I love book lists, thus I was happy to discover another list of book lists. This one from Britain’s Telegraph back in April. The article is entitled 110 Best Books: The Perfect Library. I could not discover who wrote the article, and think I know why after reading the comments from readers at the end of the article. The comments are as entertaining (to me) as the lists themselves. The article could easily have been entitled, “How to Start a Fight with Readers.”
The lists in the article include: CLASSICS, POETRY, LITERARY FICTION, ROMANTIC FICTION, CHILDREN’S BOOKS, SCI-FI, CRIME, BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD, BOOKS THAT CHANGED YOUR WORLD, HISTORY, and LIVES. I’ve listed a couple of lists as samples:
CLASSICS
The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer (Leisure Guy should be delighted)
The Barchester Chronicles by Anthony Trollope
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (Stacy should be thrilled)
War and Peace by Tolstoy
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Middlemarch by George Eliot
LITERARY FICTION
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
A la recherche du temps perdu by Proust
Ulysses by James Joyce
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
Sword of Honour trilogy by Evelyn Waugh
The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark
Rabbit series by John Updike
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Human Stain by Philip Roth
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
The Lord of the Rings by J.R. R. Tolkien
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
Babar by Jean de Brunhoff
The Railway Children by E. Nesbit
Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne (Not When We Were Young, but Chartroose should be happy)
Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
ROMANTIC FICTION
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Le Morte D’Arthur by Thomas Malory
Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos
I, Claudius by Robert Graves
Alexander Trilogy by Mary Renault
Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (Literate Housewife should be pleased)
Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
The Plantagenet Saga by Jean Plaidy
