Thread: Books that are must reads before you die ?

Excellent choices all! Some favorites that I have repeatedly recommended to friends are:
Wind, Sand and Stars by Saint Exupery
With The Old Breed at Pelilieu and Okinawa by Sledge
Catch-22 by Heller
The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck
Atlas Shrugged by Rand

-Canterbury Tales
-Beowulf
-Iliad and Odyssey by Homer
-Lord of the Rings (all three)
-A few of Jack London's
-A few of Michael Crichton's
-Animal Farm and 1984, as well as many/most of George Orwell's essays (I particularly liked "Politics and the English Language")
-The Omnivore's Dilemma (as well as his other books) by Michael Pollan
-Freakonomics and Super Freakonomics
-Moby Dick
-Mutiny on the Bounty
-The Scarlet Pimpernel
-Sherlock Holmes Series

to name but a few

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

The Ice-Shirt (1990) (Volume One of Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes), Fathers and Crows (1992) (Volume Two of Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes), Argall: The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith (2001) (Volume Three of Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes), and The Rifles (1994) (Volume Six of Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes) all by William T. Vollman

The Recognitions by William Gaddis

The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth (hilarious)

Not a novel but one of the all time great works of literature is Labyrinths By Jorge Luis Borges.

"The amazing Maurice and his educated rodents" By Terry Pratchett....it's a short read but you've GOT to have read it.

A Short History of Nearly Everything- Bill Bryson

I think everybody should read at least one book of which they think "Mmmmneh", but which is recommended by many for its "classicness", in whichever way that is. And then be honest whether it was actually worth your time or not! I guess many people will find themselves positively surprised, but not everybody of course.

I'm still struggling with the thought of opening up one of the many classic yet still 'readable' philosophy books. I read Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance a few years ago after thinking about and discarding it for years and was on the one hand positively surprised by the points brought forward, but on the other hand it suffers from the hippie-disease that makes my skin crawl. I read Kerouac's On The Road and got annoyed with it. Finished it, but that was it. Perhaps it's the style of that time, combined with an over-abundance of self pity that I dislike. I got annoyed with Generation X as well, which is in my opinion one of Douglas Coupland's worst books, and I love all his fiction stuff.

I find myself at a distinct disadvantage here being illiterate and all: illiterate and disnumerative both; NFLD, number flubber and letter dumb. It's a terrible heavy burden, lemme tellya.

In these times : The Road by Cormac McCarthy, others, the list is so long....

A quick contribution:

The Theogony: Hesiod
Clouds: Aristophanes
The Symposium: Plato
The Politics: Aristotle
De Rarum Natura: Lucretius
The Federalist Papers: Publius
The Red and the Black: Stendhal
A Place to Come to: Robert Penn Warren
Brothers to Dragons: RPW
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

Sun tsu: The art of war.

It's not so much that you have to have read it before you die (after all, you're dead so it doesn't really matter anymore), but reading it can make your life a whole lot easier because the principles translate very well to any system based on conflicting parties, like project management, software development, business, etc.