Migrated from my old blog...
Top fiction books I think every adult should read at least once in their lifetime:(alphabetical by title, unless I think you should read the author's works, then by last name)
Aesop’s Fables*
Alice in Wonderland*
Animal Farm – George Orwell*
Anything by Jane Austen*
Beowulf - Anonymous*
Big Red – Jim Kjelgaard*
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley*
Bulfinch’s Mythology – Thomas Bulfinch
Call of the Wild – Jack London*
Calumet K – Merwin & Webster*
Candide - Voltaire
The Canterbury Tales – Thomas Chaucer*
Anything by Agatha Christie*
The Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis*
Cyrano de Bergerac – Edmund Rosten*
All of the books by Dante
Either The DaVinci Code or Angels & Demons by Dan Brown*
Anything by Charles Dickens* (with the exception of the Edwin Drood mystery)
Don Quixote – Miguel Cervantes
Anything by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle*
Anything by Alexandre Dumas*
At least one book by Daphne duMaurier*
El Cid – Robert Krepps
Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card*
Any book by Erle Stanley Gardner*
Exodus – Leon Uris*
The Eye of the Needle – Ken Follett*
Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury*
Any book by Ian Fleming*
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley*
The Godfather – Mario Puzo
Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
The Good Earth – Pearl Buck*
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald*
Gulliver’s Travels – Johnathan Swift*
The Harry Potter Novels – J.K. Rowling*
Anything by O. Henry*
The Horatio Hornblower books – C.S. Forrester
Anything by Victor Hugo*
I, The Jury – Mickey Spillane*
I, Robot - Isaac Asimov*
Idylls of the King – Alfred Lord Tennyson
The Iliad and The Odyssey – Homer
Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte*
The Joy Luck Club – Amy Tan*
The Jungle Book – Rudyard Kipling*
King Solomon’s Mines – H. Rider Haggard
The Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper*
Le Morte D’Arthur (find a good translation) – Thomas Mallory*
Any book by Sinclair Lewis*
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
Any book by James Michener
The Mists of Avalon – Marion Zimmer Brown*
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
The Mummy – Anne Rice*
National Velvet – Enid Bagnold
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck*
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway*
The Once and Future King – T.H. White*
One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest – Ken Kesey*
Paradise Lost – John Milton
Patriot Games – Tom Clancy*
Peter Pan – JM Barrie
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
The Pillars of Earth - Ken Follett*
Complete Works – Edgar Allan Poe*
The Prince - Machiavelli
The Promise and/or The Chosen – Chaim Potok*
The Rabbit Novels – John Updike
Everything by Ayn Rand*
Riders of the Purple Sage – Zane Grey*
Rip Van Winkle – Washington Irving
Robin Hood – Howard Pyle*
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
The Scarlet Letter – Hawthorne*
The Scarlet Pimpernel – Baroness Orczy
The Searchers – Alan le May*
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett*
A Separate Peace – John Knowles
The complete works – William Shakespeare*
The Song of Roland - Anonymous*
Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
The Stand (uncut) – Stephen King*
Stardoc series - S.L. Viehl*
State of Fear – Michael Crichton*
Anything by Robert Louis Stevenson*
Tarzan – Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Thornbirds - Colleen McCullough*
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee*
To Sir With Love – E.B. Braithwaite*
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute*
Anything by J.R.R. Tolkien*
Anything by Tolstoy
Trustee from the Toolroom – Nevil Shute*
Any book by Mark Twain
Two Years Before the Mast – R.H. Dana
Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe
Everything by Jules Verne*
The Walking Drum – Louis L’Amour*
War of the Worlds – HG Wells*
The Warden – Anthony Trollope
Watership Down – Richard Adams*
Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne*
The World According to Garp – John Irving*
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
(The asterisk denotes books I have read. At some point, I'm hoping to read them all. If I made a list of all the books I was planning on reading, it would be twice this long. And if I made a list of every book I've already read, I'd be here all day.)
Enjoy and feel free to comment here or create a similar list on your own blog - just don't forget to say so in the comments, so I can link to you.PS. I know I'm forgetting somebody. I was trying to keep it to the top 100. Who do you think should be on here who's not, and why?
(Edited 6/4/07: I went over 100, so now it's just the top books. Let's face it, there are always more than 100 you should read anyway.)
(Edited 1/24/08: Google ate my original post from March of 2007, so I rebuilt this. If you commented there, please comment here.)
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