The Museum, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), in which librarians around the country were asked the question, “Which book should every adult read before they die?” Below is the full list of all thirty books that, according to a group of librarians somewhere, you should read before you die. Thanks to my highschool English teacher, I’ve read about half of them. The rest are now officially on my todo list. (with the possible exception of the Austen and Bronte books)
In Particular Order:
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- The Bible
- The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
- 1984 by George Orwell
- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- All Quite on the Western Front by E M Remarque
- His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
- Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
- Tess of the D’urbevilles by Thomas Hardy
- Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
- The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
- Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
- The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
- The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
- The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
- The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
- Life of Pi by Yann Martel
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn