Amazon Releases 100 “must read” Books Before You Die

100 Books Everyone Should Read

image from newyorker.com
image from newyorker.com

Editors from Amazon has released a list of their 100 “nust read” books before you die.

“With 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime, we set out to build a road map of a literary life without making it feel like a homework assignment,” Sara Nelson, Editorial Director of Print and Kindle Books at Amazon.

Most of the books are century classics or recent bestsellers and the oldest in the list is Jane Austen’s 1813 ‘Pride and Prejudice’. Of course the all time favorites ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘The Hunger Games’ that spans multiple genres with adult fiction, epic, nonfiction, young adult novels.

“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,” said Nelson in a press release.

Here are the list of books in alphabetical order.

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