1,000 Books to Read Before You Die: A Life-Changing List

This is one of the 759 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.

About this list

1,000 Books to Read Before You Die(Book), 969 Books

A list written by James Mustich, a bookseller, editor, and writer. Here's the publisher's description:

Celebrate the pleasure of reading and the thrill of discovering new titles in an extraordinary book that’s as compulsively readable, entertaining, surprising, and enlightening as the 1,000-plus titles it recommends.

Covering fiction, poetry, science and science fiction, memoir, travel writing, biography, children’s books, history, and more, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die ranges across cultures and through time to offer an eclectic collection of works that each deserve to come with the recommendation, You have to read this. But it’s not a proscriptive list of the “great works”—rather, it’s a celebration of the glorious mosaic that is our literary heritage.

This list was originally published in 2018 and was added to this site about 2 years ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
13 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen 1813 British English
192 Persuasion Jane Austen 1817 British English
215 The Haunting of Hill House Shirley Jackson 1959 American English
216 A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens 1843 British English
35 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll 1865 British English
3 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 American English
16 To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 1960 American English
83 Emma Jane Austen 1815 British English
22 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884 American English
522 The Phantom Tollbooth Norton Juster 1961 American English
419 The Daughter of Time Josephine Tey 1951 British English
243 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Mark Twain 1876 American English
2486 The Golden Compass Philip Pullman 1995 British English
5494 All Creatures Great And Small James Herriot 1972 British English
49 Beloved Toni Morrison 1987 American English
150 Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury 1953 American English
101 Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett 1953 Irish French
636 Goodnight Moon Margaret Wise Brown 1947 American English
71 Hamlet William Shakespeare 1600 British English
547 Through the Looking Glass Lewis Carroll 1871 British English
59 Rebecca Daphne du Maurier 1938 British English
29 Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë 1847 British English
68 Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston 1937 American English
573 Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret Judy Blume 1970 American English
6 Nineteen Eighty Four George Orwell 1949 British English
314 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay Michael Chabon 2000 American English
136 The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame 1908 British English
15 Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë 1847 British English
165 Winnie the Pooh A. A. Milne 1926 British English
320 Where the Wild Things Are Maurice Sendak 1963 American English
121 Bleak House Charles Dickens 1852 British English
425 Sense and Sensibility Jane Austen 1811 British English
92 The Age of Innocence Edith Wharton 1920 American English
233 The Spy Who Came in From the Cold John le Carré 1963 British English
5 One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez 1967 Colombian Spanish
3255 The Book Of Three Lloyd Alexander 1964 American English
265 Cry, the Beloved Country Alan Paton 1948 South African English
230 The Call of the Wild Jack London 1903 American English
520 Mansfield Park Jane Austen 1814 British English
224 Watership Down Richard Adams 1972 British English
155 Macbeth William Shakespeare 1606 British English
74 The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne 1850 American English
95 Orlando Virginia Woolf 1928 British English
590 Northanger Abbey Jane Austen 1817 British English
480 Cold Comfort Farm Stella Gibbons 1932 British English
76 The Plague Albert Camus 1947 French French
50 Brave New World Aldous Huxley 1932 British English
1707 The House at Pooh Corner A. A. Milne 1928 British English
84 Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut 1969 American English
53 Dracula Bram Stoker 1897 British English
293 A Wrinkle In Time Madeleine L'Engle 1962 American English
54 The Old Man and the Sea Ernest Hemingway 1952 American English
14232 A Walk In The Woods Bill Bryson 1998 American English
1388 The Hunger Games Suzanne Collins 2008 American English
718 Possession A. S. Byatt 1990 British English
26 The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck 1939 American English
291 The House of the Spirits Isabel Allende 1982 Chilean Spanish
4 The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger 1951 American English
69 Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe 1719 British English
47 David Copperfield Charles Dickens 1849 British English
813 Cranford Elizabeth Gaskell 1851 British English
339 The Adventures of Oliver Twist Charles Dickens 1837 British English
1305 Long Day's Journey Into Night Eugene O'Neill 1956 American English
78 A Passage to India E. M. Forster 1924 British English
340 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz L. Frank Baum 1900 American English
251 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Agatha Christie 1926 British English
205 The Complete Sherlock Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle 1927 British English
93 Little Women Louisa May Alcott 1868 American English
393 The Moonstone Wilkie Collins 1868 British English
20 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857 French French
286 The Once and Future King T. H. White 1958 British English
73 The Portrait of a Lady Henry James 1881 American English
157 The Color Purple Alice Walker 1982 American English
102 Charlotte's Web E. B. White 1952 American English
131 King Lear William Shakespeare 1608 British English
134 Tom Jones Henry Fielding 1749 British English
700 Tales of the City Armistead Maupin 1978 American English
115 Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson 1883 British English
190 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams 1979 British English
528 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick 1968 American English
39 Frankenstein Mary Shelley 1818 British English
1074 The Da Vinci Code Dan Brown 2003 American English
232 2666 Roberto Bolaño 2004 Chilean Spanish
158 Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys 1966 British English
473 The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Haruki Murakami 1994 Japanese Japanese
1941 From The Mixed Up Files Of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler EL Konigsburg 1967 American English
65 Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift 1726 British English
2537 Clear Light of Day Anita Desai 1980 Indian English
36 Invisible Man Ralph Ellison 1952 American English
1382 The Importance of Being Earnest Oscar Wilde 1895 Irish English
337 Romeo and Juliet William Shakespeare 1597 British English
3110 The Warden Anthony Trollope 1855 British English
381 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe C. S. Lewis 1950 British English
60 Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe 1958 Nigerian English
218 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson 1886 British English
105 Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray 1847 British English
86 All Quiet on the Western Front Erich Maria Remarque 1928 German German
176 The End of the Affair Graham Greene 1951 British English
143 The Talented Mr. Ripley Patricia Highsmith 1955 American English
344 The Thirty-Nine Steps John Buchan 1915 British English
479 Four Quartets T. S. Eliot 1943 British English
1346 Matilda Roald Dahl 1988 British English
110 The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer 1400 British Middle english
146 The Hobbit J. R. R. Tolkien 1937 British English
38 Great Expectations Charles Dickens 1860 British English
306 The Autobiography of Malcolm X Alex Haley 1965 American English
1289 A Game of Thrones George R. R. Martin 1996 American English
1442 Little House In The Big Woods Laura Ingalls Wilder 1932 American English
1315 Voices from Chernobyl Svetlana Alexievich 1997 Belarusian Russian
85 The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford 1915 British English
34 The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov 1967 Russian Russian
11 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky 1866 Russian Russian
814 The Secret Garden Frances Hodgson Burnett 1911 British English
52 Lord of the Flies William Golding 1954 British English
2088 Madeline Ludwig Bemelmans 1939 Austrian English
31 Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad 1899 British English
1643 Angela's Ashes Frank McCourt 1996 American English
153 A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess 1962 British English
8 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes 1605 Spanish Spanish
310 Bonfire of the Vanities Tom Wolfe 1987 American English