Once again I turn to Anna Quindlen for a list regarding books. From her book How Reading Changed My Life.

The Ten Books I Would Save in a Fire (If I Could Save Only 10)

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats
The Collected Plays of William Shakespeare
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Books from years past. See why Time magazine had to use the cut off date?