The “Before You Die” List

The “Before You Die” List
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn	Twain
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland	Carroll
Anna Karenina	Tolstoy
Anne of Green Gables	Montgomery
The Bible
Black Beauty	Sewell
Black Stallion	Farley
Blue Highways	Wm. Least Heat Moon
The Brothers Karamazov	Dostoyevsky
Catcher In the Rye	Salinger
The Call of the Wild	London
Collected Works of William Shakespeare	Shakespeare
Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe	Poe
Confederacy of Dunces
Charlotte’s Web	White
Crime and Punishment	Dostoyevsky
Cry the Beloved Country	Paton
Death of a Salesman	Miller
Diary of a Young Giri	Frank
Don Quixote	Cervantes
Emma	Austen
The Feminine Mystique	Frieden
Gift From the Sea	Lindbergh
Gone With the Wind	Mitchell
Grapes of Wrath	Steinbeck
Green Eggs and Ham	Seuss, Dr.
Great Expectations	Dickens
The Great Gatsby	Fitzgerald
The Gulag Archipelago	Solzhenitsyn
The Hobbit	Toikien
The House at Pooh Corner	Milne
Invisible Man	Ellison
Jane Eyre	Bronte
Jeeves	Wodehouse
The Koran
The Little Prince	Antoine de St. Exupery
Loiita	Nabokov
Lonesome Dove	McMurtry
Lord of the Flies	Golding
Lord of the Rings	Tolkien
Madame Bovary	Flaubert
Moby Dick	Melville
Mrs. Piggle Wiggle	MacDonald
My Antonia	Cather
Mythology	Edith Hamilton
Narnia Chronides	Lewis
Of Mice and Men	Steinbeck
Oh, the Places You’ll Go	Seuss, Dr.
The Old Man and the Sea	Hemingway
The Once and Future King	White
One Hundred Years of Solitude	Marquez
Peter Pan	Barrie
Pride and Prejudice	Austen
The –Rabbit– Quartet	Updike
The Road Less Travelled	Peck
A Sand County Almanac	Leopold
The Scarlet Letter	Hawthorne
The Screwtape Letters	Lewis
Secret Garden	Burnett
Sense and Sensibility	Austen
Siddhartha	Hesse
The Sun Also Rises	Hemingway
The Sound and the Fury	Faulkner
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman	Feynman
To Kill a Mockingbird	Lee
Travels with Charlie	Steinbeck
Ulysses	Joyce
Walden	Thoreau
War and Peace	Tolstoy
Washington Square	James
The Wasteland	Eliot
Wind in the Willows	Grahame
Winnie-the-Pooh	Milne
A Wrinkle in Time	L’Engle
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz	Baum
Wuthering Heights	Bronte
The Yearling	Rawlings
* Will Manley, the author of The Truth about Reference Librarians (McFarland, 1996), has compiled this list of books that everyone should read before he/she dies. Manley invited readers of Booklist magazine, in which his column ‘The Manley Arts” appears, to submit the titles of “the five most rewarding books you have read in your lifetime” (Booklist, vol. 96 No. 9/10, 1/1/2000 and 1/15/2000). This list is a compilation of the top winners. Manley notes that the Bible and The Collected Works of William Shakespeare were the two most often mentioned in the submissions; almost 65 % of the letter-writers included at least one children’s title; and 17 % listed J.R.R. Tolkien, right behind God and Shakespeare. If you haven’t read each title on the list, it’s time to get busy!