What are the 100 "Classic" books that I should read before I die?

Question

I am not dying, but I do want to jump start into the year by reading two classic books a month. Let's hear your suggestions!

Answer 1

Preface
"We assume that nearly every reader of this book will own a Bible and be at least somewhat accustomed to reading it; there is nothing we might try to say about it that would not seem presumptuous."
— Fadiman and Major

Part One
Anonymous, ca. 2000 BCE. The Epic of Gilgamesh.
Homer, ca. 800 BCE. The Iliad.
Homer, ca. 800 BCE. The Odyssey.
Confucius, 551-479 BCE. The Analects.
Aeschylus, 525-456/5 BCE. The Oresteia.
Sophocles, 496-406 BCE. Oedipus Rex; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone
Euripides, 484-406 BCE. Alcestis; Medea; Hippolytus; Trojan Women; Electra; Bacchae.
Herodotus, ca. 484-425 BCE. The Histories.
Thucydides, 470/460-ca.400 BCE. The History of the Peloponnesian War.
Sun-tzu, ca. 450-380 BCE. The Art of War.
Aristophanes, 448-388 BCE. Lysistrata; The Clouds; The Birds.
Plato, 428-348 BCE. Selected Works.
Aristotle, 384-322 BCE. Ethics; Politics; Poetics.
Mencius, ca. 400-320 BCE. The Book of Mencius.
Valmiki, ca. 300 BCE. The Book of Ramayana.
Vyasa, ca. 200 BCE. The Mahabharata.
Anonymous, ca. 200 BCE. The Bhagavad Gita.
Ssu-ma Ch'ien, 145-86 BCE. Records of the Grand Historian.
Lucretius, ca. 100-ca. 50 BCE. Of the Nature of Things.
Virgil, 70-19 BCE. The Aeneid.
Marcus Aurelius, 121-180. Meditations.
Part Two
Saint Augustine, 354-430. The Confessions.
Kalidasa, ca. 400. The Cloud Messenger; Sakuntala.
Revealed to Muhammad, ca. 650. The Koran.
Hui-neng, 638-713. The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch.
Firdausi, ca. 940-1020. Shah Nameh.
Sei Shonagon, ca. 965-1035. The Pillow Book.
Lady Murasaki, ca. 976-1015. Tale of Genji.
Omar Khayyam, 1048-? The Rubaiyat.
Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321. The Divine Comedy.
Luo Kuan-chung, ca. 1330-1400. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
Geoffrey Chaucer, 1342-1400. The Canterbury Tales.
Anonymous, ca. 1500. The Thousand and One Nights.
Niccolò Macchiavelli, 1469-1527. The Prince.
François Rabelais, 1483-1553. Gargantua and Pantagruel.
Wu Cheng-en, 1500-1582. Journey to the West.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, 1533-1592. Selected Essays.
Miguel de Cervantes de Saavedra, 1547-1616. Don Quixote.
Part Three
William Shakespeare, 1564-1616. Complete Works.
John Donne, 1573-1631. Selected Works.
Anonymous, 1618. The Plum in the Golden Vase (Chin P'ing Mei)
Galileo Galilei, 1574-1642. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.
Thomas Hobbes, 1588-1679. Leviathan.
René Descartes, 1596-1650. Discourse on Method.
John Milton, 1608-1674. Paradise Lost; Lycidas; On the Morning of Christ's Nativity; Sonnets; Areopagitica.
Molière, 1622-1673. Selected Plays.
Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662. Thoughts (Pensées).
John Bunyan, 1628-1688. Pilgrim's Progress.
John Locke, 1632-1688. Second Treatise of Government.
Matsuo Basho, 1644-1694. The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
Daniel Defoe, 1660-1731. Robinson Crusoe.
Jonathan Swift, 1667-1745. Gulliver's Travels.
Voltaire, 1694-1778. Candide and Other Works.
David Hume, 1711-1776. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
Henry Fielding, 1707-1754. Tom Jones.
Ts'ao Hsüeh-ch'in, 1715-1763. The Dream of the Red Chamber (also called The Story of the Stone).
Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1712-1778. Confessions.
Laurence Sterne, 1713-1768. Tristram Shandy.
James Boswell, 1740-1795. The Life of Samuel Johnson.
Thomas Jefferson and others. Basic Documents in American History, edited by Richard B. Morris
Hamilton, Madison, and Jay. The Federalist Papers, edited by Clinton Rossiter.
Part Four
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832. Faust.
William Blake, 1757-1827. Selected Works.
William Wordsworth, 1770-1850. The Prelude; Selected Shorter Poems; Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800).
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834. The Ancient Mariner; Christabel; Kubla Khan; Biographia Literaria; Writings on Shakespeare.
Jane Austen, 1775-1817. Pride and Prejudice; Emma.
Stendhal, 1783-1842. The Red and the Black.
Honoré de Balzac, 1799-1850. Père Goriot; Eugénie Grandet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882. Selected Works.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804-1864. The Scarlet Letter; Selected Tales.
Alexis de Tocqueville, 1805-1859. Democracy in America.
John Stuart Mill, 1806-1873. On Liberty; The Subjection of Women.
Charles Darwin, 1809-1882. The Voyage of the Beagle; The Origin of Species.
