MLA's 30 (34) Books Every Adult Should Read Before They Die
1. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
2. The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, Third Edition, new Revised Standard Version
3. The Fellowship of the Ring - J.R.R. Tolkien
4. The Two Towers - J.R.R. Tolkien
5. The Return of the King: being the Third Part of the Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
6. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
7. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
8. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
9. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
10. All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
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50 Best Cult Books
1. Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
2. The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell (1957-60)
3. A Rebours - JK Huysmans (1884)
4. Baby and Child Care - Dr Benjamin Spock (1946)
5. The Beauty Myth - Naomi Wolf (1991)
6. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (1963)
7. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller (1961)
8. The Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (1951)
9. The Celestine Prophecy - James Redfield (1993)
10. The Dice Man - Luke Rhinehart (1971)
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The Winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
2008 - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
2007 - The Road (McCarthy)
2006 - March (Brooks)
2005 - Gilead (Robinson)
2004 - The Known World (Jones)
2003 - Middlesex (Eugenides)
2002 - Empire Falls (Russo)
2001 - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Chabon)
2000 - Interpreter of Maladies (Lahiri)
1999 - The Hours (Cunningham)
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Top 100 Novels Printed by the Big Read
(The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed)
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
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Entertainment Weekly's Top 100 Classics from 1983-2008
1. The Road - Cormac McCarthy (2006)
2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - J.K. Rowling (2000)
3. Beloved - Toni Morrison (1987)
4. The Liars' Club - Mary Karr (1995)
5. American Pastoral - Philip Roth (1997)
6. Mystic River - Dennis Lehane (2001)
7. Maus - Art Spiegelman (1986/1991)
8. Selected Stories - Alice Munro (1996)
9. Cold Mountain - Charles Frazier (1997)
10. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami (1997)
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1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die by Peter Ackroyd (Foreword) and Peter Boxall (Editor)
2000s
1. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
2. Saturday – Ian McEwan
3. On Beauty – Zadie Smith
4. Slow Man – J.M. Coetzee
5. Adjunct: An Undigest – Peter Manson
6. The Sea – John Banville
7. The Red Queen – Margaret Drabble
8. The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
9. The Master – Colm Tóibín
10. Vanishing Point – David Markson
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Those of us who think we know
the same secrets
are silent together most of the time,
for us there is eloquence
in desire, and for a while
when in love and exhausted
it's enough to nod like shy horses
and come together in a quiet ceremony of tongues.

it's in disappointment we look for words
to convince us
the spaces between the stars are nothing
to worry about,
it's when those secrets burst
in that emptiness between our hearts
and the lumps in our throats.
And the words we find
are always insufficient, like love,
though they are often lovely
and all we have.

From Stephen Dunn: New & Selected Poems 1974-1994 page 58.