The Perfect Library

What Red Read recently posted about The Telegraphs 110 Best books aka: The Perfect Library. The Telegraph post is actually an old one but not one I was familiar with, and I loves a book list. I couldn’t resist comparing my book shelves with the Telegraphs Perfect Library. I wasn’t too concerned with how many of the 110 list I had already read, knowing the results would be dismal. But I did hope to have a pretty good jump on at least owning the books.

So, I’ve copied the Telegraph’s list here and bolded the books I already own. The books I’ve read are in italics.

CLASSICS
The Iliad 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 (In Search of Lost Time) ~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 (The Death of King Arthur) ~Thomas Malory
Les Liaisons Dangereuses ~Choderlos de Laclos
I, Claudius ~Robert Graves
Alexander Trilogy ~Mary Renau
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

Now the results, I only own 36 of the 110! I’m shocked. This-will-not-do.

I am tempted to print out the list, keep it in my purse and buy one book from the list each time I happen to find myself in the book store. This is a fabulous idea, no? Surely I can fit another 74 books on my book shelves! *glances at shelves* oh right……

I’m actually not fully convinced this is the perfect list but it is a great starting point. So, I am going to make a new page on the blog to develop my own Perfect Library list. I will start with what’s here and I am going to include The Telegraph’s description of each title that I don’t yet own. As I investigate each book I will keep those that look worthy on the list and  remove anything that doesn’t appeal to me. I’ll also slowly be adding what I think is missing. Off the top of my head, the complete works of Shakespeare are in order I think! Or….should I just include the most referenced works? Hmmm something to think on.

If you have any suggestions for my Perfect Library please leave a comment!