100 Books to Read in a Lifetime

100 Books to Read in a Lifetime

So many books, so little time. With this in mind, the Amazon Books editors set out to compile a list of 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime.

We had a few goals when we started out: We wanted the list to cover all stages of a life (which is why you'll find children's books in here), and we didn't want the list to feel like homework.

 Of course, no such list can be comprehensive – our lives, we hope, are long and varied – but we talked and argued and sifted and argued some more and came up with a list, our list, of favorites. What do you think? How did we do?

100 Books You Should Read in a Lifetime

1. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

3. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

4. 1984 by George Orwell

5. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling

6. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

8. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

9. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

10. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

11. Fahrenheit 451: A Novel by Ray Bradbury

12. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

13. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

14. Animal Farm by George Orwell

15. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

16. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

17. The Help by Kathryn Stockett

18. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

19. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

20. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

21. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

22. Lord of the Flies by William Golding

23. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

24. Night by Elie Wiesel

25. Hamlet by William Shakespeare

26. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

27. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle

28. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

29. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

30. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

31. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

32. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

33. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

34. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

35. The Little Prince by Antoine Saint-Exupery

36. Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein

37. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

38. The Giver by Lois Lowry

39. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

40. Macbeth by William Shakespeare

41. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

42. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

43. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

44. The Holy Bible: New King James Version by Thomas Nelson

45. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

46. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas pere

47. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

48. The Color Purple by Alice Walker

49. East of Eden by John Steinbeck

50. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

51. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

52. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

53. The Stand by Stephen King

54. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

55. Watership Down by Richard Adams

56. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

57. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

58. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

59. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

60. Memoirs of a Geisha: A Novel by Arthur Golden

61. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

62. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling

63. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

64. Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire Book 1) by George R.R. Martin

65. The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure by William Goldman

66. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

67. Life of Pi by Yann Martel

68. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

69. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

70. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

71. Dracula by Bram Stoker

72. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling

73. Catching Fire (The Hunger Games Book 2) by Suzanne Collins

74. Water for Elephants: A Novel by Sara Gruen

75. The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe

76. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

77. Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

78. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

79. The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel by Barbara Kingslover

80. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

81. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

82. The Odyssey by Homer

83. Celebrating Silence: Excerpts From Five Years of Weekly Knowledge 1995-2000 by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

84. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

85. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

86. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

87. The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough

88. The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls

89. Mockingjay (The Final Book of the Hunger Games) by Suzanne Collins

90. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

91. The Road by Cormac McCarthy

92. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

93. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

94. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

95. Beloved by Toni Morrison

96. Helen Keller: The Story of My Life by Helen Keller

97. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

98. From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg

99. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

100. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky