Books you should read before you die

A UK newspaper has queried librarians for their recommendation of "the one book a person should read before they die." Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird tops the list, with the Bible coming in second. Turn those two around, and I'd have to say that I agree.

Here's their list in full:

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Bible
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
1984 by George Orwell
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
All Quiet 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 AA 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

So let's see... ones I think are truly transcendent would be the Bible, TKAM, maybe All Quiet. Ones I think are excellent but not so much so that you'd be less of a person if you didn't get to read them before you died -- Grapes of Wrath, all the Dickens, Lovely Bones, Poisonwood Bible, LOTR. 1984 was okay, but not fabulous. The others, I either haven't read or I didn't find them remarkable one way or another. Except for...

... and I should apologize in advance to my best friend and to my sister, both of whom loooooove Jane Austen, but I can't STAND that crap. Does nothing at all for me. I also can't stand the Bronte sisters' stuff. It was torment to have to read any of them in school, and I hardly could force myself to finish them. Blech.

The recent resurgence of Austenish movies has been an interesting quandary for me. I enjoy them for their artistic appearance, but their subject matter still leaves me flat. As period pieces, they're usually gorgeous, but give me Dangerous Liaisons any day, just because it's a beautiful period piece AND it's snide and deceitful and lowbrow... heh.

Back to books: What one book would YOU say a person ought to read before they die? How about one movie they should see? Or one place they should go? It's an interesting topic.

If I were to pick a book NOT on this list that I think might belong there, I'd probably have to say the Chronicles of Narnia books, or the Diary of Anne Frank. How 'bout you?