The British librarian’s organization — “Museum, Libraries and Archives Council” — has put together a List of Books to Read Before You Die.
I have a pretty good start on the list. Of the ones I haven’t read yet, I have four on my bookshelves at home, so I’ll probably get to them someday.
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- The Bible
- The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
- 1984 by George Orwell
- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- All Quite on the Western Front by E M Remarque
- His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
- Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
- Tess of the D’urbevilles by Thomas Hardy
- Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
- The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
- Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
- The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
- The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
- The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
- The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
- Life of Pi by Yann Martel
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn
Wow. I’ve already read eleven of them, with about six others on my reading list right now. All I can say is thank goodness there’s no Faulkner on the list. Sheer torture, he is.
Yeah, it seems like they tried to be accessible to people who read for pleasure by not putting too many high-flying, torturous tomes on the list. On my “god, please no” list are Hemingway and friggin’ Moby Dick. I wish someone would do an abridged “Moby Dick: Just the Good Stuff” version where they cut out all the crap about whaling industry. That’s always where I get bogged down and stop reading.
Sheesh! I haven’t even read a third of those. The Alchemist is wonderful, if you haven’t read it. I will venture to say they should have included Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, as well.
I’ve read twelve (and a third of LOTR), and I’m only seventeen. I hope that’s not a bad omen 😉 Does anyone else find it sad that they’ve misspelled “quiet”?
Oh, and there is an edited Moby-Dick that cuts out the parts about the whaling industry. Not sure where to get it–I read the unabridged version.