Valuable books: 100 Books You Should Read Before You Die:

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):

1. The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
2. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, by Louis de Bernieres
3. Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Marquez
5. The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho
6. Watership Down, by Richard Adams
7. The Secret History, by Donna Tartt
8. The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold
9. Atonement, by Ian Mcewan
10. Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons
11. Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
12. The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins
13. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
14. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
15. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
16. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë
17. Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling
18. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
19. The Bible
20. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë
21. 1984, by George Orwell
22. His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman
23. Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
24. Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott
25. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy
26. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
27. The complete works of Shakespeare
28. Rebecca, by Daphne DuMaurier
29. The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien  
30. Birdsong, by Sebastian Faulks
31. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
32. The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
33. Middlemarch, by George Eliot
34. Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
35. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
36. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens
37. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
38. Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
39. Crime and Punishment, by Fydor Dostoevsky
40. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
41. Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
42. The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame
43. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
44. David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
45. The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis
46. Emma, by Jane Austen
47. Persuasion, by Jane Austen
48. Winnie-the-Pooh, by A.A. Milne
49. Animal Farm, by George Orwell
50. The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown
51. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
52. Anne of Green Gables, by L.M. Montgomery
53. Far From the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy
54. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
55. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
56. Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
57. Dune, by Frank Herbert
58. Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen
59. A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth
60. A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
61. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
62. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon
63. Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Marquez
64. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
65. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
66. The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas
67. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
68. Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy
69. Bridget Jones’s Diary, by Helen Fielding
70. Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
71. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
72. Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens
73. Dracula, by Bram Stoker
74. The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett
75. Notes From a Small Island, by Bill Bryson
76. Ulysses, by James Joyce
77. The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath
78. Swallows and Amazons, by Arthur Ransome
79. Germinal, by Emile Zola
80. Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thacker  
81. Possession, by A.S. Byatt
82. A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
83. Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell
84. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
85. The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro
86. Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
87. A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry
88. Charlotte’s Web, by E.B. White
89. The Five People You Meet in Heaven, by Mitch Albom
90. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
91. The Faraway Tree Collection, by Enid Blyton
92. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
93. The Little Prince, by Antoine de St.-Exupery
94. The Wasp Factory, by Iain Banks
95. A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice, by Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas
98. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo

SOURCES: https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/100-books-to-read-before-you-die.html

With respect.