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Amazon Says These Are the 100 Books You Should Read in Your Lifetime

We've always considered ourselves pretty well-read, but then we found Amazon's list of 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime and realized there's quite a bit of literary ground we've yet to cover. Here's the full list: 

1. 1984 by George Orwell

2. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

3. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

4. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah

5. The Bad Beginning: Or, Orphans! by Lemony Snicket

6. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

7. Selected Stories, 1968-1994 by Alice Munro 

8. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll

9. All the President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein

10. Angela's Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt

11. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume

12. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

13. Beloved by Toni Morrison

14. Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall

15. Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat

16. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

17. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl 

18. Charlotte's Web by E.B. White

19. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

20. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown

21. Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Book 1 by Jeff Kinney

22. Dune by Frank Herbert

23. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

24. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson

25. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

26. Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown

27. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

28. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond, Ph.D.

29. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling

30. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

31. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

32. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

33. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware

34. Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

35. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

36 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

37. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

38. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

39. Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich

40. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl 

41. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

42. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

43. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

44. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis

45. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

46. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

47. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen

48. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi

49. Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth

50. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

51. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

52. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

53.  Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin

54. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

55. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

56. The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley by Malcolm X and Alex Haley

57. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

58. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

59. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

60. The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride

61. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

62. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

63. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

64. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

65. The Giver by Lois Lowry

66. The Golden Compass: His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman

67. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

68. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

69. The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne

70. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

71. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

72. The Liars' Club: A Memoir by Mary Karr

73. The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan 

74. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

75. The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

76. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright

77. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

78. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks

79. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan

80. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

81. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

82. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro

83. The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

84. The Road by Cormac McCarthy

85. The Secret History by Donna Tartt

86. The Shining by Stephen King

87. The Stranger by Albert Camus

88. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

89. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

90. The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

91. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

92. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami 

93. The World According to Garp by John Irving

94. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

95. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

96. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

97. Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand

98. Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

99. Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Poems and Drawings of Shel Silverstein by Shel Silverstein 

100. Where the Wild Things Are Maurice Send

While we've put in a nice dent, we've definitely got some reading to do. Challenge accepted. 

Quiz What New Book Should You Read This Fall?



sarah stiefvater

Wellness Director

Sarah Stiefvater is PureWow's Wellness Director. She's been at PureWow for ten years, and in that time has written and edited stories across all categories, but currently focuses...