List of 100 must read books

[PhilsMajicHat]

I have been googling and would like to work my way through a list of “must read books”, but there’s so many lists and they are really varied!

I like fiction, but not adverse to some non fiction/biographical books.

has anyone else worked their way through a list like this, and what list did you use?

Harold Bloom's list is pretty good. I've been following it for years, though I don't just read his recommendations. Personally, I'd say everyone should try at least some of the following:

George Eliot: Middlemarch
Dickens: David Copperfield and Bleak House
Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
George Orwell: 1984 and his essays
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World, Point Counter Point and his essays
Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited
D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow and Women in Love
Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure
Oscar Wilde: Dorian Gray
James Joyce: Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses
Bill Bryson: A Short History of Nearly Everything
Carl Sagan: Cosmos
Stephen Hawking: A Brief History of Time
Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene
Bertrand Russell: The Problems of Philosophy and The History of Western Philosophy
Yuval Harari: Sapiens

Obviously that is a hopelessly inadequate and parochial list. Most critics would agree that Shakespeare and Dante are the two supreme writers in the western canon, with Homer in third and then maybe Proust or Tolstoy in fourth. Marquez and Borges are the two great South American writers, I guess, and the Bhagavad Gita is one of the supreme works of Asian/Eastern literature. Then there is Plato's dialogues, which most people would say are the foundation of western thought. Alan Watts provides a pretty good guide to eastern philosophy and mysticism. His books on Zen Buddhism, Taoism, etc, are wonderful, but they're obviously from the perspective of a European/outsider. American novelists like Hemingway, Twain, Faulkener, Updike, Bellow, etc, are musts. Nabokov is one of the supreme English-language novelists of the 20th-century.

I've never worked my way through a list, but I will occasionally scan one and make a note or two for future reference.

I think I may have posted something like that from the New York Times, and I'm sure there are a few British counterparts. I saw one once from one of the very respectable London bookstores - but I'd be wary depending on how they're compiled. I was once given a book on that subject - I wish I knew where it was - called something like The Book of Books. Maybe a library could advise on what lists were best.

I must say that Dappy's Bloom list looks good.

Those lists are fun to compare with your own reading but I wouldn't make a point of reading everything in them, there's often a lot of junk on them. The most interesting list I've seen is Big Jubilee Read which was compiled for the Queens Platinum Jubilee and features one book for every year of her reign and has books from across the Commonwealth.

Ooo that Big Jubilee Read looks very interesting. Definitely going to have a good look at that.

When I'd had a long hiatus from reading, but wanted to get back in to it I looked at the BBCs Books That Shaped The World list. It's divided in to themes as well. I haven't read them all, but found it a useful starting point. It's only fiction though.

I’ll definitely add some of these to my list, thank you for taking the time to list them 🙂

This looks really good!

I think I’ll do as a couple of you have suggested, look through a couple of the lists and make a note of any that look interesting

Thanks for including Thomas Hardy and knowing nod for choosing Jude The Obscure.