100 Books to Read in a Lifetime

A bucket list of books to create a well-read life (taken from a list made by Amazon's Book Editors).

Translate This Page

"So Many Books, So Little Time"

2014 - With the above quote in mind, the Amazon Book Editors set out to compile a list.  They had a few goals in mind:  the list should cover all stages of life (including childhood), and the list should not feel like homework.  No such list can be comprehensive - human lives, hopefully, are long and varied - but after much discussion and argument the editors came up with a list of favorites. 

Meet Big Brother - 1984

Explore the Universe - A Brief History of Time

Memoir as Metafiction - A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

A Child-Soldier's Story - A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

Wicked Good Fun - The Bad Beginning: A Series of Unfortunate Events Book 1

The 60's Kids Classic - A Wrinkle in Time

A Short-Form Master - Selected Stories of Alice Munro

Go Down the Rabbit Hole... - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Unseated a President - All the President's Men

An Irish-American Memoir - Angela's Ashes

The Angst of Adolescence - Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret

A Literary Page Turner - Bel Canto: A Novel

The Ghosts of Slavery - Beloved: A Novel

Why and How We Run - Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greates Race the World has Never Seen

A Journey From Haiti - Breath, Eyes, Memory

Launched Its Own Catchphrase - Catch-22

Vintage Roald Dahl - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

The Timeless Classic - Charlotte's Web

Ambitious and Humane - Cutting for Stone: A Novel

Vulnerability Breeds Courage - Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead

For Reluctant Readers - Diary of a Wimpy Kid

A Science Fiction Classic - Dune

"It was a pleasure to burn." - Fahrenheit 451

Gonzo Journalism Takes Flight - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Marriage Can Be a Real Killer - Gone Girl

First Published in 1947 - Goodnight Moon

Dickens' Best Novel - Great Expectations

Understanding Societies - Guns, Germs and Steel

Meet the Boy Wizard - Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone

True Crime at its Best - In Cold Blood

Award-winning Short Story Debut - Interpreter of Maladies

A Literary Milestone - Invisible Man

A Brilliant Graphic Novel - Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

Don't Eat While You Read This - Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

One of the Best of 2013 - Life After Life: A Novel

Childhood on the Frontier - Little House on the Prairie

Nabokov's Triumph - Lolita

A Latin American Masterpiece - Love in the Time of Cholera

A Saga Set on the Reservation - Love Medicine

A Life-Changing Book - Man's Search for Meaning

Funny and Poignant - Me Talk Pretty One Day

A Beautifullly-Written Novel - Middlesex

Rushdie's Breakthrough - Midnight's Children

Lewis Hits It Out of the Park - Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

A Writer's Writer - Of Human Bondage

The Essence of the Beats - On the Road

A Remarkable Woman's Story - Out of Africa

A Groundbreaking Graphic Novel - Persepolis

Roth at His Finest - Portnoy's Complaint

The Perennial Favorite - Pride and Prejudice

The Birth of Ecology - Silent Spring

The Absurdist WW2 Novel - Slaughterhouse-Five

How Lincoln Led - Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

19th Century High Society - The Age of Innocence

Chabon's Magnum Opus - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

A Classic Modern Autobiography - The Autobiography of Malcolm X

The International Sensation - The Book Thief

The Trials of a "Ghetto Nerd" - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Meet Holden Caulfield - The Catcher in the Rye

Exploring a Mother's Past - The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother

Great But Divisive - The Corrections

A Triumph of Narrative Nonfiction - The Devil in the White City

Moving and Eloquent - Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl

A Soulful Young Adult Novel - The Fault in Our Stars

Classic Dystopia - The Giver

Pullman's Fantasy Classic - The Golden Compass

The Joys of Imagination - Where the Sidewalk Ends

Let the Wild Rumpus Start! - Where the Wild Things Are

The Rich are Different... - The Great Gatsby

Feminist Speculative Fiction - The Handmaid's Tale

A Boy, a Bear and a Honeypot - The House at Pooh Corner

Reality TV Writ Large - The Hunger Games

Race, Ethics, and Medicine - The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

A Darkly Funny Memoir - The Liars' Club

Monsters, Mythology and a Boy - The Lightning Thief

Unique and Universal - The Little Prince

First-rate Chandler Noir - The Long Good-bye

The History of Terrorism - The Looming Tower

One Ring to Rule Them All... - The Fellowship of the Ring

A Deeply Human Account - The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

The Origins of Food - Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History in Four Meals

An Odd and Original Journey - The Phantom Tollbooth

Missionaries in Africa - The Poisonwood Bible

The Enforcer - Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

The Inner Life of Astronauts - The Right Stuff

This Way to the Apocalypse - The Road

A Modern Classic - The Secret History

Chilling and Thrilling - The Shining

Existentialist Fiction - The Stranger

Meet the Lost Generation - The Sun Also Rises

The Best Book on Vietnam - The Things They Carried

Baby's First Book - The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Mole, Toad, Rat and Badger - The Wind in the Willows

From the Modern Japanese Master - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Beware the "Undertoad" - The World According to Garp

Life, Love, Death - The Year of Magical Thinking

Tradition vs. Change - Things Fall Apart

A Beloved Family Story - To Kill a Mockingbird

An American Inspiration - Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

Addictively Entertaining - Valley of the Dolls
https://libguides.francis.edu/100-books-to-read-in-a-lifetime
libguides.francis.edu
crawl=CC-MAIN-2022-40
288192
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:3LYXXK4NABJ3TLOXKZOBB56I3UPO2OY6
<urn:uuid:d865003f-40ab-4db9-bcac-a1105bba56b0>
2022-10-02T12:24:41Z
54.88.35.99
text/html
sha1:E6GL6O6XSYZ5XT2B4CYQCBTW4R3BX5MN
<urn:uuid:d6685812-418d-4be6-bd74-6408f8196dbf>
https://libguides.francis.edu/100-books-to-read-in-a-lifetime
response
<urn:uuid:62106adf-84f0-4a6e-a265-2629bc17c0c8>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2022-40
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for September/October 2022
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-194
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.4-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/