100 Books We Should Own, But Don't (yet) UPDATED

We have been building our library for a few years now, but recently noticed some key pieces are missing. 100 pieces that we came up with for this year. We plan on crossing off, and adding each year. Hopefully compiling a well stocked library for us to enjoy for years to come. Our goal is to accumulate all 100 by the end of 2010. (yellow ones will appear as we acquire them)

This list is only the books we do not own, and should not be mistaken as those we have not read, actually quite the contrary is true. We have read and enjoyed most of the novels, epic poems and plays on this list, then promptly returned them to our local library, given them back to friends or family or just somehow lost them along the way. Some of the titles we are missing are shocking, more often than not, we actually had to check our bookcases to make sure they weren't there, all the while exclaiming, "how can we not have this!?"

We decided to share this list with friends and family, should anyone ever need gift ideas and also to keep the list close by for all of our Half Price Books and Book Fair adventures.



1. Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
2. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
3. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
4. Ulysses by James Joyce
5. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
6. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
7. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
8. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
11. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
12. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
13. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
14. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
15. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
16. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
17. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
18. Watership Down by Richard Adams
19. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
21. Dracula by Bram Stoker
22. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
23. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
24. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
25. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
26. The Trial by Franz Kafka
27. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
28. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
29. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
30. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
31. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
32. The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
33. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
34. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
35. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
36. Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
37. Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
38. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
39. The Illiad by Homer
40. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
41. A Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
42. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
43. The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
44. The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells
45. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
46. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemmingway
47. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
48. The Shining by Stephen King
49. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
50. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
51. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
52. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
53. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
54. Paradise Lost by John Milton
55. Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust
56. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
57. The Republic by Plato
58. Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss
59. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
60. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
61. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
62. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
63. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
64. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
65. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
66. Robinson Cursoe by Daniel Defoe
67. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
68. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
69. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
70. The Art of War by Sun Tzu
71. The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
72. Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
73. On the Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
74. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
75. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
76. The Indian in the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks
77. Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
78. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams
79. A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen
80. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
81. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
82. Tartuffe by Moliere
83. The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
84. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
85. The Plague by Albert Camus
86. Native Son by Richard Wright
87. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
88. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
89. The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol
90. Beowulf
91. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
92. Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman
93. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
94. Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
95. Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
96. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
97. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
98. The Odyssey by Homer
99. This Book Will Change Your Life by Benrik
100. The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum