James Mustich, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die: A Life-Changing List
science fiction awards database
This compilation, by the co-founder of the mail-order catalog A Common Reader in 1986 and later founder of the Barnes & Noble Review, is arranged alphatically by author, with single titles for each in the majority of cases. Of the 87 compiled titles here, 72 have individual entries under their authors; the others are arranged in "More to Explore" sidebars for space opera (Moore, Niven, Baxter), ghost stories (Lovecraft, Jackson, Kirk, Straub, Smith), heroic fantasy (Eddison, Vance, Leiber, Alexander, Moorcock, Martin), and a "Booknote" sidebar (Rice). Each main entry also includes other titles by the same author or of relevant interest, totaling many thousands; these are not compiled here.
Ranked: No
Titles Cited: 87
Publication: Workman, 2018
Ranked: No
Titles Cited: 87
Publication: Workman, 2018
- Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland (Seeley, 1884)
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Pan, 1979)
- Richard Adams, Watership Down (Rex Collings, 1972)
- Lloyd Alexander, The Book of Three (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964)
- Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Trilogy (series, 1953)
- J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World (Berkley Medallion, 1962)
- J. M. Barrie, Peter and Wendy (Hodder & Stoughton, 1911)
- L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (George Hill , 1900)
- Stephen Baxter, Vacuum Diagrams (HarperCollins/Voyager UK, 1997)
- Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination (NAL/Signet, 1957)
- Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962; Argentina 1944)
- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (Ballantine, 1953)
- Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (Harper & Row, 1967; France 1967)
- Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (Heinemann , 1962)
- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974; Italy 1972)
- Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game (Tor, 1985)
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Macmillan, 1865)
- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (Macmillan, 1871)
- Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Random House, 2000)
- Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End (Ballantine, 1953)
- Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Scholastic Press, 2008)
- Michael Crichton, The Andromeda Strain (Knopf , 1969)
- John Crowley, Little, Big (Bantam, 1981)
- Samuel R. Delany, Nova (Doubleday, 1968)
- Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Doubleday, 1968)
- Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (Putnam, 1962)
- Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (Doubleday, 1965)
- E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime (Random House, 1975)
- E. R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros (Jonathan Cape, 1922)
- Jack Finney, Time and Again (Simon & Schuster, 1970)
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (In Spanish, 1967; Harper & Row, 1970)
- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (Putnam, 2003)
- William Golding, Lord of the Flies (Faber and Faber, 1954)
- Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (Thames Methuen, 1908)
- Günter Grass, The Tin Drum (Pantheon, 1962)
- Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (Putnam, 1961)
- Frank Herbert, Dune (Chilton, 1965)
- Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969; Switzerland 1943)
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (Chatto & Windus, 1932)
- Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (Viking, 1959)
- Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth (Epstein & Carroll, 1961)
- Franz Kafka, The Trial (Gollancz, 1937; Germany 1925)
- Stephen King, 11/22/63 (Scribner, 2011)
- Stephen King, Carrie (Doubleday, 1974)
- Russell Kirk, Old House of Fear (Fleet, 1961)
- Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea (Parnassus Press, 1968)
- Fritz Leiber, Two Sought Adventure (Gnome, 1957)
- Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad (Seabury Press, 1974; Poland 1965)
- Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time (Farrar Straus Cudahy, 1962)
- Doris Lessing, Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta (Knopf, 1979)
- Ira Levin, Rosemary's Baby (Random House, 1967)
- C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Geoffrey Bles, 1950)
- Hugh Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle (Lippincott, 1922)
- H. P. Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (Gollancz, 1952)
- George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones (HarperCollins Voyager, 1996)
- Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Knopf, 2006)
- Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (Lippincott, 1959)
- Michael Moorcock, Stormbringer (Herbert Jenkins, 1965)
- C. L. Moore, Judgment Night (Gnome Press, 1952)
- Larry Niven, Ringworld (Ballantine, 1970)
- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Secker & Warburg, 1949)
- Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Trilogy (series, 1959)
- Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry and Tales (Library of America, 1984)
- Philip Pullman, Northern Lights [US title The Golden Compass] (Scholastic, 1995)
- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (Viking , 1973)
- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (Random House , 1957)
- Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire (Knopf , 1976)
- J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Scholastic, 1998)
- Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (Jonathan Cape, 1981)
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Lackington Hughes, 1818)
- Clifford D. Simak, City (Gnome Press, 1952)
- Thorne Smith, Topper (McBride, 1926)
- Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver (Morrow, 2003)
- Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (George Munro, 1886)
- Bram Stoker, Dracula (Constable , 1897)
- Peter Straub, lost boy lost girl (Random House, 2003)
- James Tiptree, Jr., Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (Arkham House, 1990)
- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (Allen & Unwin , 1937)
- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (series, 1955)
- Jack Vance, The Dying Earth (Hillman, 1950)
- Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (George Smith, 1873; France 1871)
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five (Delacorte, 1969)
- Jo Walton, Among Others (Tor, 2011)
- H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man (C. Arthur Pearson, 1897)
- T. H. White, The Once and Future King (Collins , 1958)
- Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (Doubleday, 2016)
- John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (Doubleday, 1951)
Copyright 2012 - 2024 by Mark R. Kelly and the Locus Science Fiction Foundation. All rights reserved.