What books should everyone have read

[remainin]

...by the time they're 20?

I'm trying to compile a list of "essential reading" for my teen DS. What do you think should be included?

1984, George Orwell
The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
One Charles Dickens. I like A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations and David Copperfield
A Room with a View, E M Forster
The Life of Pi, Yann Martel
Animal Farm, George Orwell
The Woman in Black, by Susan Hill
The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold

For starters :)

Jane Eyre
Wuthereing Heights
At least one Dickens
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome, just to show that some classics are very funny.

Out of interest, what are you making the list? Is it more so they've read the books they would be "expected" to read, or so they get a broader education? Many books would make both lists, but to broaden their understanding of the world the list should probably include more international authors than the standard UK GCSE syllabus. One I'd suggest is Small Island by Andrea Levy, who was British but the book covers the experience of Jamaicans immigrating after ww2, so a good view of racism at that time.

Whatever they enjoy that encourages them to keep reading.

My grandmother sent me a list from the Times when I was about 17, which pre-dates various things like the Life of Pi. But I have decided life is too short to read Moby Dick.

@Foxyloxy1plus1

Whatever they enjoy that encourages them to keep reading.

^ this

I would say whatever books they want to read. Nobody is going to enjoy someone else's list foisted on them.

Oh the places you’ll go - Dr Seuss

Agree that enjoying reading is not about shoulds.

The Bible or any comparable scripture from another faith such as the Koran or Torah. I say this as an agnostic, because so much of the world's culture and knowledge is founded on ancient scriptures - of course, if your DC have a religious faith, such reading might also bring spiritual benefits.

Goodnight Mr Tom
Small Island
To Kill a Mockingbird
I guess they'll have read a version of Diary of Anne Frank at school?
I even think, to develop reading for fun, the Da Vinci Code.
Rebecca
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Lord of the Rings

I was a voracious reader when younger, then stopped the last few years at school as we were forced to read stuff I hated and spend ages critiquing it. Before I started uni I went to the library and picked up loads, and got right back into it. The key is to find the books you love, and occasionally step off the usual path.

The Handmaid's Tale
The Road to Wigan Pier
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch
The Gulag Archipelago
The Color Purple
Lord of the Rings (or at least, The Hobbit)
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole and all the sequels
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Bell Jar
The Secret History

Whatever he enjoys 👍

PLUS

Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder

Goodreads has lots of lists like this, often compiled by popular vote so you have a better chance of the books being ones that a teen would enjoy.

I think unless a teen is already a voracious reader some of the books suggest here could make reading a chore and not a pleasure.

I thought your list needed some women or tales about women, so some here, plus books I love:
Atwood - Handmaid's Tale
S. E Hinton - The Outsiders
Lahiri - The Namesake
Ngozi Adichie - We Should All be Feminists and Americanah
Patricia Lockwood - Priestdaddy
Fitzgerald - Offshore
Thackeray - Vanity Fair
Conrad - The Secret Agent
Mortimer - Daddy's Gone a-hunting
Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men
Wilkie Collins - No Name
Hardy - Far from the Madding Crowd
Blackman - Noughts and Crosses series
Stella Gibbons - Starlight or The Bachelor or Cold Comfort farm

I do love a list.

Alice Walker The Color Purple
Aldous Huxley Brave New World
Kazuo Ishiguro Remains of the Day
Joseph Heller Catch 22
Stephen King The Stand
JRR Tolkien The Lord of the Rings
Jung Chang Wild Swans
Xin Ran Sky Burial
Christopher Hitchens God Is Not Good
Reno Eddo-Lodge Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race
Jeanette Winterson Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Caroline Criado-Perez Invisible Women
Neil Gaiman American Gods
Anthony Doerr All the Light We Cannot See

I have to say that despite reading almost everything I've never got through Dickens or War and Peace. (I also think Wuthering Heights is massively overrated gothic nonsense), sorry!

The Book Thief

A Summer Birdcage by Margaret Drabble
Possession by AS Byatt

A good translation of Beowulf.
Retellings of Greek/Roman/Egyptian/Norse myths. Roger Lancelyn Green's are good, though they might be a bit "young" for a teen.

Girl Woman Other by Bernadine Evaristo

(From TES website)

This is TES' top 100 books to read before you leave secondary school, as voted by teachers.

1. 1984 by George Orwell

1. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

1. Animal Farm by George Orwell

1. Lord of the Flies by William Golding

1. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

1. The Harry Potter Series by JK Rowling

1. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

1. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

1. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

10. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

11. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

12. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne

13. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

14. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

15. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

16. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

17. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

18. A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines

19. The Lord of the Rings trilogy by JRR Tolkien

20. Danny, Champion of the World by Roald Dahl

21. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

22. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

23. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

24. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

25. A Passage to India by EM Forster

26. Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo

27. The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien

28. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

29. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

30. Holes by Louis Sachar

31. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

32. The Noughts and Crosses trilogy by Malorie Blackman

33. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

34. War Horse by Michael Morpurgo

35. Atonement by Ian McEwan

36. The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins

37. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman

38. Dracula by Bram Stoker

39. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

=40. A Room With a View by EM Forster

=40. Beloved by Toni Morrison

42. Wonder by RJ Palacio

43. Emma by Jane Austen

44. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

=45. Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngoxi Adichie

=45. The Color Purple by Alice Walker

47. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

48. The Sherlock Holmes series by Arthur Conan Doyle

49. Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee

50. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

51. Anita and Me by Meera Syal

52. The Discworld series by Terry Pratchett

53. Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne

54. Skellig by David Almond

55. Life of Pi by Yann Martel

56. Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

57. The Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer

58. A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift

59. My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

60. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

61. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

62. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

63. The Fault In Our Stars by John Green

64. Dubliners by James Joyce

65. Face by Benjamin Zephaniah

66. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr

67. White Teeth by Zadie Smith

68. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

=69. Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton

=69. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

=71. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick

=71. I am David by Anne Holm

=73. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

=73. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

=73. V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

76. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

77. A Song of Ice and Fire series by George RR Martin

78. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

=79. Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison

=79. Empire of the Sun by JG Ballard

=79. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

82. The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

=83. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

=83. Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse

=83. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

=86. A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly

=86. Heroes by Robert Cormier

88. Refugee Boy by Benjamin Zephaniah

=89. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

=89. Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally

91. Forever by Judy Blume

=92. Coram Boy by Jamila Gavin

=92. Stone Cold by Robert Swindells

94. A Time to Dance by Bernard MacLaverty

=95. Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood

=95. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

=97. The War of the Worlds by HG Wells

=97. The Tracy Beaker series by Jacqueline Wilson

=99. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson

=99. Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson

=99. The Time Machine by HG Wells

Some really good ones on it. Though it's a lot of books to get through if they've not read any of them yet!!

These lists always have a few which I consider overrated pretentious twaddle and I get viscerally horrified at the thought of making them compulsory.

I think my ideal would be something in between a list of specific titles and ‘whatever you want’ - I would want everyone to read enough variety that there are some classics, some books by people who aren’t white Europeans, some comedy, a range of fictional genres like mystery and sci-fi and some classic non-fiction.

There’s some wonderful stuff on that TES list but unless I have miscounted about three quarters of them are by men!

A lot of white male authors here! You might want to seek out more plural voices if your aim is that your DC gets a broad education and insight through this project.