I came across this article from the UK-based Guardian Newspaper online. Turns out I might not be as well-read as I thought.

Museum, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) in Britain asked librarians around the country, “Which book should every adult read before they die?” At the top of the list was To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, followed by the Bible and then The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien.

Here’s others – both classics and contemporary fiction – that made the list:

• 1984 by George Orwell
• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• All Quite on the Western Front by E. M. Remarque
• His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
• Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
• Tess of the D’urbevilles by Thomas Hardy
• Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
• The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
• Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
• The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
• The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
• The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
• The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
• Life of Pi by Yann Martel
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
• A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn