The ultimate book list

The Telegraph has published a list of 110 books it describes as the "perfect library". If it is any indication of being "well read" then I'm afraid I'm at the very bottom of the scale: I have only read a handful of these tomes, most of them from the children's section and, inexplicably, the science fiction section.

Here's the list in full:

CLASSICS
The Illiad and The Odyssey Homer
The Barchester Chronicles Anthony Trollope
Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen
Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift
Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë
War and Peace Tolstoy
David Copperfield Charles Dickens
Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray
Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert
Middlemarch George Eliot

POETRY
Sonnets Shakespeare
Divine Comedy Dante
Canterbury Tales Chaucer
The Prelude William Wordsworth
Odes John Keats
The Waste Land T. S. Eliot
Paradise Lost John Milton
Songs of Innocence and Experience William Blake
Collected Poems W. B. Yeats
Collected Poems Ted Hughes

LITERARY FICTION
The Portrait of a Lady Henry James
A la recherche du temps perdu Proust
Ulysses James Joyce
For Whom the Bell Tolls Ernest Hemingway
Sword of Honour trilogy Evelyn Waugh
The Ballad of Peckham Rye Muriel Spark
Rabbit series John Updike
One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez
Beloved Toni Morrison
The Human Stain Philip Roth

ROMANTIC FICTION
Rebecca Daphne du Maurier
Le Morte D'Arthur Thomas Malory
Les Liaisons Dangereuses Choderlos de Laclos
I, Claudius Robert Graves
Alexander Trilogy Mary Renault
Master and Commander Patrick O'Brian
Gone with the Wind Margaret Mitchell
Dr Zhivago Boris Pasternak
Tess of the D'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy
The Plantagenet Saga Jean Plaidy

CHILDREN'S  BOOKS
Swallows and Amazons Arthur Ransome
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe C.S. Lewis
The Lord of the Rings J.R. R. Tolkien
His Dark Materials Philip Pullman
Babar Jean de Brunhoff
The Railway Children E. Nesbit
Winnie-the-Pooh A.A. Milne
Harry Potter J.K. Rowling
The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame
Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson

SCI-FI
Frankenstein Mary Shelley
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Jules Verne
The Time Machine H.G. Wells
Brave New World Aldous Huxley
1984 George Orwell
The Day of the Triffids John Wyndham
Foundation Isaac Asimov
2001: A Space Odyssey Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick
Neuromancer William Gibson

CRIME
The Talented Mr Ripley Patricia Highsmith
The Maltese Falcon Dashiell Hammett
The Complete Sherlock Holmes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy John le Carré
Red Dragon Thomas Harris
Murder on the Orient Express Agatha Christie
The Murders in the Rue Morgue Edgar Allan Poe
The Woman in White Wilkie Collins
Killshot Elmore Leonard

BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD
Das Kapital Karl Marx
The Rights of Man Tom Paine
The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville
On War Carl von Clausewitz
The Prince Niccolo Machiavelli
Leviathan Thomas Hobbes
On the Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud
On the Origin of Species Charles Darwin
L'Encyclopédie Diderot, et al

BOOKS THAT CHANGED YOUR WORLD
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Robert M. Pirsig
Jonathan Livingston Seagull Richard Bach
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams
The Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell
The Beauty Myth Naomi Wolf
How to Cook Delia Smith
A Year in Provence Peter Mayle
A Child Called 'It' Dave Pelzer
Eats, Shoots and Leaves Lynne Truss
Schott's Original Miscellany Ben Schott

HISTORY
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Winston Churchill
A History of the Crusades Steven Runciman
The Histories Herodotus
The History of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides
Seven Pillars of Wisdom T. E. Lawrence
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
A People's Tragedy Orlando Figes
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution Simon Schama
The Origins of the Second World War A.J.P. Taylor

LIVES
Confessions St Augustine
Lives of the Caesars Suetonius
Lives of the Artists Vasari
If This is a Man Primo Levi
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man Siegfried Sassoon
Eminent Victorians Lytton Strachey
A Life of Charlotte Brontë  Elizabeth Gaskell
Goodbye to All That Robert Graves
The Life of Dr Johnson Boswell
Diaries Alan Clark

Comments

[Gav (NextRead)]

I don't get it. I was under the impression that it didn't include anything modern until I hit Harry Potter and His Dark Materials. It gives the impression that the originator of this list needs to get to up to date in his reading. Even if he choose a couple of poets that have put pen to paper in the last decade or so it would have helped.

Perfect my arse! :D

[Lisa]

I'm a sucker for these types of lists. I don't think I've fared very well with it, either. But, they're fun to look at, and it's an excuse to buy more books. I want a perfect library, after all.

[Kinuk]

I've given up on these lists because they just make me feel insecure about my reading. And already I'm reading as much as I possibly can. I'd rather concentrate on doable lists: TBR 2008 and my Booker Prize challenge (which will take me several years to complete). A Child Called It changed their world? Really??

[meli]

yeah this list is weird and dated - don't worry about it! and who decided ted hughes was the greatest poet since yeats? (as much as i like him...) that's not a perfect library, that's a smug library...