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, 1809-1852. Dead Souls.
Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849. Short Stories and Other Works.
William Makepeace Thackeray, 1811-1863. Vanity Fair.
Charles Dickens, 1812-1870. Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Great Expectations; Hard Times; Our Mutual Friend; Little Dorrit.
Anthony Trollope, 1815-1882. The Warden; The Last Chronicle of Barset; The Eustace Diamonds; The Way We Live Now; Autobiography.
The Brontë Sisters
79A. Charlotte Brontë, 1816-1855. Jane Eyre
79B. Emily Brontë, 1818-1848. Wuthering Heights.
Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862. Walden; Civil Disobedience.
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, 1818-1883. Fathers and Sons.
Karl Marx, 1818-1883, and Friedrich Engels, 1820-1895. The Communist Manifesto.
Herman Melville, 1819-1891. Moby Dick; Bartleby the Scrivener.
George Eliot, 1819-1880. The Mill on the Floss; Middlemarch.
Walt Whitman, 1819-1892. Selected Poems; Democratic Vistas; Preface to the first issue of Leaves of Grass (1855); A Backward Glance O'er Travelled Roads.
Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1880. Madame Bovary.
Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, 1821-1881. Crime and Punishment; The Brothers Karamazov.
Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, 1828-1910. War and Peace.
Henrik Ibsen, 1828-1906. Selected Plays.
Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886. Collected Poems.
Lewis Carroll, 1832-1898. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; Through the Looking-Glass.
Mark Twain, 1835-1910. Huckleberry Finn.
Henry Adams, 1838-1918. The Education of Henry Adams.
Thomas Hardy, 1840-1928. The Mayor of Casterbridge.
William James, 1842-1910. The Principles of Psychology; Pragmatism; Four Essays from The Meaning of Truth; The Varieties of Religious Experience.
Henry James, 1843-1916. The Ambassadors.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, 1844-1900. Thus Spake Zarathustra; The Genealogy of Morals; Beyond Good and Evil; and other works.
Part Five
Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939. Selected Works, including The Interpretation of Dreams; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality; and Civilization and Its Discontents.
George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950. Selcted Plays and Prefaces.
Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924. Nostromo.
Anton Chekhov, 1860-1904. Uncle Vanya; Three Sisters; The Cherry Orchard; Selected Short Stories.
Edith Wharton, 1862-1937. The Custom of the Country; The Age of Innocence; The House of Mirth.
William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939. Collected Poems; Collected Plays; The Autobiography.
Natsume Soseki, 18676-1916. Kokoro.
Marcel Proust, 1871-1922. Remembrance of Things Past.
Robert Frost, 1874-1963. Collected Poems.
Thomas Mann, 1875-1955. The Magic Mountain.
E. M. Forster, 1879-1970. A Passage to India.
Lu Hsün, 1881-1936. Collected Short Stories.
James Joyce, 1882-1941. Ulysses.
Virginia Woolf, 1882-1941. Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse; Orlando; The Waves.
Franz Kafka, 1883-1924. The Trial; The Castle; Selected Short Stories.
D. H. Lawrence, 1885-1930. Sons and Lovers; Women in Love.
Tanizaki Junichiro, 1886-1965. The Makioka Sisters.
Eugene O'Neill, 1888-1953. Mourning Becomes Electra; The Iceman Cometh; Long Day's Journey into Night.
T. S. Eliot, 1888-1965. Collected Poems; Collected Plays.
Aldous Huxley, 1894-1963. Brave New World.
William Faulkner, 1897-1962. The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying.
Ernest Hemingway, 1899-1962. Short Stories.
Kawabata Yasunari, 1899-1972. Beauty and Sadness.
Jorge Luis Borges, 1899-1986. Labyrinths Dreamtigers.
Vladimir Nabokov, 1899-1977. Lolita; Pale Fire; Speak, Memory.
George Orwell, 1903-1950. Animal Farm; Nineteen Eighty-Four; Burmese Days.
R. K. Narayan, 1906- . The English Teacher; The Vendor of Sweets.
Samuel Beckett, 1906-1989. Waiting for Godot; Endgame; Krapp's Last Tape.
W. H. Auden, 1907-1973. Collected Poems.
Albert Camus, 1913-1960. The Plague; The Stranger.
Saul Bellow, 1915- . The Adventures of Augie March; Herzog; Humboldt's Gift.
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, 1918- . The First Circle; Cancer Ward.
Thomas Kuhn, 1922-1996. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Mishima Yukio, 1925-1970. Confessions of a Mask; The Temple of the Golden Pavilion.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1928- . One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Chinua Achebe, 1930- . Things Fall Apart.

