I easily read one book a week, more if I am caught up in the book. A couple of weeks back, I was thinking back to the thousands of books I must have read in my lifetime and wondered if these are books one must read in their lifetime. So I decided to compile a list and in this list are some favourites, some that I have read, and some I have on my to-read list. How many of these have you read?

Of course, each person’s must-read books will be different depending on their taste, and what someone may consider a must-read may have not made it to this list. This list of 50 books in alphabetical order is not an exhaustive one by any stretch, so if there is a book I have missed that needs to be included, let me know and I will add it for others to discover new books too.

1. 1984 by George Orwell
2. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
3. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
4. Animal Farm by George Orwell
5. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
6. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
7. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
8. Charlotte’s Web by E. B White
9. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
10. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
11. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
12. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
13. Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling
14. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
15. Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
16. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
17. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
18. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
19. Malgudi Days by R.K. Narayan
20. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
21. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
22. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
23. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
24. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
25. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
26. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
27. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
28. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
29. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
30. The Color Purple: A Novel by Alice Walker
31. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
32. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
33. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
34. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
35. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
36. The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
37. The Kitchen God’s Wife by Amy Tan
38. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
39. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
40. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
41. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
42. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
43. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
44. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
45. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
46. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
47. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
48. Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh
49. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
50. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Did your favourite books make the list?