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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