Roads of the United States of America”
  • Benjamin Franklin, “The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin, LL.D.” [2014]
  • Amelia Simmons, “American Cookery”
  • “New England Primer”
  • Meriwether Lewis, “History of the Expedition Under the Command of the Captains Lewis and Clark”
  • Washington Irving, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” [2006]
  • William Holmes McGuffey, “McGuffey’s Newly Revised Eclectic Primer”
  • Samuel Goodrich, “Peter Parley’s Universal History”
  • Frederick Douglass, “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Scarlet Letter”
  • Herman Melville, “Moby-Dick”; or, “The Whale” [2014]
  • Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” [2011]
  • Henry David Thoreau, “Walden;” or, “Life in the Woods” [2014]
  • Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass”
  • Louisa May Alcott, “Little Women,” or, “Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy” [2014]
  • Horatio Alger Jr., “Mark, the Match Boy”
  • Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, “The American Woman’s Home”
  • Mark Twain, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”
  • Emily Dickinson, “Poems”
  • Jacob Riis, “How the Other Half Lives”
  • Stephen Crane, “The Red Badge of Courage”
  • L. Frank Baum, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” [2011]
  • Sarah H. Bradford, “Harriet, the Moses of Her People”
  • Jack London, “The Call of the Wild”
  • W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Souls of Black Folk”
  • Ida Tarbell, “The History of Standard Oil”
  • Upton Sinclair, “The Jungle”
  • Henry Adams, “The Education of Henry Adams”
  • William James, “Pragmatism”
  • Zane Grey, “Riders of the Purple Sage”
  • Edgar Rice Burroughs, “Tarzan of the Apes” [2014]
  • Margaret Sanger, “Family Limitation”
  • William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All”
  • Robert Frost, “New Hampshire”
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Great Gatsby”
  • Langston Hughes, “The Weary Blues”
  • William Faulkner, “The Sound and the Fury”
  • Dashiell Hammett, “Red Harvest”
  • Irma Rombauer, “Joy of Cooking”
  • Margaret Mitchell, “Gone With the Wind”
  • Dale Carnegie, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”
  • Zora Neale Hurston, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”
  • Federal Writers’ Project, “Idaho: A Guide in Word and Pictures”
  • Thornton Wilder, “Our Town: A Play”
  • “Alcoholics Anonymous”
  • John Steinbeck, “The Grapes of Wrath”
  • Ernest Hemingway, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” [2015]
  • Richard Wright, “Native Son”
  • Betty Smith, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”
  • Benjamin A. Botkin, “A Treasury of American Folklore”
  • Gwendolyn Brooks, “A Street in Bronzeville”
  • Benjamin Spock, “The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care”
  • Eugene O’Neill, “The Iceman Cometh”
  • Margaret Wise Brown, “Goodnight Moon”
  • Tennessee Williams, “A Streetcar Named Desire”
  • Alfred C. Kinsey, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male”
  • J.D. Salinger, “The Catcher in the Rye”[2018]
  • Ralph Ellison, “Invisible Man”
  • E.B. White, “Charlotte’s Web”
  • Ray Bradbury, “Fahrenheit 451”
  • Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”
  • Ayn Rand, “Atlas Shrugged” [2013]
  • Dr. Seuss, “The Cat in the Hat”
  • Jack Kerouac, “On the Road”
  • Harper Lee, “To Kill a Mockingbird”
  • Joseph Heller, “Catch-22”
  • Robert A. Heinlein, “Stranger in a Strange Land”
  • Ezra Jack Keats, “The Snowy Day”
  • Maurice Sendak, “Where the Wild Things Are”
  • James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time”
  • Betty Friedan, “The Feminine Mystique”
  • Malcolm X and Alex Haley, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”
  • Ralph Nader, “Unsafe at Any Speed”
  • Rachel Carson, “Silent Spring”
  • Truman Capote, “In Cold Blood”
  • James D. Watson, “The Double Helix”
  • Dee Brown, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee”
  • Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, “Our Bodies, Ourselves”
  • Carl Sagan, “Cosmos”
  • Toni Morrison, “Beloved”
  • Randy Shilts, “And the Band Played On”
  • César Chávez, “The Words of César Chávez”

100 Must-Read Books: The Essential Man’s Library

from The Art of Manliness

  1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  2. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
  3. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
  4. 1984 by George Orwell
  5. The Republic by Plato
  6. Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  7. The Catcher and the Rye by J.D. Salinger[2018]
  8. The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
  9. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway [2015]
  10. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
  11. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
  12. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  13. How To Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie
  14. Call of the Wild by Jack London
  15. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
  16. Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss [2014]
  17. Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
  18. The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer
  19. Catch‐22 by Joseph Heller
  20. Walden by Henry David Thoreau [2014]
  21. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
  22. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
  23. Blue beard by Kurt Vonnegut
  24. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand [2013]
  25. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
  26. American Boys’ Handy Book
  27. Into Thin Air by John Krakauer
  28. King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard
  29. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  30. A River Runs Through It by Norman F. Maclean
  31. The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells
  32. Malcolm X: The Autobiography
  33. Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris
  34. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas [2014]
  35. All Quiet on The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarq
  36. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
  37. Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans by Plutarch
  38. The Strenuous Life by Theodore Roosevelt
  39. The Bible
  40. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
  41. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
  42. The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
  43. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  44. The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn and Hal Iggulden
  45. The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
  46. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin [2014]
  47. The Histories by Herodotus
  48. From Here to Eternity by James Jones
  49. The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner
  50. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
  51. Self Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
  52. Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins
  53. White Noise by Don Delillo
  54. Ulysses by James Joyce
  55. The Young Man’s Guide by William Alcott
  56. Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
  57. Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond by Denis Johnson
  58. Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  59. Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse
  60. The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry by Christine De Pizan
  61. The Art of War by Sun Tzu
  62. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
  63. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
  64. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
  65. The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien [1997, 2012]
  66. The Rough Riders by Theodore Roosevelt
  67. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
  68. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
  69. The Thin Red Line by James Jones
  70. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
  71. The Politics by Aristotle
  72. First Edition of the The Boy Scout Handbook
  73. Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
  74. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
  75. The Crisis by Winston Churchill
  76. The Naked and The Dead by Norman Mailer
  77. Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
  78. Animal Farm by George Orwell
  79. Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs [2014]
  80. Beyond Good and Evil by Freidrich Nietzsche
  81. The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
  82. Moby Dick by Herman Melville [2014]
  83. Essential Manners for Men by Peter Post
  84. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly
  85. Hamlet by Shakespeare
  86. The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn
  87. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
  88. A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway
  89. The Stranger by Albert Camus
  90. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Dafoe
  91. The Pearl by John Steinbeck [2017]
  92. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
  93. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson [2014]
  94. Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
  95. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
  96. The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux
  97. Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard
  98. Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose
  99. Paradise Lost by John Milton
  100. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck [2014]

I would also add some of my own nominations to the lists if you’re looking at these for what you should read. The biggest addition is The Book of Mormon. BBC’s list does mention Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but I would add his complete works for young audiences. I love them just as much as an adult as I did as a kid. I would also include P.L. Travers’ complete Mary Poppins stories. I’m sure there are more, but these will suffice for now. Feel free to share your suggestions of books to read before you die.

 

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