Well, at least based on NPR’s survey. The full list is here, but I’ll give you the top 20 below. What do you think? Some books put on that shouldn’t have and others left off?
- The Lord of the Rings
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
- Ender’s Game
- The Dune Chronicles
- Song of Ice and Fire Series
- 1984
- Fahrenheit 451
- The Foundation Trilogy
- Brave New World
- American Gods
- The Princess Bride
- The Wheel of Time Series
- Animal Farm
- Neuromancer
- Watchmen
- I, Robot
- Stranger in the Strange Land
- The Kingkiller Chronicles
- Slaughterhouse-Five
- Frankenstein
Ugh. 45/100.
But I’ve got 9 out of the top 10.
Some of the others I have and are in my To Do pile.
Some I’ll never read (like the Star Wars ones… or anything by Stephen King. And for some reason Bradbury doesn’t do it for me.
By and large, I liked the list, but a few things bug me. I would put the Belgariad ahead of Wheel of Time. A far better “fantasy quest” series. Also, I’ve never, ever understood the appeal of the Thomas Covenant books.
I read the first one when I was in my teens and I found it okay, but I didn’t find much to set it apart from the Legion of Tolkien Wannabees– at least, the better-written ones.
The original trilogy was a great example of epic fantasy, but the subsequent books just got worse and worse. I quit reading the final series (the one that’s just been published recently).
The best part of this list is the following flowchart to navigatate it and find your next reading selection:
http://www.box.net/shared/static/a6omcl2la0ivlxsn3o8m.jpg