Amazon has released 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime, a curated list of essential books you must read before you die.
The list was carefully compiled by the Amazon Books editorial team and has a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction. The list spans decades. The oldest book on the list is Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813) and the most recently published book on the list is Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (2013).
The Amazon Books editorial team plan to audit the list regularly in order to ensure it always stays culturally relevant.
"We listed the books alphabetically by title," said Sara Nelson, Editorial Director of Print and Kindle Books at Amazon.com, " because our assumption is that no book is more important than another."
See the full list below:
- 1984 by George Orwell
- A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
- A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah
- A Series of Unfortunate Events #1: The Bad Beginning: The Short-Lived Edition by Lemony Snicket
- A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
- Alice Munro: Selected Stories by Alice Munro
- Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
- All the President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
- Angela's Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt
- Are You There, God? It's me, Margaret by Judy Blume
- Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- Born To Run - A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall
- Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
- Charlotte's Web by E.B. White
- Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese
- Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brene Brown
- Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Book 1 by Jeff Kinney
- Dune by Frank Herbert
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson
- Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
- Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared M. Diamond
- Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling
- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
- Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
- Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
- Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
- Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
- Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
- Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
- Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
- Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
- Moneyball by Michael Lewis
- Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac
- Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
- Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
- Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
- Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
- The Color of Water by James McBride
- The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
- The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson
- The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank
- The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
- The Giver by Lois Lowry
- The Golden Compass: His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
- The House At Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne
- The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
- The Liars' Club: A Memoir by Mary Karr
- The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1) by Rick Riordan
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
- The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright
- The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
- The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks
- The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
- The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
- The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver
- The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro
- The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy
- The Secret History by Donna Tartt
- The Shining by Stephen King
- The Stranger by Albert Camus
- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
- The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
- The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
- The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel by Haruki Murakami
- The World According to Garp by John Irving
- The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand
- Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
- Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein
- Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak