110 Best Books: The Perfect Library

The Telegraph UK posted an article that attempts to suggest what books in a variety of categories should be included in the perfect library. As always, these things are pretty arbitrary, and this list is British, so an American list might look a bit different.

You can tell how British the list is by the fact that Ted Hughes, a minor poet at best, made the list in poetry. Silly, silly Brits.

Still, the idea is interesting, as is the list. Here are a couple of the categories -- others include most major genres (sci-fi, romance, literary fiction, crime, and so on), as well as books that changed the world and books that changed your world.

CLASSICS

The Iliad and The Odyssey
Homer

Set during the Trojan War, The Iliad combines battle scenes with a debate about heroism; Odysseus' thwarted attempts to return to Ithaca when the war ends form The Odyssey. Its symbolic evocation of human life as an epic journey homewards has inspired everything from James Joyce's Ulysses to the Coen brothers' film, O Brother Where Art Thou?.

The Barchester Chronicles
Anthony Trollope

A story set in a fictional cathedral town about the squabbles and power struggles of the clergy? It doesn’t sound promising, but Trollope's sparklingly satirical novels are among the best-loved books of all time.

Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen

Heroine meets hero and hates him. Is charmed by a cad. A family crisis – caused by the cad – is resolved by the hero. The heroine sees him for what he really is and realises (after visiting his enormous house) that she loves him. The plot has been endlessly borrowed, but few authors have written anything as witty or profound as Pride and Prejudice.

Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift

Swift's scathing satire shows humans at their worst: whether diminished (in Lilliput) or grossly magnified (in Brobdingnag). Our capacity for self-delusion – personified by the absurdly pompous Gulliver – makes this darkest of novels very funny.

Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë

Cruelty, hypocrisy, dashed hopes: Jane Eyre faces them all, yet her individuality triumphs. Her relationship with Rochester has such emotional power that it's hard to believe these characters never lived.

War and Peace
Tolstoy

Tolstoy's masterpiece is so enormous even the author said it couldn't be described as a novel. But the characters of Andrei, Pierre and Natasha – and the tragic and unexpected way their lives intersect – grip you for all 1,400 pages.

David Copperfield
Charles Dickens

David's journey to adulthood is filled with difficult choices – and a huge cast of characters, from the treacherous Steerforth to the comical Mr Micawber.

Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray

'"I'm no Angel," answered Miss Rebecca. And to tell the truth, she was not.' Whether we should judge the cunning, amoral Becky Sharp – or the hypocritical society she inhabits – is the question.

Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert

Flaubert's finely crafted novel tells the story of Emma, a bored provincial wife who comforts herself with shopping and affairs. It doesn't end well.

Middlemarch
George Eliot

Dorothea wastes her youth on a creepy, elderly scholar. Lydgate marries the beautiful but self-absorbed Rosamund. George Eliot's characters make terrible mistakes, but we never lose empathy with them.

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POETRY

Sonnets
Shakespeare

Shakespeare's sonnets contain some of poetry's most iconic lines – and a mysterious insight into his personal life.

Divine Comedy
Dante

Dante Alighieri's epic tale of one man's journey into the afterlife is considered Italy's finest literary export.

Canterbury Tales
Chaucer

These humorous tales about fictional pilgrims made an important contribution to English literature at a time when court poetry was written in either Anglo-Norman or Latin.

The Prelude
William Wordsworth

This posthumously published work is both an autobiographical journey and a fragment of history from the revolutionary and post-revolutionary years.

Odes
John Keats

Littered with sensuous descriptions of nature's beauty, Keats's odes also pose profound philosophical questions.

The Waste Land
T. S. Eliot

Eliot's vision of dystopia became a literary landmark, and introduced new techniques to the modern poet. He remains one of the defining figures of 20th-century poetry.

Paradise Lost
John Milton

Since its publication in 1667, Milton’s 12-book English epic – in which he sets out to 'justify the ways of God to men' – has been considered a classic.

Songs of Innocence and Experience
William Blake

Blake's short poems are simple in rhythm and rhyme, but sophisticated in meaning. Written during a time of political turmoil, they embody his radical sympathies and anti-dualist ideas.

Collected Poems
W. B. Yeats

Considered a driving force in the revival of Irish literature, Yeats fruitfully engages the topics of youth, love, nature, art and war.

Collected Poems
Ted Hughes

Although Hughes was a colossal presence among the English literary landscape – his work often draws upon the forbidding Yorkshire countryside of his youth – his personal life had a tendency to overshadow his talent.

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