1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (ah yes, Austen. This list seems to be fairly Victorian; I think the majority of the literature sticks to this particular time period. Admittedly, that's because literature was evolving with the catalyst of modern publishing techniques, but whoever wrote this either likes Victorian fiction a whole lot, or simply thought back to whatever they studied in their school-days and remembered the good ol' days)
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (whatever people say about this book, I first read it when I was ten. No, I didn't understand it. However, I was proud of myself for reading it! It was only later when I read it more slowly and as an older reader that I began to understand it properly. It's a bit of a struggle at first, I'll admit, but it's a good idea to start with The Hobbit and go from there.)
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (Hm. Overrated, but not bad. I'm not fantastically keen on the books, but that's more because of the way it's been publicised. I enjoyed them when I was younger; what child hasn't dreamed of being accepted into Hogwarts? I did always wonder why they didn't have proper lessons, though, as they always had to write essays, yet didn't have any English classes? Maybe it's a Muggle mundanity, but I couldn't have got through my school life without some form of literature.)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (Another childhood classic)
6. The Bible (but then again... How many people have read the Bible cover to cover?)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (OF COURSE I HAVE READ THIS, ORWELL YOU GOD)
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (I was in my early teens and the ending simply made me sad. I had no idea about the religious background to it all, and that simply makes it more intriguing now!
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (this is my literature course staring at me. I love how Dickens follows Pullman as well; I think Dickens is a great influence on the latter. Then again, Dickens is an influence on pretty much any British writer, and one could even extend that to Europe if one was so inclined.)
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (depressing stuff, Hardy)
13. Catch22 - Joseph Heller (to be honest, I'm fond of a good psychological thriller, but I found Catch-22 a bit much. I'm determined to get my teeth into it sometime, though!)
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (ask me in, oh, ten years. There's hardly anyone who will have read his complete works, unless one is a Shakespeare specialist. His plays alone are meaty, not to mention the sonnets etc.)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (and it was a bit of a load of twaddle. Not a fan, I'm afraid)
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (ah yes. Just what the doctor ordered)
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
24. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (The answer to life is 42. I quote that far too often in my everyday life. The good thing is, everyone always knows what I'm referring to!)
25. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky(I am actually in the midst of re-reading this. Expect my next review to be on Russian crime!)
26. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
27. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (and of course, the lesser known sequel.)
28. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
29. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (Tolstoy/Dostoyevsky stand-off, anyone?)
30. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
31. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (I shouldn't admit that I used to dream of Narnia being real. But I just did. It took me years to get over it.)
32. Emma -Jane Austen
33. Persuasion - Jane Austen (enough with the Austen!)
34. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis (repeat of 31?)
35. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (is this a movie? I've heard of it, but being mired somewhat centuries behind in literature means that I tend to ignore modern fiction unless it's non-Western - i.e. colonial or Asiatic)
36. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (hur hur A-levels)
37. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (I thought the preface was a real introduction of historical events until I realised it was categorised as fiction)
38. Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
39. Animal Farm - George Orwell (I love Orwell. I cannot repeat this enough. If someone were to give me his complete works I would not come out of my room until I had read it, cover to cover.)
40. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (clever, but too recent to be a classic, really. I think it's well-written in terms of explanation, with some good plot points, but there's something about it that I can't quite put my finger on. It's somehow written for a moment that's now past, and has simply been given to charity shops in the hundreds. It's not a keeper in that sense.)
41. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
42. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
43. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins (I would actually argue that Collins and Dickens should be equally regarded. Dickens is obviously the more famous one nowadays, but Collins was one of the forerunners in detective and sensationalist fiction. The Moonstone should be on this list too.)
44. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (pure childhood glee, this was. Like Pollyanna, it never failed to send a good, moral, happy message that the unconscious me always enjoyed.)
45. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
46. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
47. Lord of the Flies - William Golding (I remember studying this back in my GCSE days. Funnily enough, I even liked it!)
48. Atonement - Ian McEwan (This has been recommended to me; I promise to read it, J! Eventually...)
49. Life of Pi - Yann Martel (This book does deserve a mention. I enjoyed it thoroughly as a relaxing Easter book one year)
50. Dune - Frank Herbert (sci-fi is underrated. As a professed fantasy and sci-fi geek, I wish Asimov, Wells, Wyndham and the rest of the genre would get more recognition.)
51. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
52. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (this shouldn’t count, really. Pride and Prejudice is her reworking of this title)
53. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth (it’s terrible of me but I think I’ve read it and simply can’t remember what it’s about)
54. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
55. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (honestly?)
56. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
57. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
58. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
59. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
60. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (I've been meaning to read this for a while, actually. To the library!)
61. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
62. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
63. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
64. On The Road - Jack Kerouac (hearts fly across my eyes. Kerouac's Satori in Paris was what inspired this blog, at some insane hour of the morning.)
65. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy (In one word: depressing. As was Tess of D'Ubervilles.)
66. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (erm... perhaps one day...)
67. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (yes. Yes. YES!)
68. Moby Dick - Herman Melville (I was going to buy this in a charity shop but I already had about ten other books, oops)
69. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (why the Dickens does Dickens come up so much?)
70. Dracula - Bram Stoker (which leads me to question - where's Bryon? Stoker always makes me think of Polidori, which leads to Bryon. And then to Percy and Mary Shelley. I vote for Frankenstein!)
71. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
72. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
73. Ulysses - James Joyce (I am actually reading this, as confusing as it is)
74. The Inferno – Dante (I give up! It is hellish to read! Get it?
75. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
76. Germinal - Emile Zola (I’m so glad this book is on the list. J’adore. Zola is one of the most grotesquely thought-provoking authors I've ever come across. I want to acquire the entire Rougon-Maquart series. I've got Therese Raquin already, and have read La Bete Humaine; loved them both.)
77. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (this book sits forlornly on my shelf, waiting to be read. It’s still wrapped in the plastic that I bought it in! But it has about other books to keep it company so I’m sure it’s not all that lonely.)
78. Possession - AS Byatt
79. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (seriously, enough with the Dickens. Yes, he represents the quinssential Victorian Britain, but there are plenty of other writers out there...)
80. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
81. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
82. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
83. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (We’ve talked about you, Emma Bovary...)
84. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
85. Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
86. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
87. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (they were elementary. I also watch House MD – based on Holmes, don’t you know, and the updated TV adaption by BBC, Sherlock. C’est magnifique!)
88. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
89. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
90. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
91. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
92. Watership Down - Richard Adams
93. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
94. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
95. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
96. Hamlet - William Shakespeare (which is one of Shakespeare's works, unless there were two of them)
97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (I think the Witches is better; I'm not sure why. But what child can resist the idea of a factory churning out more sweets than one could ever ingest in a lifetime? I would run to the stream of dark chili chocolate and just mediate beside it. Forever.)
98. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
And that's that! So, what's your take on this? What have you read, what are you reading, and what did you think of them?
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