Books to Read Before I Die

There are so many lists out there that let me know me all of the books that I need to read in my lifetime…but they’re either unrealistically long, way too short, or I’ve already read half of them. So I decided to have some fun (yes, this is what I call fun  ) and come up with my own Books to Read Before I Die list, made up of all books that I personally want to eventually read.

Some of my choices are for fun, some of my choices are classics, and two of them are poetry. But these are the things that I wanted to put on my personal book bucket list. I can’t wait to get started on this list and be able to cross some of them out!

1. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. White Oleander by Janet Fitch
3. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
4. The Shack by Wm. Paul Young
5. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
6. Cinder by Marissa Meyer
7. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
8. Crank by Ellen Hopkins
9. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
10. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
11. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
12. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
13. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
14. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
15. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
16. The Pilot’s Wife by Anita Shreve
17. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
18. Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
19. Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins
20. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
21. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
22. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
23. Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King, Jr.
24. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
25. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemmingway
26. The Stand by Steven King
27. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
28. The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
29. Just One Day by Gayle Forman
30. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
31. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
32. Dead Poets Society by N.H. Kleinbaum
33. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
34. Between Shades of Grey by Ruta Sepetys
35. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
36. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows
37. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
38. The Duke and I by Julia Quinn
39. Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
40. The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan
41. Incest: From a Journal of Love by Anaïs Nin
42. Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
43. On the Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta
44. Please Ignore Vera Dietz by A.S. King
45. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
46. Catch Me if You Can by Frank W. Abagnale
47. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry
48. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
49. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
50. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
51. Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand
52. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
53. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
54. Fight Club by Chucke Palahniuk
55. Angels & Demons by Dan Brown
56. The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons
57. Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities by Flora Rheta Schreiber
58. Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers
59. The Hours by Michael Cunningham
60. Looking for Alaska by John Green
61. These Is My Words by Nancy E. Turner
62. Maus — A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman
63. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
64. The Tempest by William Shakespeare
65. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
66. 100 Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda
67. If I Stay by Gayle Forman
68. Saturday by Ian McEwan
69. Someone Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill
70. Coraline by Neil Gaiman
71. I Am Nujood: Age 10 and Divorced by Nujood Ali
72. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
73. Unwind by Neal Schusterman
74. 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fights to Survive Inside the Twin Towers by Jim Dwyer & Kevin Flynn
75. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
76. Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
77. Forbidden by Tabitha Suzuma
78. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
79. Slave: My True Story by Mende Nazer
80. It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini
81. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
82. The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick
83. Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion
84. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
85. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
86. Every Day by David Levithan
87. Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon
88. The Angel Experiment by James Patterson
89. The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman
90. Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters
91. Naked by David Sedaris
92. Darkfever by Karen Marie Moning
93. Amber House by Kelly Moore
94. Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt
95. Empty Chairs by Stacey Danson
96. Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
97. The Violets of March by Sarah Jio
98. The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate
99. Sing You Home by Jodi Picoult
100. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
101. Watership Down by Richard Adams