Back in 2007, I put together a list of 100 books to read before I die, gathering them from various “Top 100 Books” lists online and excluding any that I had already read from cover to cover, as opposed to dipping into them for study purposes.
The full list follows, although progress has been slow to the point of non-existent since starting my PhD. (35/100)
(1) Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
(2) Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
(3) Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
(4) Beowulf (5) The Bhagavad Gita
(6) Richard Doddridge Blackmore, Lorna Doone
(7) Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron
(8) Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
(9) Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth
(10) Albert Camus, The Outsider
(11) Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales
(12) Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
(13) Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
(14) Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
(15) Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote
(16) Guy de Maupassant, Pierre and Jean
(17) Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
(18) Charles Dickens, Bleak House
(19) Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
(20) Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
(21) Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
(22) Fyodor M Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
(23) Fyodor M Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
(24) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
(25) Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
(26) Alexandre Dumas, The Count Of Monte Cristo
(27) Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers
(28) George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
(29) George Eliot, Middlemarch
(30) Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
(31) William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
(32) Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
(33) Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
(34) E.M. Forster, Howards End
(25) E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
(36) John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga
(37) Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
(38) William Golding, Lord of the Flies
(39) Graeme Greene, The Power and the Glory
(40) Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd
(41) Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
(42) Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
(43) Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
(44) Joseph Heller, Catch-22
(45) Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
(46) Frank Herbert, Dune
(47) Homer, The Illiad
(48) Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame
(49) Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House
(50) Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
(51) Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
(52) Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat
(53) James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(54) Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
(55) Franz Kafka, The Trial
(56) Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
(57) Jack Kerouac, On the Road
(58) D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
(59) Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock
(60) Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley
(61) Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera(62) Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
(63) Herman Melville, Moby Dick
(64) Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
(65) E. Nesbit, The Railway Children
(66) Ovid, Metamorphoses
(67) Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
(68) Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast
(69) Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
(70) Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
(71) Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac
(72) Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
(73) J.D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
(74) Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
(75) William Shakespeare, King Lear
(76) William Shakespeare, Othello
(77) Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
(78) Nevil Shute, A Town Like Alice
(79) John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
(80) John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
(81) Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
(82) Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
(83) Bram Stoker, Dracula
(84) Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
(85) William Makepeace Thackeray, Barry Lyndon
(86) Thousand and One Nights
(87) Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
(88) Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
(89) Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right
(90) Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn
(91) Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now
(92) Virgil, The Aeneid
(93) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
(94) Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse 5
(95) Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
(96) Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall
(97) H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
(98) T.H.White, The Once and Future King
(99) Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
(100) Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie