Guardian Essential Library

Given by The Guardian

100 Works 567,939 Books 7,949 Reviews ½ 3.9
Clear your shelves of dog-eared airport novels, forgettable potboilers and half-read works of non-fiction. We asked eminent writers to choose 10 books from their respective fields to make up a show more capsule library of indispensable volumes. The only rules were that the books had to be in print and readily available in the UK. From art to science via fiction and memoir, these are their selections for the Guardian's Essential Library of 100 vital books. Collect them, then read them... http://books.guardian.co.uk/guardianessentiallibrary/0,12530,814635,00.html show less
Categories:
WorkCategory
Essays on Music (2002) by Theodor Adorno
Art and Music
The Painter of Modern Life (1964) by Charles Baudelaire
Art and Music
Beethoven's Letters (1926) by Ludwig van Beethoven
Art and Music
Ways of Seeing (1972) by John Berger
Art and Music
The Story of Art (1950) by E. H. Gombrich
Art and Music
The Glenn Gould Reader (1984) by Glenn Gould
Art and Music
Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told by a Friend (1949) by Thomas Mann
Art and Music
The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (1971) by Charles Rosen
Art and Music
Memories and Commentaries: New One-Volume Edition (2002) by Igor Stravinsky
Art and Music
The Lives of the Artists (1957) by Giorgio Vasari
Art and Music
Brief Lives (1898) by John Aubrey
Biography
The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) by James Boswell
Biography
Henry James: A Life (1985) by Leon Edel
Biography
The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) by Elizabeth Gaskell
Biography
Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983) by Andrew Hodges
Biography
Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage (1993) by Richard Holmes
Biography
Eminent Victorians (1918) by Lytton Strachey
Biography
The Quest for Corvo : An Experiment in Biography (1934) by A. J. A. Symons
Biography
The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (1990) by Claire Tomalin
Biography
Orlando: A Biography (1928) by Virginia Woolf
Biography
Persuasion (1817) by Jane Austen
Fiction
Our Mutual Friend (1865) by Charles Dickens
Fiction
Middlemarch (1871) by George Eliot
Fiction
The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fiction
The Good Soldier (1915) by Ford Madox Ford
Fiction
The Scarlet Letter (1850) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Fiction
The Portrait of a Lady (1908) by Henry James
Fiction
Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce
Fiction
Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy (1995) by John Updike
Fiction
The Custom of the Country (1913) by Edith Wharton
Fiction
The Master and Margarita (1966) by Mikhail Bulgakov
Fiction in Translation
Madame Bovary (1857) by Gustave Flaubert
Fiction in Translation
Effi Briest (1894) by Theodor Fontane
Fiction in Translation
A Hero of Our Time (1840) by Michail Jurjevič Lermontov
Fiction in Translation
In Search of Lost Time (1913) by Marcel Proust
Fiction in Translation
Eugene Onegin (1964) by Alexander Pushkin
Fiction in Translation
Anna Karenina (1875) by Leo Tolstoy
Fiction in Translation
Fathers and Sons (1862) by Ivan Turgenev
Fiction in Translation
Candide (1759) by Voltaire
Fiction in Translation
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Set 3 Vol) (1949) by Fernand Braudel
History
Selected Writings (Oxford World's Classics) (1991) by William Hazlitt
History
The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919) by Johan Huizinga
History
The Face of Battle (1976) by John Keegan
History
If Not Now, When? (1985) by Primo Levi
History
The Armada (1959) by Garrett Mattingly
History
English Society in the Eighteenth Century (1982) by Roy Porter
History
The Annals of Tacitus (117) by P. Cornelius Tacitus
History
The Leopard (1958) by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
History
Experience (2000) by Martin Amis
Memoir and Autobiography
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) by Maya Angelou
Memoir and Autobiography
Testament of Youth (1933) by Vera Brittain
Memoir and Autobiography
Diaries (1993) by Alan Clark
Memoir and Autobiography
The Naked Civil Servant (1968) by Quentin Crisp
Memoir and Autobiography
C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too... (1998) by John Diamond
Memoir and Autobiography
Good-Bye to All That: An Autobiography (1929) by Robert Graves
Memoir and Autobiography
If This Is a Man / The Truce (1947) by Primo Levi
Memoir and Autobiography
Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (1994) by Nelson Mandela
Memoir and Autobiography
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) by Malcolm X
Memoir and Autobiography
The complete poems, 1927–1979 (1983) by Elizabeth Bishop
Poetry
Troilus and Cressida (1374) by Geoffrey Chaucer
Poetry
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955) by Emily Dickinson
Poetry
The Waste Land (1922) by T. S. Eliot
Poetry
The Poetry of Robert Frost (1968) by Robert Frost
Poetry
Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems (1976) by Thomas Hardy
Poetry
The Complete Poems (1979) by Christina Rossetti
Poetry
The Sonnets (1609) by William Shakespeare
Poetry
Collected Poems (1921) by Edward Thomas
Poetry
The Prelude (1850) by William Wordsworth
Poetry
Politics (4 BCE) by Aristotle
Politics
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) by Edmund Burke
Politics
The Federalist Papers (1787) by Alexander Hamilton
Politics
Leviathan (1651) by Thomas Hobbes
Politics
The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Karl Marx
Politics
Orwell and Politics (Penguin Modern Classics) (2001) by George Orwell
Politics
On the Social Contract (1762) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Politics
Development as Freedom (1999) by Amartya Sen
Politics
Democracy in America (1835) by Alexis de Tocqueville
Politics
E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation (2000) by David Bodanis
Science
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996) by Richard Dawkins
Science
The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (1991) by Jared M. Diamond
Science
Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution (2000) by Richard Fortey
Science
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991) by Stephen Jay Gould
Science
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth (1998) by Paul Hoffman
Science
Cosmos: The Story of Cosmic Evolution, Science and Civilisation (1980) by Carl Sagan
Science
The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography (1999) by Simon Singh
Science
Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements (2000) by Paul Strathern
Science
The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (1969) by James D. Watson
Science
The Road to Oxiana (1937) by Robert Byron
Travel
In Xanadu: A Quest (1989) by William Dalrymple
Travel
Don Quixote's Delusions: Travels in Castilian Spain (2001) by Miranda France
Travel
Eothen (1844) by Alexander William Kinglake
Travel
A Time of Gifts (1977) by Patrick Leigh Fermor
Travel
Danube (1989) by Claudio Magris
Travel
Sun Dancing (1997) by Geoffrey Moorhouse
Travel
Old Glory: A Voyage Down the Mississippi (1981) by Jonathan Raban
Travel
The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) by Paul Theroux
Travel
In Siberia (1999) by Colin Thubron
Travel
If This Is a Man (1947) by Primo Levi
The Prince (1513) by Niccolò Machiavelli
The Social Contract and Discourses (1950) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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