My friend just sent me these lists in an excel sheet. We wanted to read as many on the list this year as possible. Many we have already read. Some on the list do repeat we noticed. Do these look accurate though or anything to add/change?
TOP TWEEN BOOKS:
Charlotte’s Web — E.B. White
The Giver — Lois Lowry
Harry Potter — J.K. Rowling
A Wrinkle in Time — Madeleine L’Engle
Bridge to Terabithia — Katherine Paterson
The Phantom Tollbooth — Norton Juster
Coraline — Neil Gaiman
Holes — Louis Sachar
The Chronicles of Narnia — C.S. Lewis
Matilda — Roald Dahl
Wonder — R.J. Palacio
Because of Winn-Dixie — Kate DiCamillo
The Graveyard Book — Neil Gaiman
Esperanza Rising — Pam Muñoz Ryan
Percy Jackson and the Olympians— Rick Riordan
TOP TEEN BOOKS:
The Hunger Games — Suzanne Collins
Harry Potter — J.K. Rowling
The Book Thief — Markus Zusak
The Perks of Being a Wallflower — Stephen Chbosky
Divergent — Veronica Roth
Looking for Alaska — John Green
The Fault in Our Stars — John Green
The Giver — Lois Lowry
Six of Crows — Leigh Bardugo
Speak — Laurie Halse Anderson
The Maze Runner — James Dashner
The Hate U Give — Angie Thomas
Eleanor & Park — Rainbow Rowell
Coraline — Neil Gaiman
A Wrinkle in Time — Madeleine L’Engle
LITERARY FICTION
To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee
Beloved — Toni Morrison
The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald
One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel García Márquez
Mrs. Dalloway — Virginia Woolf
The Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger
The Road — Cormac McCarthy
The Color Purple — Alice Walker
Never Let Me Go — Kazuo Ishiguro
East of Eden — John Steinbeck
The Handmaid’s Tale — Margaret Atwood
White Teeth — Zadie Smith
The Bell Jar — Sylvia Plath
Life of Pi — Yann Martel
A Little Life — Hanya Yanagihara
FANTASY
The Lord of the Rings — J.R.R. Tolkien
A Game of Thrones — George R.R. Martin
The Hobbit — J.R.R. Tolkien
The Name of the Wind — Patrick Rothfuss
Earthsea (series) — Ursula K. Le Guin
The Once and Future King — T.H. White
Mistborn — Brandon Sanderson
The Chronicles of Narnia — C.S. Lewis
American Gods — Neil Gaiman
The Witcher — Andrzej Sapkowski
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell — Susanna Clarke
The Broken Earth — N.K. Jemisin
Good Omens — Pratchett & Gaiman
The Princess Bride — William Goldman
Piranesi — Susanna Clarke
SCIENCE FICTION
Dune — Frank Herbert
1984 — George Orwell
The Left Hand of Darkness — Ursula K. Le Guin
Neuromancer — William Gibson
Fahrenheit 451 — Ray Bradbury
The Dispossessed — Ursula K. Le Guin
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — Philip K. Dick
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams
Snow Crash — Neal Stephenson
Foundation — Isaac Asimov
Brave New World — Aldous Huxley
Kindred — Octavia Butler
Ender’s Game — Orson Scott Card
Annihilation — Jeff VanderMeer
Station Eleven — Emily St. John Mandel
MYSTERY/CRIME
The Big Sleep — Raymond Chandler
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — Stieg Larsson
Gone Girl — Gillian Flynn
In Cold Blood — Truman Capote
The Maltese Falcon — Dashiell Hammett
The Silence of the Lambs — Thomas Harris
The Name of the Rose — Umberto Eco
And Then There Were None — Agatha Christie
The Talented Mr. Ripley — Patricia Highsmith
The Shadow of the Wind — Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Big Little Lies — Liane Moriarty
The Postman Always Rings Twice — James M. Cain
Sharp Objects — Gillian Flynn
The Snowman — Jo Nesbø
Rebecca — Daphne du Maurier
HORROR
Dracula — Bram Stoker
Frankenstein — Mary Shelley
The Shining — Stephen King
It — Stephen King
The Haunting of Hill House — Shirley Jackson
The Exorcist — William Peter Blatty
World War Z — Max Brooks
The Road — Cormac McCarthy
Bird Box — Josh Malerman
House of Leaves — Mark Z. Danielewski
Pet Sematary — Stephen King
The Turn of the Screw — Henry James
The Silence of the Lambs — Thomas Harris
Let the Right One In — John Ajvide Lindqvist
Mexican Gothic — Silvia Moreno-Garcia
ROMANCE
Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen
Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë
Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë
Outlander — Diana Gabaldon
Me Before You — Jojo Moyes
The Time Traveler’s Wife — Audrey Niffenegger
Call Me by Your Name — André Aciman
The Notebook — Nicholas Sparks
Normal People — Sally Rooney
Love in the Time of Cholera — Gabriel García Márquez
Twilight — Stephenie Meyer
Red, White & Royal Blue — Casey McQuiston
The Song of Achilles — Madeline Miller
