The Dean

How many of these have you read?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zifon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams -
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factoy - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Autonomy

Just curious - Dean - how many have you read, 'cos some of this list is a bit odd....?

shakh your bootie

Ulysess is number 75??? That in itself is enough to make me suspicious....

Also, why the repititions - one would assume that the complete works of Shaky Spear include the Danish Play, and that the Chronicles of Narnia include the Lion, the Witch et al??????

Looks like a list of liars led by donkeys to me....

Good to see Dotoevsky up there in the gods, however, but no Coetzee???

DesertOcean

I'm surprised Gravity's Rainbow is not included...

klaus3974

How come Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum's Book: My Vision - Challenges In The Race For Excellence, is not included????

Again the British media attacking Dubai !!!

Sally Redux

Bridget Jones's Diary?????

Madam Medusa

i've read the majority of these...i think it's a pretty good list...a fine balance has to be one of the best, and most moving, books ever written...

to kill a mockingbird is my all time fave if i had to pick just one...

MM, xx

flares

Bible in at number six....what no Q'uran....not a very PC list then....good for the Beeb

Bonny Boy

Can't see any V.S. Naipaul, and he's a British Nobel Laureate in literature! I would go for his "In a Free State", which should be of interest to the bored, as it examines Expatriate life amongst other themes.

Good to see Kerouac's 'On the Road' and Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness', the latter also addressing expatriate themes. A sprinkling of Hardy too.

No Graham Greene!

Bahtatboy

Untenable without any Graham Greene, and Yukio Mishima's Sea of Fertility ought to be there.

The Dean

I didn't read the full accompanying article but I don't think this list was necessarily meant to be the "best" 100 - more a way of avoiding the "What?? You mean you've never read Blah Blah Blah???" comments from your mates.

Sort of "essential" reading, if you like.

Auto, I think I've only read about 18-19 of them............

The Dean

'A Fine Balance' is a new one to me - why is it so good? You'd recommend it obviously..............

Brains1983

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factoy - Roald Dahl


I've saw a lot more in movie form which I guess doesn't count. There should be more of Bill Brysons work in there.

littlejimmy

What? No Very Hungry Caterpillar?

Madam Medusa

it really is a must read...set in indira ghandi's india during the state of emergency, focuses on 4 characters from different walks of life...don't want to say too much as it would spoil it, but really, do get hold of it, it's fabulous...

MM, xx