Fiction | Mysteries | Science Fiction | Poetry | Drama | Non-Fiction
The titles that follow were selected by the "Books That Matter" Committee on the basis of popularity, as reflected in the balloting of the community, but consideration was also given to such matters as special merit and enduring value.
Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale
Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice
Buck, Pearl S., The Good Earth
Camus, Albert, The Stranger
Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness
Dickens, Charles, A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyesvsky, Fyodor, Crime and Punishment
Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man
Esquivel, Laura, Like Water for Chocolate
Faulkner, William, The Sound and the Fury
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary
Gaines, Ernest, A Lesson Before Dying
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel , One Hundred Years of Solitude
Golding, William, Lord of the Flies
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph, Catch-22
Hemingway, Ernest, A Farewell to Arms
Hugo, Victor, Les Miserables
Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World
Jackson, Shirley, The Lottery and Other Stories
Joyce, James, Ulysses
Knowles, John, A Separate Peace
Lee, Harper, To Kill a Mockingbird
Mann, Thomas, The Magic Mountain
Melville, Herman, Moby Dick
Mitchell, Margaret, Gone With the Wind
Morrison, Toni, Beloved
O’Brien, Tim, The Things They Carried
Orwell, George, 1984
Potok, Chaim, The Chosen
Remarque, Erich Maria, All Quiet on the Western Front
Salinger, J.D., The Catcher in the Rye
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Frankenstein
Sinclair, Upton, The Jungle
Smith, Betty, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Solzhenitzen, Aleksandr I., One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Steinbeck, John, The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Twain, Mark, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire, Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt, Slaughterhouse Five
Walker, Alice, The Color Purple
Christie, Agatha, And Then There Were None
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Grisham, John, A Time to Kill
James, P.D., Devices and Desires
Le Carre, John, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; Smiley’s People
Peters, Ellis, Brother Cadfael’s Penance
Poe, Edgar Allen, Tales of Mystery and Imagination
Sayers, Dorothy, Murder Must Advertise
Asimov, Isaac, Foundation; Foundation and Empire; Second Foundation
Bradbury, Ray, Fahrenheit 451
Clarke, Arthur C., Childhood’s End
Gibson, William, Neuromancer
Heinlein, Robert A., Stranger in a Strange Land
Le Guin, Ursula, The Lathe of Heaven
Tolkein, J.R.R., The Hobbit
Verne, Jules, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Wells, H.G., The Time Machine
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Dickinson, Emily, Complete Poems
Homer, The Iliad
Homer, Odyssey
Neruda, Pablo, Selected Poems
Shakespeare, William, Sonnets
Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass
Yeats, William Butler, "Among School Children"
Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot
Brecht, Bertolt, The Threepenny Opera
Ibsen, Henrik, A Doll’s House
Miller, Arthur, Death of a Salesman
O’Neill, Eugene, Long Day’s Journey into Night
Pirandello, Luigi, Six Characters in Search of an Author
Shakespeare, William, Othello
Angelou, Maya, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring
Churchill, Winston, The Second World War
Frank, Anne, The Diary of a Young Girl
Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams
Gleick, James, Chaos: Making a New Science
Hawking, Stephen, A Brief History of Time
Keller, Helen, The Story of My Life
Kovic, Ron, Born on the Fourth of July
Kubler-Ross, Elizabeth, On Death and Dying
Machiavelli, Niccolo, The Prince
McCourt, Frank, Angela’s Ashes
Merton, Thomas, The Seven Storey Mountain
Norris, Kathleen, The Cloister Walk
Paine, Thomas, Common Sense; The Rights of Man
Pirsig, Robert M., Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
Sandburg, Carl, Abraham Lincoln; The War Years
Thoreau, Henry David, Walden
Wiesel, Elie, Night
X, Malcolm, The Autobiography of Malcolm X