Answer 2

This is Lalabee's personal list of great classics to read, including ONLY ones I've actually read and enjoyed (not just ones that are important.)

Aristotle, "Poetics"
Plato, "The Republic"
Sophocles: "Oedpius Rex"; "Antigone", "Electra"
Euripides: "The Trojan Women"; "Medea"
Aristophanes: "Lysistrata"
(translators matter: for greek drama I like Grene and Lattimore)
Homer: "The Odyssey"; "The Iliad"

(note; I think i've read every existing Greek Drama at least once, so these are my favorites - not just the ones I was assigned in school. If I had to pick the 3 that resonate the most with me, they are Antigone, Medea and Lysistrata.)

okay Duh the Bible, especially Genesis, Exodus, all the Psalms, and most of the Prophets

Shakespeare: Essentials:
Tragedy: Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth
Comedy: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, As You Like It
Also: Merchant of Venice; Henry V; Complete Sonnets

Other Classic and Modern Drama:
Moliere: Tartuffe (I like Richard Wilbur translations for all Moliere)
Henrik Ibsen: A Doll's House
Anton Chekov: Uncle Vanya; The Cherry Orchard; The Three Sisters
Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot
George Bernard Shaw: Arms and the Man
Noel Coward: Blithe Spirit
Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest
August Strindberg: Miss Julie
Frederico Garcia Lorca: The House of Bernarda Alba
Lilian Hellman: The Children's Hour
Eugene O'Neill: Long Day's Journey into Night
Lorraine Hansberry: A Raisin in the Sun
Arthur Miller: Death of A Salesman; The Crucible; All my Sons
Athol Fugard: The Road to Mecca
Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka; The Dutchman
August Wilson: Fences
Jean Paul Satre: No Exit
Tom Stoppard: The Real Thing
Peter Shaeffer: Equus

General Fiction Classics:
Cervantes: Don Quixote
Fydor Dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamozov; Crime and Punishment
Nikolai Gogol: The Nose (short story)
Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Voltaire: Candide
Edith Wharton: Ethan Fromme: the Age of Innocence
Zora Neal Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Spunk
Jean Toomer: Cane
Albert Camus: The Plague
George Orwell: 1984: Animal Farm
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
Upton Sinclair: The Jungle
Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Hundred Years of Solitude
Franz Kafka: The Trial: Metamorphasis
Toni Morrison: Beloved; Sula
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Yellow Wallpaper

Non-Fiction
Charles Darwin: On the Origin of Species
Elie Wiesel: Night
Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl
Rachel Carson: Silent Spring
Stephen Hawking: A Brief History of Time

Contemporary (recent) writers, and popular writing
Agatha Christie: And then there Were None; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Barbara Kingsolver: Animal Dreams; The Poisonwood Bible
Frank McCourt: Angela's Ashes
J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter (books 1-6)
Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale
Alice Sebold: The Lovely Bones
Louise Erdrich: Love Medicine
Lois Lowry: The Giver

Children's Classics:
Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland; Through the Looking Glass
Laura Ingalls Wilder: The little house Series
C.S. Lewis: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
L.M. Montgomery: Anne of Green Gables
Mother Goose: Nursery Rhymes
The Brothers Grimm: Tales (you might try "The Juniper Tree and other Tales from Grimm" collection)
Jane Yolen (editor): Favorite Folktales from Around the World
A.A. Milne: The House at Pooh Corner
Beatrix Potter: Peter Rabbit
Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn
J.M. Barrie: Peter Pan
Frances Hodson Burnett: The Secret Garden
Louis Fitzhugh: Harriet the Spy
Elizabeth George Speare: The Witch of Blackbird Pond
E.L. Konigsberg: From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

I'm sure I've forgotten something, and I know the list is heavy on drama (I was a theatre major... I guess it shows)

This was really fun for me to think about and put together. Thanks for asking this question. Maybe it will inspire me to finally finish "War and Peace!"
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Edit: okay... I caved and looked at most of the lists posted or links to suggested. I really like the observer list, the teenreads list, and the first list posted by Mike R. (I hated the Random house list - Atlas Shrugged voted #1? Blech.) I've now got runner's up that didn't make my top 100 (well, 104 counting little house series as one book) - some I just didn't think of, some I DID think of and wavered on. All of them are on at least one of the other lists and all are worth reading.

Lalabee's also rans and afterthoughts:
To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee); The Prince (Machiavelli); Flowers for Algernon(Keyes); Schindler's List (Keneally); The Little Prince (Expury); A Wrinkle in Time (L'Engle); Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry (Taylor); Bean Trees (Kingsolver); Bud, Not Buddy (Curtis); Holes (Sachar); Nickel and Dimed (Ehrenriech); Fast Food Nation (schlosser); Are you there God, it's me Margaret (Blume); when bad things happen to good people (Kushner); Into thin Air (Krakauer): Charlotte's Web (White)

Answer 3

Wonderful Wizard of Oz
And Then There Were None
Hunchback of Notre Dame (long though)
Frankenstein
Collected Works of Edgar Alan Poe
Treasure Island
Oliver Twist
Alice's Adventures In Wonderlad
A Christmas Carol
The Strange Case Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Collected Works of Washington Irving
The Canterbury Tales
Phantom of the Opera
Dracula
The Jungle Book
Hamlet
1,001 Arabian Knights
Short Stories of the Brothers Grimm
The Joy Luck Club
The Adventures of Peter and Wendy
Pride and Prejudice

Answer 4

That long list hit a lot of what I too would recommend, but I did not see the following...

Le Miserables (sorry spelling)
Palgraves Golden Treasury
Ralph Woods Favorites
Hemmingway Old Man and the Sea
Hendrick Van Loon Lives
Frederick Allen Only Yesterday


That guy did a good job, but c'mon, the list was too long and not editted for the top 100 must reads, just like the Harvard Bookshelf of Must Read's... still, credit for loking it up dude.

Answer 5

The Chronicles of Narnia
The Scarlet Letter
The Phantom of the Opera
Silas Marner
The Hobbit

Answer 6

One suggestion is A Cristmas Carol by Charles Dickens. This book is great! I also suggest A Tale of Two Cities, The Adventures of Tom Saywer, Huck Finn, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, old man and the sea, Romeo and Juliet, and Dracula

Answer 7

I would recommend the following books:

"The Awakening" by Kate Chopin
"Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen
"Tess of the D'Urbevilles" by Thomas Hardy
"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelo
"1984" by George Orwell
"The Giver" by Lois Lowry

The links are to lists of 100 must read books as voted on by Time Magazine and Random House Readers.

Answer 8

City of Joy by Dominique LaPierre
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
A Tale of Two Citie by Charles Dickens
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Answer 9

Here is a site for the Untimate Reading Litst with over 250 titles:
http://www.teenreads.com/features/2006-reading-list.asp

They are not all classics, but they are all great books.

Hope this helps!
~Jesse T.

Answer 10

Here are some posted lists that will keep you reading for years:
1001 books to read before you die - http://www.listology.com/content_show.cfm/content_id.22845/Books
http://www.lib.utah.edu/unreq/fb/3tg_before_you_die.html
http://www.plastic.com/article.html;sid=03/10/17/02363408
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1721526,00.html
Scan several different lists and choose one that hits the spot with you. Alternate idea: combine the lists and read the books that you see on multiple lists, assuming those are the most universally important books.

Answer 11

The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien