My Ideal Bookshelf...2025

Every book related website, whether curated by professional writers, publishers or booklovers, is awash in some variation of "100(ish) Books To Read Before You Die". After perusing many of these lists, I can say with confidence that they are heavily redundant, somewhat elitist, and likely comparable to the most boring assignment you have gotten since high school. Surely there must be a better list of books I can recommend you keep company with in your dying days. No one book has changed my life, but the reading of countless has made my life what it is. I can’t imagine who I would be today without my love of reading and I am grateful that I don’t have to. I am not going to regurgitate a synopsis here or lay bare my journal entries to disclose the books magnitude or what emotions it elicited. What I will say is that singularly or in some extraordinary combination they made me who I am.

1 The Stand – Stephen King

2 We Begin At The End - Chris Whitaker

3 All The Sinners Bleed - S.A. Cosby

4 We Solve Murders - Richard Osman

5 The Book Of Doors - Gareth Brown

6 The Institute - Stephen King

7 Carnivale Of Curiousitites - Aimee Gibbs

8 All The Colours Of The Dark - Chris Whitaker

9 Recurison - Blake Crouch

10 Lunar Chronicles - Marissa Meyer

11 The Plot - Jean Hanff Korelitz

12 Fairy Tale - Stephen King

13 Ready Player One – Ernest Cline

14 Motherless Brooklyn – Jonathan Lethem

15 Lord of The Rings Trilogy – J. R. R. Tolkien

16 The Martian – Andy Weir

17 The Women - Kristin Hannah

18 Heart Shaped Box – Joe Hill

19 Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon

20 This Story Is A Lie – Tom Pollock

21 Good Omens – Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman

22 French Windows - Antione Laurain

23 Wishing Game - Meg Shaffer

24 Yellowface - R.F. Kuang

25 Zilot - Bob Odenkirk

26 Babel - R.F. Kuang

27 Frozen River - Ariel Lawhon

28 Dracula – Bram Stoker

29 Harry Potter Series – J. K. Rowling

30 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

31 Women In The Library - Sulari Gentil

32 Blood Sugar -Sashca Rothschild

33 Final Girls Support Group - Grady Hendrix

34 Eight Detectives - Alex Pavesi

35 Small Mercies – Dennis Lehane

36 Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

37 Happiness Falls - Angie Kim

38 Everyone In My Family Will Someday Be Dead - Benjamin Stevenson

39 Fourth Wing - Rebecca Yarros

40 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

41 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

42 The Shining – Stephen King

43 Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium Trilogy) – Stieg Larsson

44 Princess Bride – William Goldman

45 Grimm’s Fairy Tales – Brothers Grimm

46 One Hundred Years Of Lenni & Margot - Marianne Cronin

47 Daisy Jones & The Six – Taylor Jenkins Reid

48 The Eight – Katherine Neville

49 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith

50 In the Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco

51 I Am Pilgrim – Terry Hayes

52 Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

53 Harriet The Spy – Louise Fitzhugh

54 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

55 Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

56 A Simple Plan – Scott Smith

57 The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver

58 High Fidelity – Nick Hornby

59 Postcards from the Edge – Carrie Fisher

60 The Nightingale – Kristin Hannah

61 Practical Magic – Alice Hoffman

62 The Echo Wife - Sarah Gailey

63 The Killing Circle – Andrew Pyper

64 Murder of Roger Ackroyd/Crooked House – Agatha Christie

65 Dead Silence - S.A. Barnes

66 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

67 Interpreter of Maladies – Jhumpa Lahiri

68 Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil – John Berendt

69 Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury

70 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

71 The Historian – Elizabeth Kostova

72 Paradox Hotel -Rob Hart

73 Bright Young Women - Jennifer Knoll

74 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

75 The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next Series) – Jasper Fforde

76 Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak

77 English Patient – Michael Ondaatje

78 Bad Monkey/Sick Puppy – Carl Hiaasen

79 Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro

80 Lessons In Chemistry - Bonnie Garmus

81 Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell – Susanna Clarke

82 Where the Sidewalk Ends – Shel Silverstein

83 No One Will Miss Her - Kat Rosenfield

84 Speak Of The Devil - Rose Wilding

85 Larry’s Party – Carol Shields

86 Everything I Never Told You – Celeste Ng

87 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

88 The Pillars of the Earth – Ken Follett

89 The Stinky Cheese Man – Jon Scieszka

90 Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier

91 Go Ask Alice – Anonymous

92 Kane and Abel – Jeffrey Archer

93 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf – Edward Albee

94 Battle Royale – Koushun Takami

95 Fight Club – Chuck Palahniuk

96 Ordinary People – Judith Guest

97 Rosemary’s Baby – Ira Levin

98 Little Women – Louisa May Alcott

99 The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett