300 Books to Read in Your Life

Some time ago, I came across a list of books that supposedly everyone should read at least once in their life, and I began to count.

I pride myself on being an avid reader, and I had high hopes on having read at least a decent number of all the books on the list. Turns out I’ve read exactly 100 of the 300. I was a little impressed, but also disappointed. Well, at least now I’ll have several more books on my to-read list.

How did they put together this list? It’s not exactly a list of classics, but more of a list of most-talked-about books. Books that come up again and again, even if some of them I’ve never heard of before.

If you’re interested in seeing which books I’ve read already, I’ve prepared a list below. Feel free to skip, but I really suggest taking a look at the linked list, so you can add more important books to your list.

What books do you think should be on the list that aren’t? What books do you think I should read? Let me know in a comment!

1. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
2. 1984, George Orwell
3. Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling
4. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
5. Animal Farm, George Orwell
6. The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
7. The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
8. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
9. The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Lord of the Rings series,J.R.R. Tolkien
12. Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare
13. Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
14. Farenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
15. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
16. The Hunger Games series, Suzanne Collins
17. The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
18. The Giver, Lois Lowry
19. Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White
20. Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
21. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
22. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
23. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
24. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
25. Hamlet, Shakespeare
26. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
27. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
28. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
29. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
30. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
31. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
32. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
33. The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton
34. Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery
35. The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd
36. Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom
37. The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas, Sr.
38. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
39. Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes
40. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
41. MacBeth, Shakespeare
42. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
43. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
44. Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
45. The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
46. The Little House series, Laura Ingalls Wilder
47. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
48. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
49. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
50. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
51. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle
52. Dracula, Bram Stoker
53. Matilda, Roald Dahl
54. The Fault in Our Stars, John Green
55. Stories by Edgar Allan Poe
56. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
57. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
58. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum
59. The Call of the Wild, Jack London
60. A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin
61. Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Paterson
62. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare
63. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
64. The Road, Cormac McCarthy
65. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
66. Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
67. The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
68. And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
69. His Dark Materials series, Philip Pullman
70. Aesop’s Fables
71. Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
72. The Glass Castle, Jeanette Walls
73. Sophie’s World, Jostein Gaarder
74. Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
75. The Prince, Machiavelli
76. The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
77. The Trial, Franz Kafka
78. Tuck Everlasting, Natalie Babbitt
79. Emma, Jane Austen
80. Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales
81. Beloved, Toni Morrison
82. The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
83. Number the Stars, Lois Lowry
84. A Little Princess, Frances Hodgson Burnett
85. Story of My Life, Helen Keller
86. Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie
87. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
88. Maus, Art Spiegelman
89. Island of the Blue Dolphins, Scott O’Dell
90. Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky
91. Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie
92. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
93. Holes, Louis Sachar
94. The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
95. Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
96. Howard’s End, E.M. Forster
97. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
98. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
99. The Lottery, Shirley Jackson
100. The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer

Also, below here I will keep updating this post as I read more of the books on this list. Let’s see if I ever hit 300.

101. Julius Caesar, Shakespeare

102. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Judy Blume

103. The Color Purple, Alice Walker

104. Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne

105. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

106. Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman

107. El Alquimista, Paulo Coelho

108. La Sombra del Viento, Carlos Ruiz Zafón

109. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

110. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini

111. The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett

112. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman

113. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou

114. We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson

115. American Gods, Neil Gaiman

116. Catch-22, Joseph Heller

117. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

118. Night, Elie Wiesel

119. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

120. Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden

121. The Help, Kathryn Stockett

122. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

123. Life of Pi, Yann Martel

124. A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini

125. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

126. The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger

127. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway

128. Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

129. Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier

130. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

131. The Stand, Stephen King

132. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

133. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith

134. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

135. Don Quijote, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

136. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Graham

137. Dune, Frank Herbert

138. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver

139. Cien Años de Soledad, Gabriel García Márquez

140. L’Étranger, Albert Camus

141. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

142. Persuasion, Jane Austen

143. All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque

144. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

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