Telegraph's 110 Best Books List (By Genre)

I've always been a sucker for lists (despite my inability and unwillingness to keep a strict TBR list) so imagine my delight when Brenna a Literary Musings recently posted a book reading list I'd never seen before, which she had just discovered in a post from Amanda at Dead White Guys on BookRiot about reading lists.

Anyway, here's the list: Telegraph's 110 Best Books List. It's organized by genre, which I love, and I've read a measly number to date:

KEY:

Read for an assignment, which only half counts

Read it! Take that!

Own/planned to read in short order/but let’s face it those plans never really work out anyway

CLASSICS

1. The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer
2. The Barchester Chronicles, Anthony Trollope
3. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
4. Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
5. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
6. War and Peace, Tolstoy
7. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
8. Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
9. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
10. Middlemarch, George Eliot

POETRY

11. Sonnets, Shakespeare
12. Divine Comedy, Dante
13. Canterbury Tales, Chaucer
14. The Prelude, William Wordsworth
15. Odes, JohnKeats
16. The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot
17. Paradise Lost, John Milton
18. Songs of Innocence and Experience, William Blake
19. Collected Poems, W. B. Yeats
20. Collected Poems, Ted Hughes

LITERARY FICTION

21. The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
22. A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust
23. Ulysses, James Joyce
24. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
25. Sword of Honour trilogy, Evelyn Waugh
26. The Ballad of Peckham Rye, Muriel Spark
27. Rabbit series, John Updike (I've read the first book in the series)
28. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
29. Beloved, Toni Morrison
30. The Human Stain, Philip Roth

ROMANTIC FICTION

31. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
32. Le Morte D'Arthur, Thomas Malory
33. Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Choderlos de Laclos
34. I, Claudius, Robert Graves
35. Alexander Trilogy, Mary Renault
36. Master and Commander, Patrick O'Brian
37. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
38. Dr Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
39. Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
40. The Plantagenet Saga, Jean Plaidy

CHILDREN'S BOOKS

41. Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
42. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis
43. The Lord of the Rings, J.R. R. Tolkien
44. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
45. Babar, Jean deBrunhoff
46. The Railway Children, E. Nesbit
47. Winnie-the-Pooh, A.A. Milne
48. Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling
49. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
50. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson

SCI-FI

51. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
52. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
53. The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
54. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
55. 1984, George Orwell
56. The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham
57. Foundation, Isaac Asimov
58. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke
59. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
60. Neuromancer, William Gibson

CRIME

61. The Talented Mr Ripley, Patricia Highsmith
62. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
63. The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
64. The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
65. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John le Carré
66. Red Dragon, Thomas Harris
67. Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie
68. The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Edgar Allan Poe
69. The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
70. Killshot, Elmore Leonard

BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

71. Das Kapital, Karl Marx
72. The Rights of Man, Tom Paine
73. The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
74. Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
75. On War, Carlvon Clausewitz
76. The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
77. Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
78. On the Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud
79. On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
80. L'Encyclopédie, Diderot, et al

BOOKS THAT CHANGED YOUR WORLD

81. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig
82. Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach
83. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
84. The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
85. The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf
86. How to Cook, Delia Smith
87. A Year in Provence, Peter Mayle
88. A Child Called 'It', Dave Pelzer
89. Eats, Shoots and Leaves, Lynne Truss
90. Schott's Original Miscellany, Ben Schott

HISTORY

91. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon
92. A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Winston Churchill
93. A History of the Crusades, Steven Runciman
94. The Histories, Herodotus
95. The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
96. Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence
97. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Compiled at King Alfred's behest
98. A People's Tragedy, Orlando Figes
99. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, Simon Schama
100. The Origins of the Second World War, A.J.P. Taylor

LIVES

101. Confessions, St Augustine
102. Lives of the Caesars, Suetonius
103. Lives of the Artists, Vasari
104. If This is a Man, Primo Levi
105. Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Siegfried Sassoon
106. Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey
107. A Life of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell
108. Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves
109. The Life of Dr Johnson, Boswell
110. Diaries, AlanClark

So…

7 books read as a school assignment, which only half counts, so 3.5

14 books read, so take that. Six were from the children’s book section. What does that say about my reading selections?

14 books that I already own and already planned to read... someday. Which is not to say I won’t read the others, but it is to say I may not have necessarily heard of all of the others.

So, 14 or 17.5 or 21 books read in total, depending on how you count.

14 books on my radar.

Which leaves approximately 2/3 of the list, however you cut it, on which I grade myself a complete Fail. How many have you read? What reading lists do you get excited about?