Perfect Library... ahem...

[vallensvelvet]

 This was a list from the Telegraph: the 101 best books, or the perfect library. I think it's a pretty funny list, so am repeating it here.

Bold, I have read.
Underlined, my favourites.

• The Classics :
  
  • The Illiad and The Odyssey by Homer.
    
  • The Barchester Chronicles by Anthony Trollope.
  • Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.
  • Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift.
  • Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.
  • War and Peace by Tolstoy.
  • David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.
  • Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray.
  • Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.
    
  • Middlemarch by George Eliot.
• Poetry:
  
  • Sonnets by Shakespeare.
  • Divine Comedy by Dante.
  • Canterbury Tales by Chaucer.
  • The Prelude by William Wordsworth.
    
  • Odes by John Keats.
  • The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot.
  • Paradise Lost by John Milton.
  • Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake.
  • Collected Poems by W. B. Yeats.
  • Collected Poems by Ted Hughes.

Literary Fiction

•  The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James.
• A la recherche du temps perdu by Proust.
• Ulysses by James Joyce.
• For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway.
• Sword of Honour trilogy by Evelyn Waugh.
• Rabbit series by John Updike.
• One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Beloved by Toni Morrison.
• The Human Stain by Philip Roth.

• Romantic fiction.
  • Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.
  • Le Morte D'Arthur by Thomas Malory.
  • Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos.
  • I, Claudius by Robert Graves.
  • Alexander Trilogy by Mary Renault.
  • Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian.
  • Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.
  • Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak.
  • Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy.
  • The Plantagenet Saga by Jean Plaidy.

• Children's books:
  
  • Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome.
  • The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis.
  • The Lord of the Rings by J.R. R. Tolkien.
  • His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman.
  • Babar by Jean de Brunhoff.
  • The Railway Children by E. Nesbit.
  • Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne.
  • Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling.
  • The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.
  • Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.
•  
  • Sci-Fi
  •  
• • Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
  • Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne.
  • The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.
  • Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
  • 1984 by George Orwell.
  • The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham.
  • Foundation by Isaac Asimov.
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke.
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.
  • Neuromancer by William Gibson.
  •  
• Crime
  • The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith.
  • The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.
  • The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
  • The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler.
  • Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré.
  • Red Dragon by Thomas Harris.
  • Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie.
  • The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe.
  • The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.
  • Killshot by Elmore Leonard.
• Books that changed the world:
  
  • Das Kapital by Karl Marx.
    
  • The Rights of Man by Tom Paine.
  • The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
  • Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville.
  • On War by Carl von Clausewitz.
  • The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli.
  • Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes.
  • On the Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud.
    
  • On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.
  • L'Encyclopédie by Diderot, et al.
    
• Books that changed your world
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig.
    
  • Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach.
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
    
  • The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.
    
  • The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf.
  • How to Cook by Delia Smith.
  • A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle.
    
  • A Child Called 'It' by Dave Pelzer.
  • Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss.
  • Schott's Original Miscellany by Ben Schott.
  •  

• History
•  
• The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon.
• A History of the English-Speaking Peoples by Winston Churchill.
• A History of the Crusades by Steven Runciman.
  
• The Histories by Herodotus.
  
• The Histories of the Pelopynesian War by Thucydides.
• Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence.
• The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
• A People's Tragedy by Orlando Figes.
• Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama.
• The Origins of the Second World War by A.J.P. Taylor.
• Lives
  • Confessions by St Augustine.
  • Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius.
  • Lives of the Artists by Vasari.
  • If This is a Man by Primo Levi.
  • Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon.
    
  • Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey.
    
  • A Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell.
  • Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves.
  • The Life of Dr Johnson by Boswell.
  • Diaries by Alan Clark.

I think this list is hilarious, despite having my favourite novel of all time on it ("The Portrait of a Lady" since you ask), I would say it is probably the LEAST perfect library ever.... each section is like the randomest collection of titles vaguely related to the genre/category....
Poetry: seriously? - with a leap from Shakespeare and Milton to Blake that completely ignores ALL the metaphysicals, Pope etc but then finds space for Ted Hughes while blanking any number of better 20th century poets -e.g.Auden, Pound, I mean WHAT? And the SF section, puhlease....
Although I have to say, I think the Literary fiction section is the oddest....actually, 'Classics' is pretty insane too lol