Sunday, April 6, 2008

Telegraph: The Perfect Library

First posted 6/27/2020.

Telegraph:

The Perfect Library

This British magazine assembled its ultimate reading list of 110 books presented, unranked, in the following categories: classics, poetry, literary fiction, romantic fiction, children’s books, sci-fi, crime, history, lives, books that changed the world, and books that changed your world.


CLASSICS

  • Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813)
  • Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre (1847)
  • Charles Dickens David Copperfield (1850)
  • George Eliot Middlemarch, a Study of Provincial Life (1872)
  • Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary (1857)
  • Homer The Odyssey (800 B.C.) / The Iliad (800 B.C.)
  • Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
  • William Makepeace Thackeray Vanity Fair (1848)
  • Leo Tolstoy War and Peace (1869)
  • Anthony Trollope The Barchester Chronicles (1857)

POETRY

  • Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia) (1320)
  • William Blake Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794)
  • Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales (1387)
  • T. S. Eliot The Waste Land (1922)
  • Ted Hughes Collected Poems (2003)
  • John Keats Odes (1819)
  • John Milton Paradise Lost (1667)
  • William Shakespeare Sonnets (1609)
  • William Wordsworth The Prelude (1799)
  • William Butler Yeats Collected Poems (1927)

LITERARY FICTION

  • Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
  • Henry James Portrait of a Lady (1881)
  • James Joyce Ulysses (1922)
  • Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
  • Toni Morrison Beloved (1987)
  • Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time, aka Remembrance of Things Past (A La Recherche du Temps Perdu) (series: 1913-1927)
  • Philip Roth The Human Stain (2000)
  • Muriel Spark The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960)
  • John Updike Rabbit (series: 1960-1991)
  • Evelyn Waugh Sword of Honour (trilogy: 1952-1961)

ROMANTIC FICTION

  • Daphne Du Maurier Rebecca (1938)
  • Robert Graves I, Claudius (1934)
  • Thomas Hardy Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891)
  • Choderlos de Laclos Dangerous Liaisons (Les Liaisons Dangereuses) (1782)
  • Sir Thomas Malory Le Morte d’Arthur (1485)
  • Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind (1936)
  • Patrick O’Brian Master and Commander (1969)
  • Jean Plaidy The Plantagenet Saga (series: 1976-1982)
  • Boris Pasternak Dr. Zhivago (1957)
  • Mary Renault Alexander Trilogy (1969-1981)

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

  • Jean de Brunhoff Babar (series: 1931-1940)
  • William Grahame The Wind in the Willows (1908)
  • C.S. Lewis The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950)
  • A.A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)
  • Edith Nesbit The Railway Children (1906)
  • Philip Pullman His Dark Materials (trilogy: 1995-2000)
  • Arthur Ransome Swallows and Amazons (1930)
  • J.K. Rowling Harry Potter (series: 1997-2007)
  • Robert Louis Stevenson Treasure Island (1883)
  • J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy: 1954-55)

SCI-FI

  • Isaac Asimov Foundation (trilogy: 1951-1953)
  • Arthur C. Clarke 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
  • Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
  • William Gibson Neuromancer (1984)
  • Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932)
  • George Orwell 1984 (1949)
  • Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818)
  • Jules Verne Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)
  • H.G. Wells The Time Machine (1895)
  • John Wyndham The Day of the Triffids (1951)

CRIME

  • John le Carré Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974)
  • Raymond Chandler The Big Sleep (1939)
  • Agatha Christie Murder on the Orient Express (1934)
  • Wilkie Collins The Woman in White (1860)
  • Arthur Conan Doyle The Complete Sherlock Holmes (series of 4 novels and 56 short stories: 1887-1927)
  • Dashiell Hammett The Maltese Falcon (1929)
  • Thomas Harris Red Dragon (1981)
  • Patricia Highsmith The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)
  • Elmore Leonard Killshot (1989)
  • Edgar Allan Poe The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)

BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

  • Carl von Clausewitz On War (1832)
  • Charles Darwin The Origin of Species (1859)
  • Denis Diderot (editor) The Encyclopedia (L’Encyclopédie) (1772)
  • Sigmund Freud The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
  • Thomas Hobbes Leviathan (1651)
  • Niccolo Machiavelli The Prince (1532)
  • Karl Marx Das Kapital (1867)
  • Thomas Paine The Rights of Man (1791)
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Social Contract (1762)
  • Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America (1840)

BOOKS THAT CHANGED YOUR WORLD

  • Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
  • Richard Bach Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970)
  • Malcolm Gladwell The Tipping Point (2002)
  • Peter Mayle A Year in Provence (1989)
  • Dave Pelzer A Child Called ‘It’ (1995)
  • Robert M. Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
  • Ben Schott Schott’s Original Miscellany (2002)
  • Delia Smith How to Cook (1999)
  • Lynne Truss Eats, Shoots, and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (2003)
  • Naomi Wolf The Beauty Myth (2002)

HISTORY

  • anonymous The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (9th century)
  • Winston Churchill A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (4 volumes: 1956)
  • Orlando Figes A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (1996)
  • Edward Gibbon The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (8-volume set: 1787)
  • Herodotus The Histories (5th century)
  • T. E. Lawrence Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922)
  • Steven Runciman A History of the Crusades (3 volumes: 1951-1954)
  • Simon Schama Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989)
  • A.J.P. Taylor The Origins of the Second World War (1961)
  • Thucydides The History of the Peloponnesian War (5th century)

LIVES

  • St Augustine of Hippo Confessions (400 A.D.)
  • James Boswell The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)
  • Alan Clark Diaries (3 volumes: 2002)
  • Elizabeth Gaskell A Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857)
  • Robert Graves Goodbye to All That (1929)
  • Primo Levi If This is a Man (1947)
  • Siegfried Sassoon Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928)
  • Lytton Strachey Eminent Victorians (1918)
  • Suetonius Lives of the Caesars (aka "The Twelve Caesars") (De Vita Caesarum) (121 A.D.)
  • Vasari Lives of the Artists (aka "The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects") (1550)

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