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166 Essential Books.

Name the most essential Books ever yo. The ones the human race can't do without. Based on this: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/mar/01/news) List. But constantly being updated with things that meet my criteria
The Yellow answer Cells are ones I have completed
The Purple answer Cells are ones I have Partially Completed
The Darkness of the yellow doesn't matter. I'm just lazy to fix it.
Quiz by BishnuMcgee
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Last updated: March 12, 2023
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First submittedJuly 21, 2017
Times taken1,309
Average score28.9%
Rating2.56
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Some are a collection. Very few.
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Author
The Bible
Solomon, David, Jeremiah, Joel, Nathan, Ezekiel.
Romeo and Juliet (And all of his works)
William Shakespeare
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings
J.R.R Tolkien
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights
Emily Bronte
Harry Potter
J.K Rowling
1984
George Orwell
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy
Catch 22
Joseph Heller
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Rebecca
Daphne Du Maurier
The Odyssey
Homer
To Kill a Mocking Bird
Harper Lee
Catcher in the Rye
JD Salinger
Middlemarch
George Eliot
The Great Gatsby
F Scott Fitzgerald
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams
Old Yeller
Fred Gipson
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath
John Steinback
Alice in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows
Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
Emma
Jane Austen
The Iliad
Homer
Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy
Moby Dick
Herman Mellville
The Secret Garden
Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Complete Works of Dr Seuss
Dr Seuss
In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey
Six Characters in Search of an Author
Luigi Pirandello
Novel With Cocaine
M Ageyev
Children of Gebelawi
Naguib Mahfouz
Shell Shaker
LeAnne Howe
A Passage to India
E M Forester
All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque
Beloved
Toni Morrison
The Sympathizer
Viet Than Nguyen
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh
Franz Werfel
Cutting for Stone
Abraham Verghese
Strange Weather in Tokyo
Hiromi Kawakami
White Noise
Don DeLillo
Spiders House
Paul Bowles
Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Leo Tolstoy
Book
Author
Captain Corelli's Mandolin
Louis de Bernières
Memoirs of a Geisha
Arthur Golden
Winnie The Pooh
A A Milne
Animal Farm
George Orwell
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Jules Verne
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables
LM Montgomery
The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood
Lord of The Flies
William Golding
Atonement
Ian McEwan
Life of Pi
Yann Martel
Dune
Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm
Stella Gibbons
A Suitable Boy
Vikram Seth
Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
Love In The Time Of Cholera
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History
Donna Tartt
Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
On the Road
Jack Kerouac
Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie
Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri
The Motion of Light in Water
Samuel R Delany
Stoner
John Edward Williams
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
The Trial
Franz Kafka
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
Blindness
Jose Saramago
Dom Casmurro
Joaquim Maria Machado
Man Tiger
Eka Kurniawan
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers
Maurice
EM Forester
The Price of Salt
Patricia Higsmith
Discovery of Heaven
Harry Muslich
Tipping the Velvet
Sarah Waters
Mission to Kala
Mongo Beti
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini
The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingslover
The Pillow Book
Sei Shonogan
Pachinko
Min Jin Lee
Under the Udala Trees
Chinelo Okpantra
The Phantom Tollbooth
Norton Juster
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess
The Blood of Flowers
Anita Amirrezvani
Train to Pakistan
Khushuwant Singh
The Hate U Give
Angie Thomas
Room on the Roof
Ruskin Bond
Indian Horse
Richard Wagamese
Book
Author
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons
Arthur Ransome
Germinal
Emilie Zola
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell
The Color Purple
Alice Walker
The Remains of The Day
Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance
Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte's Web
EB White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven
Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Little Prince
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory
Iain Banks
Watership Down
Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice
Nevil Shute
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo
Half a Yellow Sun
Ngozi Adichie
One Thousand and One Nights
*Multiple Unidentified Middle Eastern Authors
Siddharta
Hermann Hesse
I am a Cat
Natsume Sōseki
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera
Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
Atlas Shrugged
Ayn Rand
Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
Ulysses
James Joyce
The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini
The Four Chambered Heart
Anaïs Nin
Abhijnanasakutakalam
Kalidasa
The Lower Depths
Maxim Gorky
The Gaucho Martin Fierro
Jose Hernandez
Gargantua and Pantagruel
François Rabelais
The House on Mango Street
Sandra Cisneros
Men Without Women
Ernest Hemingway
Darkness at Noon
Arthur Koestler
Native Son
Richard Wright
Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace
Azazeel
Youssef Ziedan
The Earth of Mankind
Pramoedya Anata Toer
Banaag At Sikat
Lope K Santos
The Devil's Dance
Hamid Ismaliov
A Mind at Peace
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar
The Beautiful Ones are not Yet Born
Ayi Kwei Armah
I Stared at the Night of the City
Bakhtiyar Ali
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
Kintu
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
A Little Life
Hanya Yanaghrina
Like Water for Chocolate
Laura Esquivel
Radiance of the King
Camara Laye
To Live
Yu Hua
A Golden Age
Tahmima Anam
Men at Arms
Terry Pratchett
Giovanni's Room
James Baldwin
I Captured the Castle
Dodie Smith
Nectar in a Sieve
Kamala Markandaya
East of Eden
John Steinback
Fools Crow
James Welch
Solar Storms
Linda Hogan
Slaughterhouse Five
Kurt Vonnegut
BishnuMcgee
+1
Level 80
Sep 7, 2022
This quiz is meant to be an almost constant work in progress! I will add (And very rarely, subtract) works to this list as more qualifying works come to my attention. Also keep me posted on Spelling, seeing as this is such a large content quiz I may get things wrong. Thanks for coming here and your patience
sweeprower
+1
Level 60
Jul 21, 2017
odyssey is spelled wrong

good quiz

BishnuMcgee
+1
Level 80
Jul 21, 2017
Thanks for the Heads up! Fixed
Cog
+1
Level 75
Jul 21, 2017
You should include every author of the Bible
BishnuMcgee
+1
Level 80
Jul 21, 2017
Nice suggestion. I Did the best I could from sources I could find.
Cog
+2
Level 75
Sep 6, 2022
Oh wow what an old comment I've stumbled across. I was actually still a Christian back then
panscedar
+2
Level 68
Jul 21, 2017
Two important things. One, you really need to proof read your quiz. Jayne Ire? Brideshed Revisited? I could go on. Two, it needs a little more time.
BishnuMcgee
+1
Level 80
Jul 21, 2017
panscedar, This list I personally went through and consulted many websites and English Professors. By tallying those results, I came up with the top 101. These are just what people thought. I used this: ( https://www.theguardian.com) Website for the authors but that doesn't matter. And if you would like, I can add more time. Thank you for your comment! Sorry if I seemed mean :(
kiwirage
+1
Level 63
Apr 19, 2019
panscedar was talking about your spelling mistakes. No one will ever get Jane Eyre if you spell it Jayne Ire. (And Charlotte Bronte, not Charolette). Also, Siddharta, not Siddiharta. Owen Meany, not Owen Meaney etc.
NigelS
+2
Level 95
Jul 21, 2017
Agreed: it's a good quiz but there are far too many typos - Jane Eyre, Rolad Dahl, a lot of others - and you need to allow answers with and without "The" at the start (some do work without and some don't).
BishnuMcgee
+1
Level 80
Jul 21, 2017
Fixed some typos and added a ton of answers without the.
blizzrd33
+2
Level 79
Sep 6, 2022
Would be good to apply the same approach to allow "Christmas Carol" for "A Christmas Carol"
Prucsok
+1
Level 69
Sep 15, 2022
I agree. Also E.M. Forster is spelt Forester. :( In Adichie's "Half of a Yellow Sun" one word ("of") is missing from the title. I did guess "The Time Traveler's Wife", but only after remembering "traveler" is a valid spelling instead of "traveller". You might add the latter as a type-in.
acionescu
+1
Level 54
Mar 16, 2021
Its Jane Eyre, not Jeyne Eyre
BishnuMcgee
+1
Level 80
Sep 6, 2022
Working on it!
malachite
+1
Level 78
Sep 6, 2022
Minor corrections: Charlotte Bronte (It says 'Charolette'), Kenneth Grahame, Mary Shelley with an e, Herman Melville, Patricia Highsmith... and not to be pedantic, but Hesse's book title is 'SIDDHARTHA' not Siddharta, no wonder my answer wasn't accepted ;)

:) Enjoyed this quiz anyway.

BishnuMcgee
+1
Level 80
Sep 6, 2022
Thanks working on it!
KuduBiltong
+1
Level 60
Sep 6, 2022
There are still a lot of typos, and there isn't nearly enough time
BishnuMcgee
+1
Level 80
Sep 6, 2022
I may add 10 more minutes and work on other spellings
Deru
+2
Level 37
Sep 6, 2022
Siddhartha is spelled wrong :) nominated.
BishnuMcgee
+1
Level 80
Sep 6, 2022
Thanks! I'll get to that one soon
vargzum
+1
Level 54
Sep 6, 2022
You should accept the spelling Quijote, not just Quixote. That's the name used in modern spanish and many countries use only the J spelling.

Dante's name is spelled wrong - Alighieri, not Alghieri

BishnuMcgee
+1
Level 80
Sep 6, 2022
I'll get to those soon
sumguy
+3
Level 84
Sep 6, 2022
Typed "Huckleberry Finn". Added "Adventures of". Still no good. It's never necessary to include a leading "The", but "Adventures of" should also be optional.

"And" should never be mandatory because people sometimes use an ampersand. The Jetpunk standard would accept "Pride Prejudice" and "Sense Sensibility", for instance.

Jerimiah = Jeremiah

Ezekial = Ezekiel

BishnuMcgee
+1
Level 80
Sep 6, 2022
On it, give me a bit
marjobro
+3
Level 66
Sep 6, 2022
My kind of quiz since I've actually read 50 of the 53 I got..not counting the 7 I missed for the same reason already mentioned in the comments...type-ins should accept titles without "A" or "The."

Really surprised that "Satanic Verses" was not the Rushdie opus included. The Hemingway novel is so little known that it wasn't even mentioned in an American literature class I took for my Master's degree!

Bravo to you for creating this challenging quiz! Now you need to get busy reading some of these that you evidently haven't read yet..."Gatsby" is close to a perfect novel, if there could be such a thing. "Poisonwood Bible" is a masterpeice. I know Moby Dick and "Don Quixote" aren't everyone's cup of tea, but try them, you might be surprised!

"Cold Comfort Farm" is loony and fun. "Rebecca" must surely be one of the most engrossing plots ever conceived. The main character of "Vanity Fair" is a real b..ch, but certainly memorable.

Thanks for bringing these masterworks into one big picture!

BishnuMcgee
+1
Level 80
Sep 7, 2022
Glad to hear your thoughts! I too have enjoyed a good portions of the reads here. I am getting to the Rushdie one and will let you know if I reconsider it according to my parameters of how I put things on here. I'm on War and Peace now and that will take a bit. Either way thank you.
vermiciousknid
+1
Level 88
Sep 8, 2022
I haven't read The Satanic Verses, but I have read Midnight's Children and I think that's a valid selection for the author. It's a Booker prize winner and definitely among his best known works. If TSV is more well-known it's only because of the fatwa.
vermiciousknid
+3
Level 88
Sep 8, 2022
Interesting list, but still a few typos to be fixed, including a couple that prevent acceptance of the correct answer:

- Infinite Jest (currently misspelled Infiinte)

- Fahrenheit 451 (currently misspelled Farenheit)

I would also suggest accepting "The Count of Monte Cristo" since that's the actual title; currently you only accept it without "The", so I missed it.

Relatedly, I missed A Confederacy of Dunces because I didn't type in the "A". That's technically fair, since I didn't have the full title, but some of the other answers don't require the initial article, so you might want to revisit that decision.

Also, Charlotte Bronte is currently misspelled Charoltte, and Patricia Highsmith is misspelled Higsmith, but those are less of an issue since they're clues rather than answers.

Ferbin
+2
Level 76
Sep 9, 2022
A little leeway in the titles would be good.

And Hernandez's book is overwelmingly known as just Martin Fierro, so much that I had totally forgotten the full title and was baffled when I typed the name alone and wasn't accepted.

BishnuMcgee
+1
Level 80
Jan 12, 2023
Should work by now cheers.
evilcheeser
+3
Level 72
Sep 11, 2022
Once you spend the time to spellcheck every title and every author, clean up the colors and add some more of the obvious type-ins, this will be a great quiz. Until then, it's a pretty cool book list but it doesn't play well. It's plenty hard enough remembering that The Time Traveler's Wife was written by Niffenegger or guessing which of Rushdie's or Solzhenitsyn's masterpieces you decided to include without also needing to guess whether you insist on the "a" or "and" or what The Complete Works of Dr Seuss is called exactly.
Prucsok
+2
Level 69
Sep 15, 2022
I love such quizzes, so thank you! It's inspiring to see so many contemporaries side by side with classics, lots of books I've already read and lots of others to look up. I'll definitely get back to it from time to time later.

There are still quite a few mistakes, though, and some type-ins should be included. I've mentioned them above in another comment.

(Can't believe I'm the only one here who knows "The Blood of Flowers" by Anita Amirrezvani. I didn't think there would be many who guessed it, but I wasn't prepared for a 0 per cent. It's a good story, though. Really.)

NobleStuff
+2
Level 25
Jan 2, 2023
"Christmas Carol" isn't accepted but "A Christmas Carol" is
BishnuMcgee
+1
Level 80
Jan 12, 2023
Fixed thanks for the feeback!
Neodymium
+1
Level 59
Jan 19, 2023
You can standardize the color by copying the cell and pasting it on the others. If you think it'll be a bit of work, you can add me as a collab and I'll do it. Just...really kinda throws me off.
Neodymium
+1
Level 59
Jan 19, 2023
Also, you have the Bible, why not put other important religious works, seeing as other religons of similar numbers of followers?
BishnuMcgee
+1
Level 80
Jan 20, 2023
Well I just put it in the context that the entire Western canon is based off of the whole premise of the Bible. While Muslims have many followers as do Hindus and such, The Bible is an essential contextual piece for many more by virtue of, well Europe kinda not minding it's own business and colonial stuff. Plus if we go by the base form of it, Muslims and Jews believe in some form of the base Abrahamic Bible.
BishnuMcgee
+1
Level 80
Jan 20, 2023
I can figure it out, just got a lot of notifications from you so trying to get to them all
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