How many have you read?
By Melanie Curtin, Writer, activist @melaniebcurtin
Reading a book can be an intensely personal experience. Books can be truly life-changing, and also, as it turns out, make you smarter. Research repeatedly shows you boost your analytical thinking by reading, along with expanding your vocabulary, as well as your mind in general.
The question, then, is not whether you should read, but what to read.
In the early 2000s, the BBC’s Big Read ran a search for the U.K.’s best-loved novel. After parsing results of those nominating their favorite books, they made a list of the top 100–a list that follows.
In an interesting update on the idea, Howard Bentham of the BBC recently put together a new list of the top 100 books, but this time used authors and book experts. What’s special about the list is there are audio clips that explain each choice — recorded by the people recommending them. It’s a good way of getting a brief overview of the books in order to decide which ones to put on your list.
Here’s the original BBC list. It wasn’t a ranked list, so I started out with a few of my own personal favorites–ones I found hauntingly beautiful, with characters I truly missed when they were gone. (If you only pick one, let it be Shadow of the Wind. It’s unbelievably good):
- The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
- Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, by Louis de Bernieres
- Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden
- One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Marquez
- The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho
- Watership Down, by Richard Adams
- The Secret History, by Donna Tartt
- The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold
- Atonement, by Ian Mcewan
- Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons
- Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
- The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
- Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
- The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
- Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë
- Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling
- To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
- The Bible
- Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë
- 1984, by George Orwell
- His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman
- Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
- Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy
- Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
- The complete works of Shakespeare
- Rebecca, by Daphne DuMaurier
- The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien
- Birdsong, by Sebastian Faulks
- The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
- The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
- Middlemarch, by George Eliot
- Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
- The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Bleak House, by Charles Dickens
- War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
- Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
- Crime and Punishment, by Fydor Dostoevsky
- The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
- Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
- The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame
- Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
- David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
- The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis
- Emma, by Jane Austen
- Persuasion, by Jane Austen
- Winnie-the-Pooh, by A.A. Milne
- Animal Farm, by George Orwell
- The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown
- A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
- Anne of Green Gables, by L.M. Montgomery
- Far From the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy
- The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
- Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
- Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
- Dune, by Frank Herbert
- Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen
- A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth
- A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
- Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon
- Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Marquez
- Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
- Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas
- On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
- Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy
- Bridget Jones’s Diary, by Helen Fielding
- Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
- Moby Dick, Herman Melville
- Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens
- Dracula, by Bram Stoker
- The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett
- Notes From a Small Island, by Bill Bryson
- Ulysses, by James Joyce
- The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath
- Swallows and Amazons, by Arthur Ransome
- Germinal, by Emile Zola
- Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thacker
- Possession, by A.S. Byatt
- A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
- Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell
- The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
- The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro
- Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
- A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry
- Charlotte’s Web, by E.B. White
- The Five People You Meet in Heaven, by Mitch Albom
- Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Faraway Tree Collection, by Enid Blyton
- Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
- The Little Prince, by Antoine de St.-Exupery
- The Wasp Factory, by Iain Banks
- A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
- A Town Like Alice, by Nevil Shute
- The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas
- A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl
- Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo
SOURCES: https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/100-books-to-read-before-you-die.html
With respect.