100 Books Everyone Should Read Before They Die

“With 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime, we set out to build a roadmap of a literary life without making it feel like a homework assignment,” Sara Nelson, Editorial Director of Print andKindle Books at Amazon, said in a press release. “Over many months, the team passionately debated and defended the books we wanted on this list. In other words, we applied plenty of the bookish equivalent of elbow-grease, and we can’t wait to hear what customers have to say about our final picks.”

Check out the final list of books in alphabetical order below.

1. “1984” by George Orwell
2. “A Brief History of Time”by Stephen Hawking
3. “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” by Dave Eggers
4. “A Long Way Gone” by Ishmael Beah
5. “A Series of Unfortunate Events #1: The Bad Beginning: The Short-Lived Edition” by Lemony Snicket
6. “A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’Engle
7. “Alice Munro: Selected Stories” by Alice Munro
8. “Alice in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll
9. “All the President’s Men” by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
10. “Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir” by Frank McCourt
11. “Are You There, God? It’s me, Margaret” by Judy Blume
12. “Bel Canto” by Ann Patchett
13. “Beloved” by Toni Morrison
14. “Born To Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen” by Christopher McDougall
15. “Breath, Eyes, Memory” by Edwidge Danticat
16. “Catch-22” by Joseph Heller
17. “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” by Roald Dahl
18. “Charlotte’s Web” by E.B. White
19. “Cutting For Stone” by Abraham Verghese
20. “Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead” by Brene Brown
21. “Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Book 1” by Jeff Kinney
22. “Dune” by Frank Herbert
23. “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury
24. “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream” by Hunter S. Thompson
25. “Gone Girl” by Gillian Flynn
26. “Goodnight Moon” by Margaret Wise Brown
27. “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens
28. “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” by Jared M. Diamond
29. “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” by J.K. Rowling
30. “In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote
31. “Interpreter of Maladies” by Jhumpa Lahiri
32. “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison
33. “Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth” by Chris Ware
34. “Kitchen Confidential” by Anthony Bourdain
35. “Life After Life” by Kate Atkinson
36. “Little House on the Prairie” by Laura Ingalls Wilder
37. “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov
38. “Love in the Time of Cholera” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
39. “Love Medicine” by Louise Erdrich
40. “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl
41. “Me Talk Pretty One Day” by David Sedaris
42. “Middlesex” by Jeffrey Eugenides
43. “Midnight’s Children” by Salman Rushdie
44. “Moneyball” by Michael Lewis
45. “Of Human Bondage” by W. Somerset Maugham
46. “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac
47. “Out of Africa” by Isak Dinesen
48. “Persepolis” by Marjane Satrapi
49. “Portnoy’s Complaint” by Philip Roth
50. “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen
51. “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson
52. “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut
53. “Team of Rivals” by Doris Kearns Goodwin
54. “The Age of Innocence” by Edith Wharton
55. “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” by Michael Chabon
56. “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
57. “The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak
58. “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Diaz
59. “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger
60. “The Color of Water” by James McBride
61. “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen
62. “The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America” by Erik Larson
63. “The Diary of Anne Frank” by Anne Frank
64. “The Fault in Our Stars” by John Green
65. “The Giver” by Lois Lowry
66. “The Golden Compass: His Dark Materials” by Philip Pullman
67. “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
68. “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood
69. “The House At Pooh Corner” by A. A. Milne
70. “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins
71. “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot
72. “The Liars’ Club: A Memoir” by Mary Karr
73. “The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1)” by Rick Riordan
74. “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
75. “The Long Goodbye” by Raymond Chandler
76. “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” by Lawrence Wright
77. “The Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien
78. “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales” by Oliver Sacks
79. “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” by Michael Pollan
80. “The Phantom Tollbooth” by Norton Juster
81. “The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel” by Barbara Kingsolver
82. “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York” by Robert A. Caro
83. “The Right Stuff” by Tom Wolfe
84. “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy
85. “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt
86. “The Shining” by Stephen King
87. “The Stranger” by Albert Camus
88. “The Sun Also Rises” by Ernest Hemingway
89. “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien
90. “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” by Eric Carle
91. “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame
92. “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel” by Haruki Murakami
93. “The World According to Garp” by John Irving
94. “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion
95. “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe
96. “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee
97. “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption” by Laura Hillenbrand
98. “Valley of the Dolls” by Jacqueline Susann
99. “Where the Sidewalk Ends” by Shel Silverstein
100. “Where the Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak