100 Books Everyone Should Read Before They Die

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Amazon book editors have just released a list of their 100 Books To Read In A Lifetime.

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Many of the books are 20th century classics or recent bestsellers - the oldest book on the list is Jane Austen's 1813 masterpiece "Pride and Prejudice." It also spanned multiple genres, with adult fiction, nonfiction, children's, and young adult novels such as "The Hunger Games" and "Harry Potter" making the list.

"With 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime, we set out to build a roadmap of a literary life without making it feel like a homework assignment," Sara Nelson, Editorial Director of Print and Kindle Books at Amazon, said in a press release. "Over many months, the team passionately debated and defended the books we wanted on this list. In other words, we applied plenty of the bookish equivalent of elbow-grease, and we can't wait to hear what customers have to say about our final picks."

Check out the final list of books in alphabetical order below.

  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" by Ishmael Beah

  5. "A Series of Unfortunate Events #1: The Bad Beginning: The Short-Lived Edition" by Lemony Snicket

  6. "A Wrinkle in Time" by Madeleine L'Engle

  7. "Alice Munro: Selected Stories" by Alice Munro

  8. "Alice in Wonderland" 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 Brene 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 M. Diamond

  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: 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 Frankl

  41. "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedaris

  42. "Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides

  43. "Midnight's Children" by Salman Rushdie

  44. "Moneyball" 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" 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" by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  54. "The Age of Innocence" by Edith Wharton

  55. "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" by Michael Chabon

  56. "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" by Malcolm X and Alex Haley

  57. "The Book Thief" by Markus Zusak

  58. "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz

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

  60. "The Color of Water" by James McBride

  61. "The Corrections" by Jonathan Franzen

  62. "The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America" by Erik Larson

  63. "The Diary of Anne Frank" 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 (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1)" 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: A Novel" 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: A Novel" 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" by Shel Silverstein

  100. "Where the Wild Things Are" by Maurice Sendak

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.

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