Wait, didn’t I already do one of these? Yes, I did do a 101 Must-Read Classic Books list, but that was before my site blew up that one time and I lost all of my posts. Alas, my original post is gone … forever lost in the vast space of the internet. Last night, however, I thought I’d retype my many—ever-changing—bookish lists and save them where they hopefully won’t simply vanish.
Why type these lists, though? For me, it’s somewhat cathartic. I like lists, and I like being able to tick things off those lists. Goodreads is great for reviewing the books I’ve read, but there’s something about being able to organize lists and books that just makes me oh so happy, and they don’t really offer that to me.
So, this is how I keep track of books I absolutely need to read before I die.
Thus far, I’ve read about 35 of the 101 must-read classic books on my list, which means I’ve not exactly made a huge dent yet. I’m getting there, though. Slowly, but surely. 🙂
101 Must-Read Classic Books
| TITLE | AUTHOR | |
| 1. | Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen |
| 2. | The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald |
| 3. | 1984 | George Orwell |
| 4. | The Divine Comedy | Dante Alighieri |
| 5. | Catch-22 | Joseph Heller |
| 6. | Arabian Nights | Anonymous |
| 7. | Anne of Green Gables | L.M. Montgomery |
| 8. | The Shining | Stephen King |
| 9. | The War of the Worlds | H.G. Wells |
| 10. | Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert |
| 11. | Middlemarch | George Eliot |
| 12. | Moby-Dick | Herman Melville |
| 13. | The Grapes of Wrath | John Steinbeck |
| 14. | The Odyssey | Homer |
| 15. | The Sun Also Rises | Ernest Hemingway |
| 16. | The Catcher in the Rye | J.D. Salinger |
| 17. | Jane Eyre | Charlotte Brontë |
| 18. | To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee |
| 19. | The Bell Jar | Sylvia Plath |
| 20. | Slaughterhouse-Five | Kurt Vonnegut |
| 21. | Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland | Lewis Carroll |
| 22. | The Collected Stories and Poems | Edgar Allan Poe |
| 23. | Paradise Lost | John Milton |
| 24. | Faust | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
| 25. | The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner |
| 26. | The Lord of the Rings | J.R.R. Tolkien |
| 27. | To the Lighthouse | Virginia Woolf |
| 28. | Frankenstein | Mary Shelley |
| 29. | Wuthering Heights | Charlotte Brontë |
| 30. | Lord of the Flies | William Golding |
| 31. | Animal Farm | George Orwell |
| 32. | The Scarlet Letter | Nathaniel Hawthorne |
| 33. | A Clockwork Orange | Anthony Burgess |
| 34. | The Canterbury Tales | Geoffrey Chaucer |
| 35. | Brave New World | Aldous Huxley |
| 36. | On the Road | Jack Keruoac |
| 37. | The Handmaid’s Tale | Margaret Atwood |
| 38. | Gone with the Wind | Margaret Mitchell |
| 39. | Fairy Tales and Stories | Hans Christian Anderson |
| 40. | The Phantom of the Opera | Gaston Leroux |
| 41. | The Count of Monte Cristo | Alexander Dumas |
| 42. | Lady Chatterley’s Lover | D.H. Lawrence |
| 43. | A Christmas Carol | Charles Dickens |
| 44. | The Secret Garden | Frances Hodgson Burnett |
| 45. | The Harry Potter Series | J.K. Rowling |
| 46. | Fahrenheit 451 | Ray Bradbury |
| 47. | Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea | Jules Verne |
| 48. | 2001: A Space Odyssey | Arthur C. Clarke |
| 49. | The Art of War | Sun Tzu |
| 50. | The Complete Works | H.P. Lovecraft |
| 51. | Never Let Me Go | Kazuo Ishiguro |
| 52. | I, Claudius | Robert Graves |
| 53. | The Picture of Dorian Gray | Oscar Wilde |
| 54. | The Time Machine | H.G. Wells |
| 55. | Dracula | Bram Stoker |
| 56. | Persuasion | Jane Austen |
| 57. | The Plague | Albert Camus |
| 58. | The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy | Douglas Adams |
| 59. | Little Women | Louisa May Alcott |
| 60. | Dune | Frank Herbert |
| 61. | The Wonderful Wizard of Oz | L.Frank Baum |
| 62. | The Complete Sherlock Holmes | Arthur Conan Doyle |
| 63. | Murder on the Orient Express | Agatha Christie |
| 64. | The Chronicles of Narnia | C.S. Lewis |
| 65. | Beowulf | Anonymous |
| 66. | The Turn of the Screw | Henry James |
| 67. | Dream of the Red Chamber | Cao Xueqin |
| 68. | The Complete Works | William Shakespeare |
| 69. | Aesop’s Fables | Aesop |
| 70. | The Princess of Cleves | Madame de la Fayette |
| 71. | I, Robot | Isaac Asimov |
| 72. | The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde | Robert Louis Stevenson |
| 73. | Utopia | Thomas More |
| 74. | Don Quixote | Miguel de Cervantes |
| 75. | Ulysses | James Joyce |
| 76. | Crime and Punishment | Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
| 78. | The Iliad | Homer |
| 79. | The Hell-bound Heart | Clive Barker |
| 80. | Heart of Darkness | Joseph Conrad |
| 81. | The Kite Runner | Khaled Hosseini |
| 82. | War and Peace | Leo Tolstoy |
| 83. | Gulliver’s Travels | Jonathan Swift |
| 84. | The Hunchback of Notre Dame | Victor Hugo |
| 85. | Oedipus the King | Sophocles |
| 86. | Tess of D’urbervilles | Thomas Hardy |
| 87. | Dead Souls | Nikolai Gogol |
| 88. | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest | Ken Kesey |
| 89. | Vanity Fair | William Makepeace Thackeray |
| 90. | Candide | Voltaire |
| 91. | Ghost Story | Peter Straub |
| 92. | The Castle | Franz Kafka |
| 93. | Peter Pan | J.M. Barrie |
| 94. | Emma | Jane Austen |
| 95. | The Diary of a Young Girl | Anne Frank |
| 96. | Rebecca | Daphne du Maurier |
| 97. | The Planet of the Apes | Pierre Boulle |
| 98. | The Princess Bride | William Goldman |
| 99. | The Book Thief | Markus Zusak |
| 100. | American Psycho | Bret Easton Ellis |
| 101. | Perfume | Patrick Süskind |
When you’re done reading through my 101 Must-Read Classic Books list, check out my 50 Must-Read Horror Books list. It’s to die for. 😉
