Publisher Penguin is celebrating it's 60th anniversary by compiling a list of what it considers to be 'must read' books:
THE BEST CRAZIES
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Ken Kesey
The Diary of a Madman
Nikolai Gogol
Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Notes From Underground
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
THE BEST SEX
Story of the Eye
Georges Bataille
A Spy in the House of Love
Anaïs Nin
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
D. H. Lawrence
Venus In Furs
Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch
The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer
THE BEST VILLAINS
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
Diamonds are Forever
Ian Fleming
The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
The Secret Agent
Joseph Conrad
THE BEST LOVERS
A Room with a View
E. M. Forster
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
Don Juan
Lord Byron
Love In A Cold Climate
Nancy Mitford
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Tennessee Williams
THE BEST HEROES
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
Middlemarch
George Eliot
She
H. Rider Haggard
The Fight
Norman Mailer
No Easy Walk to Freedom
Nelson Mandela
THE BEST TEARJERKERS
Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
Notre-Dame De Paris
Victor Hugo
Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy
The Old Curiosity Shop
Charles Dickens
THE BEST SPINE-TINGLERS
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
Dracula
Bram Stoke
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
The Castle of Otranto
Horace Walpole
The Turn of the Screw
Henry James
THE BEST MINXES
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
Baby Doll
Tennessee Williams
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Truman Capote
Emma
Jane Austen
THE BEST JOURNEYS
On the RoadJack Kerouac
The Odyssey
Homer
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
Three Men in a Boat
Jerome K. Jerome
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
THE BEST DECADENCE
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Vile Bodies
Evelyn Waugh
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
The Beautiful and Damned
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Against Nature
J. K. Huysmans
THE BEST REBELS
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Malcolm X
The Outsider
Albert Camus
Animal Farm
George Orwell
The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo
THE BEST SCIENCE FICTION
The Time Machine
H. G. Wells
The Man in the High Castle
Philip K. Dick
The Invisible Man
H. G. Wells
The Day of the Triffids
John Wyndham
We
Yevgeny Zamyatin
THE BEST VIOLENCE
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess
Hell’s Angels
Hunter S. Thompson
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens
Another Country
James Baldwin
In Cold Blood
Truman Capote
THE BEST HIGHS
Junky
William S. Burroughs
The Moonstone
Wilkie Collins
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Thomas De Quincey
The Subterraneans
Jack Kerouac
Monsieur Monde Vanishes
Georges Simenon
THE BEST SUBVERSION
1984
George Orwell
The Monkey Wrench Gang
Edward Abbey
The Prince
Niccolo Machiavelli
Bound for Glory
Woody Guthrie
Death of a Salesman
Arthur Miller
THE BEST CRIMES
Maigret and the Ghost
Georges Simenon
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins
The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler
A Study in Scarlet
Arthur Conan Doyle
The Thirty-Nine Steps
John Buchan
THE BEST ADULTERY
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
Thérèse Raquin
Emile Zola
Les Liaisons dangereuses
Choderlos de Laclos
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
THE BEST DEBAUCHERY
I, Claudius
Robert Graves
Hangover Square
Patrick Hamilton
The Beggar’s Opera
John Gay
The Twelve Caesars
Suetonius
Guys and Dolls
Damon Runyon
THE BEST ACTION
Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson
The Iliad
Homer
The Count Of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
From Russia with Love
Ian Fleming
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy
THE BEST LAUGHS
Cold Comfort Farm
Stella Gibbons
The Diary of a Nobody
George and Weedon Grossmith
The Pickwick Papers
Charles Dickens
Scoop
Evelyn Waugh
Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis
I've read less than a quarter of these, which makes me feel rather dull and unenlightened.
How many of these have YOU read?