50 books to read before you die discussion

This is our group 100 list. I couldn't find where it was originally posted so I have done it again for the benefit of new members.


1 We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver.
2 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith.
3 Mossflower - Brian Jacques.
4 The New Jim Crowe Laws - Michelle Alexander
5 A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini.
6 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott.
7 Middlemarch - George Elliot.
8 The Discworld Series - Terry Pratchett.
9 The Collected Works - EE Cummings
10 The Thirteenth Tale. - Dianne Setterfield
11 The Book Thief. - Markus Zusak.
12 I am the Messenger. - Markus Zusak.
13 A Bell for Adano. - John Hersey
14 East of Eden. - John Steinbeck.
15 Of Mice and Men. - John Steinbeck.
16 A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway.
17 The Art of Racing in the Rain - Garth Stein
18 Tess of the D'urbavilles - Thomas Hardy.
19 The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared. - Jonas Jonasson.
20 Crime and Punishment. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
21 The Alchemist. - Paulo Coelho.
22 The Shining. - Steven King.
23 The Shack - W Young
24 The Last Man - Mary Shelly
25 Foundation Trilogy - Isaac Asimov
26 My First White Friend - Patricia Raybon
27 Persuasion. - Jane Austin.
28 The Fault in Our Stars. - John Green.
29 Very Bad Men - Harry Dolan
30 Fahrenheit 451. - Ray Bradbury.
31 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens.
32 Watership Down - Richard Adams.
33 Night - Elie Wiesel
34 Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
35 The Stand - Stephen King
36 A Tale of Two Cities. - Charles Dickens.
37 Great Expectations. - Charles Dickens.
38 Fight Club. - Chuck Palahniuk.
39 The Old Man and the Sea. - Ernest Hemingway.
40 For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway.
41 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy.
42 Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand.
43 The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - Anne Bronte
44 The Time Traveler's Wife. - Audrey Niffeneger.
45 Invasion of the Body Snatchers - Jack Finney
46 The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K le Guin
47 The Hyperion Series - Dan Simmons
48 The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress - Robert A Heinlein
49 Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert A Heinlein.
50 Ender's Game. - Orson Scott Card.
51 The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway.
52 Descartes Bones - Russell Shorto
53 The Kite Runner. - Khaled Hosseini.
53 The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
55 A Separate Peace - John Knowles
56 The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss.
57 Looking for Alaska. - John Green.
58 12 Years A Slave. - Solomon Northup.
59 Dove - Robin Lee Graham
60 Revolutionary Road. - Richard Yates.
61 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. - Muriel Spark.
62 Tender is the Night - F Scott Fitzgerald.
63 The Power of One - Bryce Courtney
64 A Testament of Youth - Vera Britain
65 Burr - Gore Vidal
66 The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down - Anne Faddiman
67 Pet Cemetary - Stephen King.
68 Jurassic Park - Michael Crichton.
69 American Psycho - Brett Easton Ellis.
70 Human Comedy - William Saroyan
71 Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson
72 The Cellist of Sarajevo - Steven Galloway
73 The discovery of heaven - Harry Mulisch
74 The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow - Rita Leganski
75 My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult.
76 Emma. - Jane Austin.
77 Of Human Bondage - W Somerset Maugham
78 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
79 The Forgotten Seamstress - Liz Trenow
80 Freedom from the Known - J Krishnamurti
81 Foam of the Daze, also published under the title of Mood Indigo - Boris Vian
82 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
83 The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
84 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larsson.
85 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance- Pirsig
86 Moon and Sixpence - W Somerset Maugham
87. Middlesex. - Jeffrey Eugenides.
88 Johnny got his gun - Dalton Trumbo
89 Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. - Patrick Suskind.
90 How Green was My Valley - Richard LLewellyn.
91 Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe.
92 The Jungle - Upton Sinclair
93 Scaramouche - Rafael Sabatini
94 The Age of Reason - Thomas Paine
95 The Faiths of the Founding Fathers - David L Holmes
96 The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx
97 The Prisoner of Zenda - Anthony Hope
98 Dhalgren - Samuel R Delany
99 The Marid Audran Sequence - George Alec Effinger
100 When The Sacred Gin Mill Closes - Lawrence Block

In April we're reading For Whom the Bell Tolls. This is my favorite of all of Hemingway's novels. It surely deserves to be on the bookmark list of 50 Books to Read Before You Die, rather than the Hemingway collection that is on that list. I hope plenty of our members will read this one.

Christine wrote: "This is our group 100 list. I couldn't find where it was originally posted so I have done it again for the benefit of new members.

1 We Need to Talk About Kevin. - Lionel Shriver
2 A Tree Grows i..."

Thanks, Buck, this is exactly what I was looking for so I could create my own "discussion" list.

It's as good a place as any, thanks for the recommendation Rachel! I thought we had a suggestions thread, I can find a couple of similar discussions but not the one I remember. The 100 list was made by group members in 2014, it's always interesting to hear what people would add to a list like that now.

Anything written by Hunter S Thompson should be read!! They are short but very good.