Here Are the 100 Books Amazon Thinks You Should Read Before You Die

published Dec 16, 2017
We independently select these products—if you buy from one of our links, we may earn a commission. All prices were accurate at the time of publishing.
Post Image
(Image credit: Lauren Kolyn)

If your New Year’s resolution is to read more in 2018 but don’t know where to start, Amazon editors have got you covered. They’ve put together a list of the 100 books to read in a lifetime, which covers fiction and nonfiction, with writers that range from Doris Kearns Goodwin to Shel Silverstein .

The list is mostly classics, so if you’re looking to beef up your library with something more zeitgeisty, they also released their most read Kindle and Audible books of 2017. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale topped the Kindle fiction list, with The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson taking top nonfiction honors.

Amazon’s 100 must read books are as follows:

  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: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah
  5. The Bad Beginning: Or, Orphans!, by Lemony Snicket
  6. A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle
  7. Selected Stories, 1968-1994, by Alice Munro
  8. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass, 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 Brené 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 Diamond, Ph.D.
  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: The 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 García Márquez
  39. Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich
  40. Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl
  41. Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris
  42. Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
  43. Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
  44. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, 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: The Story of a Childhood, 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: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
  54. The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton
  55. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon
  56. The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley, by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
  57. The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak
  58. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz
  59. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
  60. The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother, by James McBride
  61. The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen
  62. The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson
  63. The Diary of a Young Girl, 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 , 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, 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, 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: The Poems and Drawings of Shel Silverstein, by Shel Silverstein
  100. Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak

How many have you read? What would you add to the list?

More book news: