100 Books to Read Before You Die

An editor once told me there are certain books that make you a better person simply for having read them. I tend to agree. This isn’t a list of personal favorites, but it is a list of books we all should read. The author’s name follows the title of the book. For purposes of reducing repetitiveness, only one book per author will be listed. In no particular order:

1. The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien
2. The Road Less Traveled – Dr. Scott M. Peck
3. Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
4. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
7. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
9. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
10. World War Z – Max Brooks
11. Education of a Wandering Man – Louis L’Amour
12. Watership Down – Richard Adams
13. The Iliad – Homer
14. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
15. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
16. Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
17. Paradise Lost – John Milton
18. Ulysses – James Joyce
19. Dracula – Bram Stoker
20. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
21. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
22. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
23. 1984 – George Orwell
24. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
25. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
26. Shogun – James Clavell
27. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
28. The Stand – Stephen King
29. Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D. H. Lawrence
30. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
31. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
32. War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
33. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
34. The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli
35. The Art of War – Sun Tzu
36. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
37. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
38. Something Wicked This Way Comes – Ray Bradbury
39. Starship Troopers – Robert A. Heinlein
40. Deliverance – James Dickey
41. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
42. The Dark Knight Returns – Frank Miller
43. Season of Mists – Neil Gaiman
44. The Princess Bride – William Goldman
45. Eaters of the Dead – Michael Crichton
46. The Pillars of the Earth – Ken Follett
47. Night – Eli Wiesel
48. Exodus – Leon Uris
49. Contact – Carl Sagan
50. You Can’t Go Home Again – Thomas Wolfe
51. On the Road – Jack Kerouac
52. Blubber – Judy Blume
53. Foundation – Isaac Asimov
54. The Stranger – Albert Camus
55. The Trial – Franz Kafka
56. Rabbit, Run – John Updike
57. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
58. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C. S. Lewis
59. The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler
60. Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
61. Grendel – John Gardner
62. Hour of the Dragon – Robert E. Howard
63. The Executioner’s Song – Norman Mailer
64. Cop Hater – Ed McBain
65. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
66. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court – Mark Twain
67. McTeague – Frank Norris
68. A Game of Thrones – George R. R. Martin
69. Fight Club – Chuck Palahniuk
70. Titus Groan – Mervyn Peake
71. Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
72. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea – Jules Verne
73. The Divine Comedy – Dante
74. Don Quixote – Miguel De Cervantes
75. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
76. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
77. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
78. Charlotte’s Web – E. B. White
79. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
80. The Magus – John Fowles
81. Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
82. Middlemarch – George Eliot
83. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
84. The Complete Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
85. The Complete Shakespeare – William Shakespeare
86. Rosemary’s Baby – Ira Levin
87. I Am Legend – Richard Matheson
88. The Compete Plays of Aristophanes – Aristophanes
89. The Science of God – Gerald L. Schroeder
90. The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
91. No Exit – Jean-Paul Sartre
92. Alexander of Macedon – Harold Lamb
93. Battle Royale – Koushun Takami
94. We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson
95. Band of Brothers – Stephen Ambrose
96. Ancient Inventions – Peter James and Nick Thorpe
97. The Telltale Heart and Other Writings – Edgar Allan Poe
98. The Call of the Wild – Jack London
99. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – Frank Baum
100. The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer

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