100 Books

I was talking to a friend recently about books (shock!) and she mentioned how she'd created her own '100 books to read before you die' list, tailored to her reading tastes. So I thought I'd create my own!

As a basis, I similar lists produced by Penguin Books, BBC and The Guardian, as well as including some of my own. The aim was to make a list of books that I could realistically see myself reading. For example, the complete works of Shakespeare were included in some lists, which I think is a tad too much to expect! I also removed a lot of the children's books that I've already read many times, such as Harry Potter. I have read a small number of the books below, although I don't really remember some of them, so will have to re-read at some point!

So, without further ado, here is my list of 100 Books I Want to Read Before I Die. Ones coloured in red are ones I have now read. 

1. 1984 - George Orwell
2. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
3. A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles
4. A House for Mr Biswas - V.S. Naipaul
5. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
6. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
7. Animal Farm - George Orwell
8. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
9. Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery
10. Atonement - Ian McEwan
11. Beloved - Toni Morrison
12. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
13. Black Beauty - Anna Sewell
14. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
15. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
16. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
17. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
18. Cousin Bette - Balzac
19. Crime and Punishment - Dostoyevsky
20. Don Quixote - Cervantes
21. Dracula - Bram Stoker
22. Dune - Frank Herbert
23. East of Eden - John Steinbeck
24. Emma - Jane Austen
25. Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
26. Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
27. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
30. I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith
31. Ivanhoe - Walter Scott
32. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
33. Lady Chatterley's Lover - D.H. Lawrence
34. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
35. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
36. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
37. Lolita - Nabokov
38. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
39. Lost Illusions - Balzac
40. Love in a Cold Climate - Nancy Mitford
41. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
42. Madame Bovary - Flaubert
43. Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
44. Middlemarch - George Eliot
45. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
46. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
47. Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
48. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
49. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
50. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
51. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
52. Orlando - Virginia Woolf
53. Passing - Nella Larson
54. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
55. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
56. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
57. Suite Francaise - Irene Nemirovsky
58. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
59. Testament of Youth - Vera Brittain
60. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
61. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
62. The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
63. The Alchemist - Paul Coelho
64. The Call of the Wild - Jack London
65. The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
66. The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
67. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
68. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
69. The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank
70. The Godfather - Mario Puzo
71. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
72. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
73. The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo
74. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
75. To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
76. The Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit - Tolkien
77. The Odyssey - Homer
78. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
79. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
80. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
81. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
82. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
83. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
84. The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan
85. The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
86. The Trial - Franz Kafka
87. The Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula Le Guin
88. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
89. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
90. Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K Jerome
91. Tinker Tailor Solider Spy - John Le Carre
92. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
93. Travels with My Aunt - Graham Greene
94. Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
95. Ulysses - James Joyce
96. Vanity Fair - Thackeray
97. Villette - Charlotte Bronte
98. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
99. Wild Swans - Jung Chang
100. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

Click here to see my reviews of the ones I've read so far: Reviews

UPDATE:
Since compiling this list, I have thought of other worthy additions (you can never include too many books!). Some notable further entries include:
  • The Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
  • The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
  • Lady Audley's Secret - Mary Elizabeth Braddon
  • The Legend of Sleepy Hollow - Washington Irving
  • Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen