This time it’s the top 100-ish books from the LibraryThing Legacy Libraries project, where you can compare your own library against 106 famous dead people’s libraries. (The ten top contributors to the list below are Thomas Jefferson, Ernest Hemingway, Carl Sandburg, C.S. Lewis, Eeva-Liisa Manner, T. E. Lawrence, John Adams, Alfred Deakin, Karen Blixen and Walker Percy.) As usual – bold if you’ve read it, italic if you’ve started but not finished, strike through if you couldn’t stand it. These are the top 103 books from the 106 libraries; there are a few cases of duplication (where a part of one entry apears seaparately) but I think we can cope.

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The Odyssey by Homer
The Complete Works of Shakespeare by William Shakespeare
Complete Works by Horace
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Iliad by Homer
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (complete sets) by Edward Gibbon
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
On the Nature of Things by Lucretius
Moby Dick, or, The Whale by Herman Melville
The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne
The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell
The Golden Ass by Apuleius
The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto
Aesop’s Fables
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Metamorphoses by Ovid
Commentaries on the Laws of England by Sir William Blackstone
Parallel Lives by Plutarch
History of his own time by Gilbert Burnet
The Bible
The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
The Spectator by Joseph Addison
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Ulysses by James Joyce
Hudibras by Samuel Butler
Les Fleurs Du Mal by Charles Baudelaire
The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Dictionary by Samuel Johnson
Telemachus by François Fénelon
Inferno by Dante Alighieri
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Complete Works by Virgil
Erewhon by Samuel Butler
Confessions by Augustine
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Histories by Herodotus
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Thus spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
The Poetical Works of Lord Byron
The Complete Poetry of John Milton
The Aeneid by Virgil
Lives of the English Poets by Samuel Johnson
Ab urbe condita by Livy
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
Republic by Plato
Travels of Anacharsis the younger in Greece by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy
The Poems of Virgil by Virgil
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius
Dubliners by James Joyce
Lives of Great Generals by Cornelius Nepos
Book of Common Prayer
Gil Blas by Alain René Le Sage (9)
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
The works of Geoffrey Chaucer by Geoffrey Chaucer
A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry by Thomas Percy
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
The Orator’s Education by Quintilian
The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
The ancient history of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Grecians and Macedonian by Charles Rollin
The Satyricon by Petronius
An historical and critical dictionary by Pierre Bayle
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
In Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
The poems of Ossian by James MacPherson
The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin
The History of the Great Rebellion by the Earl of Clarendon
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
Comedies by Terence
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
The Golden Bough by James George Frazer
Candide by Voltaire
Robert Ainsworth’s dictionary, English and Latin
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle
Comedies by Titus Maccius Plautus
The new law-dictionary by Giles Jacob
Memoirs of Maximilian de Bethune, duke of Sully, prime minister to Henry the Great
The analogy of religion by Joseph Butler
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Natural History by Pliny the Elder
Logic: The Right Use of Reason in the Inquiry After Truth by Isaac Watts
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres by Hugh Blair
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters
The Works of Josephus by Flavius Josephus
History of the reign of Charles the Fifth by William Robertson
History of England by David Hume