The Hating Game — Sally Thorne
One Day — David Nicholls
NONFICTION/MEMOIR
Educated — Tara Westover
The Diary of a Young Girl — Anne Frank
Sapiens — Yuval Noah Harari
Becoming — Michelle Obama
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks — Rebecca Skloot
When Breath Becomes Air — Paul Kalanithi
Into the Wild — Jon Krakauer
The Glass Castle — Jeannette Walls
Between the World and Me — Ta-Nehisi Coates
A Brief History of Time — Stephen Hawking
Night — Elie Wiesel
Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman
The Art of War — Sun Tzu
Born a Crime — Trevor Noah
Just Kids — Patti Smith
by Fickle-artists
20 Comments
This is a solid list but definitely missing some stuff depending on what you and your friend are into. Like for horror where’s Lovecraft? And for sci-fi you gotta have Hyperion by Dan Simmons somewhere in there
Also noticed The Road is listed in both literary fiction and horror which makes sense honestly since it fits both
Pretty ambitious goal to tackle all these in one year though, good luck with that
More Pratchett needed for Tween, teen and fantasy. Good Omens is my favorite, but not having a single Discworld novel is a grave omission. Just to put things in perspective, Pratchett was the top selling UK author for several years. Not top fantasy author, top of the heap.
I don’t think you should include unfinished works.
Personally i would swap It and The Stand for the top spot for Stephen King. MOST people prefer The Stand i think overall than It, i am a bigger fan of It but would acknowledge that it has more flaws than The Stand, also go with the complete version uncut version released later on though as it adds a tone compared to the original version. Other than that no notes, good lists!
I wish historical fiction wasn’t always left out of genre lists. There are some gems in there.
Remove Divergent and replace it with something by Nancy Farmer or Eoin Colfer.
House of The Scorpion or Artemis Fowl
You don’t need two John Green books either, maybe scrap one of them.
I guess it depends on your definition.
Looking at the first few lists and this seems to favor popularity from a decade or so back. Especially looking at the romance section. Not to mention there seem to be a decent amount of repeat authors.
Harry Potter, for example, is major in a cultural sense but I would not put those in a top 15 for either tween or teen books.
For King I’m honestly more of a Salems Lot guy than an It guy
Count of Monte Cristo, Heart of Darkness, Crime and Punishment, def some Dickens, maybe Tale of two cities.
That is what I would add on first glance.
Skip A Little Life, it’s horrible.
For fantasy, I would take out American Gods (wouldn’t say it’s top 15 and no one should support him) and take out Name of the wind (unfinished series and imo pretty overrated)
I would add The First Law series and Eye of the World in its place.
For Sci Fi I would add The Expanse, Children of Time, and Hyperion as pretty essential works. Don’t know enough of the other to say what should get taken out though (I don’t love station 11)
Seems like a very good list. Some duds, some missing = but that would be true of any list.
Patti Smith’s autobiography? Hmmm – that sounds interesting.
Trying to pick 150 books as “the best” for any genre is a losing cause, let alone 15. So I don’t think you can have a right answer to this.
You can’t probably have some wrong answers, but I’m not going to be piling on choices in your lists. If you read even a fraction of these I’m sure you’ll enjoy the diversity.
Wrinkle in Time is listed twice. It’s definitely a kids book not a teen book.
Divergent is really bad, skip.
Eleanor and Park is actually incredibly racist. It caricatures the Black female characters and feminised the half Korean male love interest while thoroughly orientalising both him and his mother. I’d take that off the list.
Piranesi is overrated
In the year of our lord two-thousand and twenty six can we please stop promoting Harry Potter.
Also you need to add The Fifth Season to the fantasy list
Borges Kafka Proust Mann Dickens Tolstoy Goethe Zola Balzac Stendhal Joyce Pynchon Gaddis Oe Mahfouz Infante Dostoevsky Roth Bellow Antunes Cervantes Camus
Etc in to infinity. Drop all of the teens and tweens
It’s a very solid list!
I’d probably add A. Solzenicyn’s Cancer Ward and Master and Margarita by Bułhakow to novels but it’s my preference. Name of the Wind is unfinished and probably never will be. In SF I’d definitely find a spot for Hyperion and Gene Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer.