110 best books: the perfect library
From classics and sci-fi to poetry, biographies and books that changed the world … The Telegraph presents the ultimate reading list (April 2008)
- Classics
- Poetry
- Literary fiction
- Romantic fiction
- Children's books
- Sci fi
- Crime
- Books that changed the world
- Books that changed your world
- History
- Lives
Classics
- The Iliad and The Odyssey
- Homer
- The Barchester Chronicles
- Anthony Trollope
- Pride and Prejudice
- Jane Austen
- Gulliver's Travels
- Jonathan Swiftdd>
- Jane Eyre
- Charlotte Brontë
War and Peace- Tolstoy
- David Copperfield
- Charles Dickens
- Vanity Fair
- William Makepeace Thackeray
- Madame Bovary
- Gustave Flaubert
- Middlemarch
- George Eliot
Poetry
- Sonnets
- Shakespeare
- Divine Comedy
- Dante
- Canterbury Tales
- Chaucer
- The Prelude
- William Wordsworth
Odes- John Keats
- The Waste Land
- T. S. Eliot
- Paradise Lost
- John Milton
- Songs of Innocence and Experience
- William Blake
- Collected Poems
- W. B. Yeats
- Collected Poems
- Ted Hughes
Literary fiction
- The Portrait of a Lady
- Henry James
- A la recherche du temps perdu
- Proust
- Ulysses
- James Joyce
- For Whom the Bell Tolls
- Ernest Hemingway
- Sword of Honour trilogy
- Evelyn Waugh
- The Ballad of Peckham Rye
- Muriel Spark
- Rabbit series
- John Updike
- One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Gabriel García Márquez
- Beloved
- Toni Morrison
- The Human Stain
- Philip Roth
Romantic fiction
Rebecca- Daphne du Maurier
- Le Morte D'Arthur
- Thomas Malory
- Les Liaisons Dangereuses
- Choderlos de Laclos
- I, Claudius
- Robert Graves
- Alexander Trilogy
- Mary Renault
- Master and Commander
- Patrick O'Brian
- Gone with the Wind
- Margaret Mitchell
- Dr Zhivago
- Boris Pasternak
- Tess of the D'Urbervilles
- Thomas Hardy
- The Plantagenet Saga
- Jean Plaidy
Children's books
Swallows and Amazons- Arthur Ransome
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
- C.S. Lewis
- The Lord of the Rings
- J.R.R. Tolkien
- His Dark Materials
- Philip Pullman
- Babar
- Jean de Brunhoff
- The Railway Children
- E. Nesbit
- Winnie-the-Pooh
- A.A. Milne
- Harry Potter
- J.K. Rowling
The Wind in the Willows- Kenneth Grahame
- Treasure Island
- Robert Louis Stevenson
Science fiction
- Frankenstein
- Mary Shelley
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
- Jules Verne
- The Time Machine
- H.G. Wells
- Brave New World
- Aldous Huxley
- 1984
- George Orwell
- The Day of the Triffids
- John Wyndham
- Foundation
- Isaac Asimov
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?- Philip K. Dick
- Neuromancer
- William Gibson
Crime
- The Talented Mr Ripley
- Patricia Highsmith
- The Maltese Falcon
- Dashiell Hammett
- The Complete Sherlock Holmes
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Big Sleep
- Raymond Chandler
- Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
- John le Carré
- Red Dragon
- Thomas Harris
- Murder on the Orient Express
- Agatha Christie
- The Murders in the Rue Morgue
- Edgar Allan Poe
The Woman in White- Wilkie Collins
- Killshot
- Elmore Leonard
Books that changed the world
- Das Kapital
- Karl Marx
- The Rights of Man
- Tom Paine
- The Social Contract
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Democracy in America
- Alexis de Tocqueville
On War- Carl von Clausewitz
- The Prince
- Niccolo Machiavelli
- Leviathan
- Thomas Hobbes
- On the Interpretation of Dreams
- Sigmund Freud
- On the Origin of Species
- Charles Darwin
- L'Encyclopédie
- Diderot, et al
Books that changed your world
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- Robert M. Pirsig
- Jonathan Livingston Seagull
- Richard Bach
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- Douglas Adams
The Tipping Point- Malcolm Gladwell
- The Beauty Myth
- Naomi Wolf
- How to Cook
- Delia Smith
- A Year in Provence
- Peter Mayle
- A Child Called 'It'
- Dave Pelzer
- Eats, Shoots and Leaves
- Lynne Truss
- Schott's Original Miscellany
- Ben Schott
History
- The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
- Edward Gibbon
- A History of the English-Speaking Peoples
- Winston Churchill
- A History of the Crusades
- Steven Runciman
- The Histories
- Herodotus
- The History of the Peloponnesian War
- Thucydides
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom
- T. E. Lawrence
- The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
- A People's Tragedy
- Orlando Figes
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution- Simon Schama
- The Origins of the Second World War
- A.J.P. Taylor
Lives
- Confessions
- St Augustine
- Lives of the Caesars
- Suetonius
- Lives of the Artists
- Vasari
If This is a Man- Primo Levi
- Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
- Siegfried Sassoon
- Eminent Victorians
- Lytton Strachey
- A Life of Charlotte Brontë
- Elizabeth Gaskell
- Goodbye to All That
- Robert Graves
- The Life of Dr Johnson
- Boswell
- Diaries
- Alan Clark
