Here is a list of 100 books to read before you die as suggested by the listeners to the Sean Moncrieff radio show on Newstalk. Let me know if you think there are any books missing from this list!
- Moby Dick – Herman Melville
- Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
- Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
- The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
- A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
- Collected Stories – Raymond Carver
- The Book of Evidence – John Banville
- Fragments of a Life Story – Denton Welch
- Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
- The Lay of the Land – Richard Ford
- Money – Martin Amis
- Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
- Rabbit, Run – John Updike
- Underworld – Don DeLillo
- Sophie’s World – Jostein Gaarder
- Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
- Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
- Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S Thompson
- Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
- A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee
- Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
- Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
- The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien
- The Watchmen – Alan Moore with artwork by Dave Gibbons
- Hunger – Knut Hamsun
- Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
- One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Get Shorty – Elmore Leonard
- If This Is A Man – Primo Levi
- The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
- The Tanners – Robert Walser
- Austerlitz – W.G. Sebald
- The Book Thief – Markus Zusak
- Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell – Susanna Clarke
- The Man in the High Castle – Philip K. Dick
- The Good Earth – Pearl S. Buck
- Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
- Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
- Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Huston
- The Tin Drum – Gunter Grass
- Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Bleak House – Charles Dickens
- Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
- The Trial – Franz Kafka
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
- Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
- The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
- Under the Net – Iris Murdoch
- A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
- The Liberal Imagination – Lionel Trilling
- A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
- On The Road – Jack Kerouac
- The Naked and the Dead – Norman Mailer
- The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
- Ways of Seeing – John Berger
- To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
- The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
- The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Dubliners – James Joyce
- Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
- In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
- The End of History and the Last Man – Francis Fukuyama
- The Open Society and its Enemies – Karl Popper
- The Road – Cormac McCarthy
- Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha – Roddy Doyle
- Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
- The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli
- The Autobiography of Malcom X – Alex Haley and Malcolm X
- The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins
- Anam Cara: The Book of Celtic wisdom – John O’Donoghue
- A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking
- The Master – Colm Tobin
- The Picture of Dorian Grey – Oscar Wilde
- Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
- Guests of the Nation and other short stories – Frank O’Connor
- Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
- Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
- The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
- The White Hotel – DM Thomas
- Of Human Bondage – W. Somerset Maugham
- The Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank
- Walden – Henry David Thoreau
- Scoop – Evelyn Waugh
- The Visitor – Maeve Brennan
- The Demon Haunted World (Science as a Candle in the Dark) – Carl Saga
- Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
- Goodbye To All That – Robert Graves
- Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler
- The Affluent Society – John Kenneth Galbraith
- Cry The Beloved Country – Alan Paton
- The Country Girls – Edna O’Brien
- Middlemarch – George Eliot
- This Boy’s Life – Tobias Wolff
- Atomised – Michel Houellebecq
- Brighton Rock – Graham Greene
- All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
- The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe