Top 100 Books to Read Before You DieTop 100 Books to Read Before You Die

I am not much of a reader, so this may take a while.  This list comes fromTime Magazine’s All-Time best 100 English language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

I will update with links as I read/purchase each one.


  1. To Kill a Mockingbird
    by Harper Lee
  2. 1984
    by George Orwell
  3. The Lord of the Rings (The Lord of the Rings, #1-3)
    by J.R.R. Tolkien
  4. The Catcher in the Rye
    by J.D. Salinger
  5. The Great Gatsby
    by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  6. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Chronicles of Narnia, #1)
    by C.S. Lewis
  7. Lord of the Flies
    by William Golding
  8. Animal Farm
    by George Orwell
  9. Catch-22
    by Joseph Heller
  10. The Grapes of Wrath
    by John Steinbeck
  11. Gone with the Wind
    by Margaret Mitchell
  12. Slaughterhouse-Five
    by Kurt Vonnegut
  13. Lolita
    by Vladimir Nabokov
  14. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
    by Ken Kesey
  15. A Clockwork Orange
    by Anthony Burgess
  16. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
    by Judy Blume (Goodreads Author)
  17. Atonement
    by Ian McEwan
  18. Watchmen (Watchmen #1-12)
    by Alan Moore (Goodreads Author)
  19. Never Let Me Go
    by Kazuo Ishiguro
  20. Things Fall Apart
    by Chinua Achebe
  21. Invisible Man
    by Ralph Ellison
  22. Mrs. Dalloway
    by Virginia Woolf
  23. Beloved
    by Toni Morrison
  24. On the Road
    by Jack Kerouac
  25. The Sun Also Rises
    by Ernest Hemingway
  26. Possession
    by A.S. Byatt
  27. The Big Sleep (Philip Marlowe, #1)
    by Raymond Chandler
  28. A Passage to India
    by E.M. Forster
  29. I, Claudius (Claudius, #1)
    by Robert Graves
  30. Their Eyes Were Watching God
    by Zora Neale Hurston
  31. The Sound and the Fury
    by William Faulkner
  32. All the King’s Men
    by Robert Penn Warren
  33. The Blind Assassin
    by Margaret Atwood (Goodreads Author)
  34. Native Son
    by Richard Wright
  35. To the Lighthouse
    by Virginia Woolf
  36. Ragtime
    by E.L. Doctorow
  37. The French Lieutenant’s Woman
    by John Fowles
  38. Light in August
    by William Faulkner
  39. Naked Lunch
    by William S. Burroughs
  40. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
    by John le Carré
  41. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
    by Carson McCullers
  42. Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
    by Cormac McCarthy
  43. White Noise
    by Don DeLillo
  44. Infinite Jest
    by David Foster Wallace
  45. Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
    by Evelyn Waugh
  46. Snow Crash
    by Neal Stephenson (Goodreads Author)
  47. Revolutionary Road
    by Richard Yates
  48. Midnight’s Children
    by Salman Rushdie
  49. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
    by Muriel Spark
  50. Death Comes for the Archbishop
    by Willa Cather
  51. The Bridge of San Luis Rey
    by Thornton Wilder
  52. American Pastoral (The American Trilogy, #1)
    by Philip Roth
  53. The Power and the Glory
    by Graham Greene
  54. The Crying of Lot 49
    by Thomas Pynchon
  55. Portnoy’s Complaint
    by Philip Roth
  56. Wide Sargasso Sea
    by Jean Rhys
  57. Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1)
    by William Gibson
  58. The Corrections
    by Jonathan Franzen
  59. Gravity’s Rainbow
    by Thomas Pynchon
  60. Red Harvest
    by Dashiell Hammett
  61. White Teeth
    by Zadie Smith
  62. Under the Volcano
    by Malcolm Lowry
  63. The Painted Bird
    by Jerzy Kosiński
  64. Go Tell It on the Mountain
    by James Baldwin
  65. A House for Mr Biswas
    by V.S. Naipaul
  66. Play It as It Lays
    by Joan Didion
  67. Lucky Jim
    by Kingsley Amis
  68. Ubik
    by Philip K. Dick
  69. Rabbit, Run (Rabbit Angstrom #1)
    by John Updike
  70. The Golden Notebook
    by Doris Lessing
  71. The Heart of the Matter
    by Graham Greene
  72. Pale Fire
    by Vladimir Nabokov
  73. The Moviegoer
    by Walker Percy
  74. The Confessions of Nat Turner
    by William Styron
  75. Tropic of Cancer
    by Henry Miller
  76. Appointment in Samarra
    by John O’Hara
  77. Money
    by Martin Amis
  78. Deliverance
    by James Dickey
  79. The Day of the Locust
    by Nathanael West
  80. Housekeeping
    by Marilynne Robinson
  81. The Man Who Loved Children
    by Christina Stead
  82. The Sot-Weed Factor
    by John Barth
  83. The Adventures of Augie March
    by Saul Bellow
  84. Herzog
    by Saul Bellow
  85. At Swim-Two-Birds
    by Flann O’Brien
  86. Call It Sleep
    by Henry Roth
  87. The Sheltering Sky
    by Paul Bowles
  88. A Handful of Dust
    by Evelyn Waugh
  89. The Sportswriter (Frank Bascombe, #1)
    by Richard Ford
  90. The Berlin Stories: The Last of Mr Norris/Goodbye to Berlin
    by Christopher Isherwood
  91. A Death in the Family
    by James Agee
  92. The Recognitions
    by William Gaddis
  93. Dog Soldiers
    by Robert Stone
  94. The Assistant
    by Bernard Malamud
  95. Loving
    by Henry Green
  96. Under the Net
    by Iris Murdoch
  97. A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement (A Dance to the Music of Time, #1-3)
    by Anthony Powell
  98. An American Tragedy
    by Theodore Dreiser
  99. Falconer
    by John Cheever
  100. The Death of the Heart
    by Elizabeth Bowen

By Kreuz