The Perfect Library

The Telegraph has a list! A wonderful list! I love these kinds of things, 'cause I'm always looking for more suggestions for books to buy. Heaven knows that's what I need -More Books!

They have annotations at the site, but here are the classics suggestions:

The Illiad and The Odyssey
Homer

The Barchester Chronicles
Anthony Trollope

Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen

Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift

Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë

War and Peace
Tolstoy

David Copperfield
Charles Dickens

Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray

Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert

Middlemarch
George Eliot

I've got this covered, except I can't find Vanity Fair. I had a copy in high school, and I don't remember getting rid of it, but it's disappeared at some point during the many intervening years.

Their literary fiction choices:

The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James

A la recherche du temps perdu
Proust

Ulysses
James Joyce

For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway

Sword of Honour trilogy
Evelyn Waugh

The Ballad of Peckham Rye
Muriel Spark

Rabbit series
John Updike

One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez

Beloved
Toni Morrison

The Human Stain
Philip Roth

I have the ones in bold print.

They also have lists for crime novels, children's books, poetry, romantic fiction, sci fi, books that changed the world, books that changed your world, history and lives. This list is well worth considering, but I'm glad I have space enough to have lots more books than they suggest.

HT: SFSignal, where they pull out the SFF suggestions.