Recommended reading lists - usually those that include the words 'should' or 'must' - are always contentious, but nevertheless of interest to browse through if only to congratulate yourself on how many of the titles you've read, to remind yourself of those you've always meant to read, or to discover those that you didn't know about.

The list below offers 30 titles to read before 30 - though why the quantity and age are relevant, we're not sure.

To read the reasons given by the compilers for each of their choices, click here...

By Marc - first published on Marc and Angel Hack Life in May 2010

1.Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
2.1984 by George Orwell
3.To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
4.A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
5.For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
6.War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
7.The Rights of Man by Tom Paine
8.The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
9.One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
10.The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
11.The Wisdom of the Desert by Thomas Merton
12.The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
13.The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
14.The Art of War by Sun Tzu
15.The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
16.David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
17.Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot
18.Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
19.The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
20.The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
21.Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
22.The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
23.Walden by Henry David Thoreau
24.The Republic by Plato
25.Lolita – bt Vladimir Nabokov
26.Getting Things Done by David Allen
27.How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
28.Lord of the Flies by William Golding
29.The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
30.The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov