100 Books You Should Read in a Lifetime

100 books with summary on witcritic.com

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

1. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/21/best-books-of-the-21st-century

2. https://www.rd.com/list/books-read-before-die/

3. https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2022/05/100-must-read-classic-books

4. https://medium.com/world-literature/creating-the-ultimate-list-100-books-to-read-before-you-die-45f1b722b2e5