Just like any other list of must-read books, but this one is 124 sci-fi/fantasy books The Guardian thinks you should read. The books I’ve read are bold, the authors I’ve read are italicized, and I want to read the ones that are underlined. I haven’t even heard of all of these. And I love how Hitchhiker’s is first. As it should be.
- Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
- Brian W Aldiss: Non-Stop
- Isaac Asimov: Foundation
- Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin
- Paul Auster: In the Country of Last Things
- Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory
- Iain M Banks: Consider Phlebas
- Clive Barker: Weaveworld
- Nicola Barker: Darkmans
- Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships
- Greg Bear: Darwin’s Radio
- Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination
- Poppy Z Brite: Lost Souls
- Algis Budrys: Rogue Moon
- Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Coming Race
- Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange
- Anthony Burgess: The End of the World News
- Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess of Mars
- William Burroughs: Naked Lunch
- Octavia Butler: Kindred
- Samuel Butler: Erewhon
- Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees
- Ramsey Campbell: The Influence
- Lewis Carroll: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
- Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
- Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus
- Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
- Arthur C Clarke: Childhood’s End
- GK Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday
- Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
- Michael G Coney: Hello Summer, Goodbye
- Douglas Coupland: Girlfriend in a Coma
- Mark Danielewski: House of Leaves
- Marie Darrieussecq: Pig Tales
- Samuel R Delaney: The Einstein Intersection
- Philip K Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
- Philip K Dick: The Man in the High Castle
- Umberto Eco: Foucault’s Pendulum
- Michel Faber: Under the Skin
- John Fowles: The Magus
- Neil Gaiman: American Gods
- Alan Garner: Red Shift
- William Gibson: Neuromancer
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Herland
- William Golding: Lord of the Flies
- Joe Haldeman: The Forever War
- M. John Harrison: Light
- Robert A Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land
- Frank Herbert: Dune
- Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game
- Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker
- James Hogg: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
- Michel Houellebecq: Atomised
- Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
- Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled
- Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House
- Henry James: The Turn of the Screw
- PD James: The Children of Men
- Richard Jefferies: After London; Or, Wild England
- Gwyneth Jones: Bold as Love
- Franz Kafka: The Trial
- Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon
- Stephen King: The Shining
- Marghanita Laski: The Victorian Chaise-longue
- Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Uncle Silas
- Stanislaw Lem: Solaris
- Doris Lessing: Memoirs of a Survivor
- David Lindsay: A Voyage to Arcturus
- Ken MacLeod: The Night Sessions
- Hilary Mantel: Beyond Black
- Michael Marshall Smith: Only Forward
- Richard Matheson: I Am Legend
- Charles Maturin: Melmoth the Wanderer
- Patrick McCabe: The Butcher Boy
- Cormac McCarthy: The Road
- Jed Mercurio: Ascent
- China Miéville: The Scar
- Andrew Miller: Ingenious Pain
- Walter M Miller Jr: A Canticle for Leibowitz
- David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas
- Michael Moorcock: Mother London
- William Morris: News From Nowhere
- Toni Morrison: Beloved
- Haruki Murakami: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
- Vladimir Nabokov: Ada or Ardor
- Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler’s Wife
- Larry Niven: Ringworld
- Jeff Noon: Vurt
- Flann O’Brien: The Third Policeman
- Ben Okri: The Famished Road
- Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club
- Thomas Love Peacock: Nightmare Abbey
- Mervyn Peake: Titus Groan
- John Cowper Powys: A Glastonbury Romance
- Christopher Priest: The Prestige
- François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel
- Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho
- Alastair Reynolds: Revelation Space
- Kim Stanley Robinson: The Years of Rice and Salt
- JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
- Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses
- Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry: The Little Prince
- José Saramago: Blindness
- Will Self: How the Dead Live
- Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
- Dan Simmons: Hyperion
- Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker
- Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash
- Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde
- Bram Stoker: Dracula
- Rupert Thomson: The Insult
- Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court
- Kurt Vonnegut: Sirens of Titan
- Robert Walser: Institute Benjamenta
- Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes
- Sarah Waters: Affinity
- HG Wells: The Time Machine
- HG Wells: The War of the Worlds
- TH White: The Sword in the Stone
- Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun
- John Wyndham: Day of the Triffids
- John Wyndham: The Midwich Cuckoos
- Yevgeny Zamyatin: We