Lists from The Guardian by Robert McCrum.
| SN | Title | Author | Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Sixth Extinction | Elizabeth Kolbert | 2014 |
| 2 | The Year of Magical Thinking | Joan Didion | 2005 |
| 3 | No Logo | Naomi Klein | 1999 |
| 4 | Birthday Letters | Ted Hughes | 1998 |
| 5 | Dreams from My Father | Barack Obama | 1995 |
| 6 | A Brief History of Time | Stephen Hawking | 1988 |
| 7 | The Right Stuff | Tom Wolfe | 1979 |
| 8 | Orientalism | Edward Said | 1978 |
| 9 | Dispatches | Michael Herr | 1977 |
| 10 | The Selfish Gene | Richard Dawkins | 1976 |
| 11 | North | Seamus Heaney | 1975 |
| 12 | Awakenings | Oliver Sacks | 1973 |
| 13 | The Female Eunuch | Germaine Greer | 1970 |
| 14 | Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom | Nik Cohn | 1969 |
| 15 | The Double Helix | James D Watson | 1968 |
| 16 | Against Interpretation | Susan Sontag | 1966 |
| 17 | Ariel | Sylvia Plath | 1965 |
| 18 | The Feminine Mystique | Betty Friedan | 1963 |
| 19 | The Making of the English Working Class | EP Thompson | 1963 |
| 20 | Silent Spring | Rachel Carson | 1962 |
| 21 | The Structure of Scientific Revolutions | Thomas S Kuhn | 1962 |
| 22 | A Grief Observed | CS Lewis | 1961 |
| 23 | The Elements of Style | William Strunk and EB White | 1959 |
| 24 | The Affluent Society | John Kenneth Galbraith | 1958 |
| 25 | The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life | Richard Hoggart | 1957 |
| 26 | Notes of a Native Son | James Baldwin | 1955 |
| 27 | The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art | Kenneth Clark | 1956 |
| 28 | The Hedgehog and the Fox | Isaiah Berlin | 1953 |
| 29 | Waiting for Godot | Samuel Beckett | 1952/53 |
| 30 | A Book of Mediterranean Food | Elizabeth David | 1950 |
| 31 | The Great Tradition | FR Leavis | 1948 |
| 32 | The Last Days of Hitler | Hugh Trevor-Roper | 1947 |
| 33 | The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care | Dr Benjamin Spock | 1946 |
| 34 | Hiroshima | John Hersey | 1946 |
| 35 | The Open Society and Its Enemies | Karl Popper | 1945 |
| 36 | Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth | Richard Wright | 1945 |
| 37 | How to Cook a Wolf | MFK Fisher | 1942 |
| 38 | Enemies of Promise | Cyril Connolly | 1938 |
| 39 | The Road to Wigan Pier | George Orwell | 1937 |
| 40 | The Road to Oxiana | Robert Byron | 1937 |
| 41 | How to Win Friends and Influence People | Dale Carnegie | 1936 |
| 42 | Testament of Youth | Vera Brittain | 1933 |
| 43 | My Early Life: A Roving Commission | Winston Churchill | 1930 |
| 44 | Goodbye to All That | Robert Graves | 1929 |
| 45 | A Room of One’s Own | Virginia Woolf | 1929 |
| 46 | The Waste Land | TS Eliot | 1922 |
| 47 | Ten Days That Shook the World | John Reed | 1919 |
| 48 | The Economic Consequences of the Peace | John Maynard Keynes | 1919 |
| 49 | The American Language | HL Mencken | 1919 |
| 50 | Eminent Victorians | Lytton Strachey | 1918 |
| 51 | The Souls of Black Folk | WEB Du Bois | 1903 |
| 52 | De Profundis | Oscar Wilde | 1905 |
| 53 | The Varieties of Religious Experience | William James | 1902 |
| 54 | Brief Lives | John Aubrey, edited by Andrew Clark | 1898 |
| 55 | Personal Memoirs | Ulysses S Grant | 1885 |
| 56 | Life on the Mississippi | Mark Twain | 1883 |
| 57 | Travels With a Donkey in the Cévennes | Robert Louis Stevenson | 1879 |
| 58 | Nonsense Songs | Edward Lear | 1871 |
| 59 | Culture and Anarchy | Matthew Arnold | 1869 |
| 60 | On the Origin of Species | Charles Darwin | 1859 |
| 61 | On Liberty | John Stuart Mill | 1859 |
| 62 | The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands | Mary Seacole | 1857 |
| 63 | The Life of Charlotte Brontë | Elizabeth Gaskell | 1857 |
| 64 | Walden | Henry David Thoreau | 1854 |
| 65 | Thesaurus | Dr Peter Mark Roget | 1852 |
| 66 | London Labour and the London Poor | Henry Mayhew | 1851 |
| 67 | Household Education | Harriet Martineau | 1848 |
| 68 | Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave | Frederick Douglass | 1845 |
| 69 | Essays | RW Emerson | 1841 |
| 70 | Domestic Manners of the Americans | Frances Trollope | 1832 |
| 71 | An American Dictionary of the English Language | Noah Webster | 1828 |
| 72 | Confessions of an English Opium-Eater | Thomas De Quincey | 1822 |
| 73 | Tales from Shakespeare | Charles and Mary Lamb | 1807 |
| 74 | Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa | Mungo Park | 1799 |
| 75 | The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin | Benjamin Franklin | 1793 |
| 76 | A Vindication of the Rights of Woman | Mary Wollstonecraft | 1792 |
| 77 | The Life of Samuel Johnson LLD | James Boswell | 1791 |
| 78 | Reflections on the Revolution in France | Edmund Burke | 1790 |
| 79 | The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano | Olaudah Equiano | 1789 |
| 80 | The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne | Gilbert White | 1789 |
| 81 | The Federalist Papers | ‘Publius’ | 1788 |
| 82 | The Diary of Fanny Burney | Fanny Burney | 1778 |
| 83 | The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire | Edward Gibbon | 1776-1788 |
| 84 | The Wealth of Nations | Adam Smith | 1776 |
| 85 | Common Sense | Tom Paine | 1776 |
| 86 | A Dictionary of the English Language | Samuel Johnson | 1755 |
| 87 | A Treatise of Human Nature | David Hume | 1739 |
| 88 | A Modest Proposal | Jonathan Swift | 1729 |
| 89 | A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain | Daniel Defoe | 1727 |
| 90 | An Essay Concerning Human Understanding | John Locke | 1689 |
| 91 | The Book of Common Prayer | Thomas Cranmer | 1662 |
| 92 | The Diary of Samuel Pepys | Samuel Pepys | 1660 |
| 93 | Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk | Sir Thomas Browne | 1658 |
| 94 | Leviathan | Thomas Hobbes | 1651 |
| 95 | Areopagitica | John Milton | 1644 |
| 96 | Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions | John Donne | 1624 |
| 97 | The First Folio | William Shakespeare | 1623 |
| 98 | The Anatomy of Melancholy | Robert Burton | 1621 |
| 99 | The History of the World | Walter Raleigh | 1614 |
| 100 | King James Bible: The Authorised Version | 1611 |