Suggested Reading

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!

  1. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
  2. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
  3. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
  4. The Corrections  – Jonathan Franzen
  5. The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
  6. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
  7. Collected Stories – Raymond Carver
  8. The Book of Evidence – John Banville
  9. Fragments of a Life Story – Denton Welch
  10. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
  11. The Lay of the Land – Richard Ford
  12. Money – Martin Amis
  13. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
  14. Rabbit, Run – John Updike
  15. Underworld – Don DeLillo
  16. Sophie’s World – Jostein Gaarder
  17. Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
  18. Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
  19. Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S Thompson
  20. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
  21. A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitsyn
  22. To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee
  23. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
  24. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
  25. The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien
  26. The Watchmen – Alan Moore with artwork by Dave Gibbons
  27. Hunger – Knut Hamsun
  28. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
  29. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  30. Get Shorty – Elmore Leonard
  31. If This Is A Man – Primo Levi
  32. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
  33. The Tanners – Robert Walser
  34. Austerlitz – W.G. Sebald
  35. The Book Thief – Markus Zusak
  36. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell – Susanna Clarke
  37. The Man in the High Castle – Philip K. Dick
  38. The Good Earth – Pearl S. Buck
  39. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
  40. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
  41. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Huston
  42. The Tin Drum – Gunter Grass
  43. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  44. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
  45. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
  46. Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
  47. The Trial – Franz Kafka
  48. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
  49. Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
  50. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
  51. Under the Net – Iris Murdoch
  52. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
  53. The Liberal Imagination – Lionel Trilling
  54. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
  55. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
  56. The Naked and the Dead – Norman Mailer
  57. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
  58. Ways of Seeing – John Berger
  59. To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
  60. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
  61. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
  62. Dubliners – James Joyce
  63. Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
  64. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
  65. The End of History and the Last Man – Francis Fukuyama
  66. The Open Society and its Enemies – Karl Popper
  67. The Road – Cormac McCarthy
  68. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha – Roddy Doyle
  69. Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
  70. The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli
  71. The Autobiography of Malcom X – Alex Haley and Malcolm X
  72. The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins
  73. Anam Cara: The Book of Celtic wisdom – John O’Donoghue
  74. A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking
  75. The Master – Colm Tobin
  76. The Picture of Dorian Grey – Oscar Wilde
  77. Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
  78. Guests of the Nation and other short stories – Frank O’Connor
  79. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
  80. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
  81. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
  82. The White Hotel – DM Thomas
  83. Of Human Bondage – W. Somerset Maugham
  84. The Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank
  85. Walden – Henry David Thoreau
  86. Scoop – Evelyn Waugh
  87. The Visitor – Maeve Brennan
  88. The Demon Haunted World (Science as a Candle in the Dark) – Carl Saga
  89. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
  90. Goodbye To All That – Robert Graves
  91. Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler
  92. The Affluent Society – John Kenneth Galbraith
  93. Cry The Beloved Country – Alan Paton
  94. The Country Girls – Edna O’Brien
  95. Middlemarch – George Eliot
  96. This Boy’s Life – Tobias Wolff
  97. Atomised – Michel Houellebecq
  98. Brighton Rock – Graham Greene
  99. All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
  100. The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

English classes at Franciscan College, Gormanston, Co. Meath

Skip to toolbar