Top 100 books

[ButterPie]

Right, I have decided to set myself a task. I am going to find a list somewhere of the top 100 books of all time (will probably stick to fiction, as my non-fiction reading tends to follow a kind of logic) and try and have read them all by the end of the year. I reckon I will have read around 50% of a list already, so if I can try and average a book a week, it will be easily do-able.

Anyway, can anyone recommend a good list? I know loads of websites and newspapers have published such lists, but which is the best? I vaguely remember one being on my noticeboard a couple of years back, which was probably from the Guardian, but can't find it on the website.

[SerenityNowAKABleh]

There is a BBC one, but it has rubbish things on it like "Complete works of Shakespeare" and lots of Jane Austen and JK Rowling (obviously, if you love JK Rowling, Shakespeare and Jane Austen this is the list for you).

[MyMamaToldMe]

Well this list was doing the email rounds a little while ago:

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

Instructions:

1. Look at the list and put an '' after those you have read.
   
2. Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
   
3. Star () those you plan on reading.
   
4. Tally your total at the bottom.
   
   How many have you read?
   
   1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
   2 The Lord of the Rings
   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 Epectations - 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 Faulks
   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 Galay - Douglas Adams
   26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
   27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
   28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
   29 Alice's Adventures 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 Meaney - 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 Zafon
   57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
   58 Brave New World - Aldous Huley
   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 - Aleandre 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 Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
   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 Alborn
   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-Eupery
   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 - Aleandre Dumas
   98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
   99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
   100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

[MyMamaToldMe]

x posts

[ButterPie]

Hmm, what about this one?

www.newsweek.com/id/204478

[KurriKurri]

I know you asked for 100, but 1001 Books you must read before you Die here has some good suggestions in it.

[SerenityNowAKABleh]

The newsweek one looks good actually. Nice mix. Call me a book snob, but somehow I don't agree with Harry Potter books being put on the same list as War and Peace or Hamlet.

[MyMamaToldMe]

Newsweek one does look good I agree - much better than the BBC one.

1001 books - my goodness - better get reading soon! ;)

[inthesticks]

There was another BBC one several years ago. Very similar but didn't include whole series as one choice. Here
Too many children's books and Terry Pratchett for my liking but I did make an effort to read several on the list that I hadn't read before such as Birdsong, Cold Comfort Farm, Of Mice and Men.
I'm afraid , with the best will in the world,the Newsweek one is too highbrow for me.

[MrsCadwallader]

A tip before you begin - don't even bother trying to read 'Ulysses'. Seriously. My degree is in Literature but even the lecturer's freely confessed to never having read the whole thing - it's that bad intellectual

[overmydeadbody]

I'm a bit sceptical about those sorts of lists as there is no way all of the titles will appeal to everyone.

What I did last year was just work through my local library reafing all their fiction that took my fancy, averaging about 3-4 books per week (bare in mind I was a SAHM at the itme, no such luxury this year lol)

I made sure I picked stuff that wasn't my usual type of fiction, and after a few months I was getting more and more into books that I may have dismissed a few years ago, so I tihnk the more you read, the more you will then be able to read!

Still not going near Terry Pratchet though, or Ulysys lol

[overmydeadbody]

I can't even spell it MrsCad

[MrsCadwallader]

See, now I'm not entirely sure I can either

[purpleduck]

Ooh, I like the sound of that goal Butterpie - I may join you

Thank God I've already read Midnight's Children. It was a character building experience

[SerenityNowAKABleh]

I totally agree on Ulysses. It's one of only two books I've never been able to read. The other was Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, which is bizarre because I adore his books and have read almost all his others, but Grapes is just different and draaaaaags (and is incredibly depressing. The bits I've read anyway).

[MrsCadwallader]

Serenitynow - my two 'unreadables' are Ulysses and Lord of the Rings.

I decided 100 or so pages into both that life was simply too short

[SerenityNowAKABleh]

Agree. Lord of the Rings sucks. Especially the last one. He tries to get too Nordic and ode-y writing these long unreadable passages (I had to skip whole chapters I was so bored). I also got frustrated because it's supposed to be so "clever" and "creative" and he made up this whole world. Bollocks. He grew up in South Africa in a town called Hobbiton hence Hobbits; the Afrikaans word for elephants is olifants, hence these special magical creatures called olifants that are um, elephants. And walking trees. Like nobody had thought of that before

rant over

[AnathemaDevice]

I started trying to work my way through the BBC Big Read list a few years ago. I think I got up to about 60 or so, but gave up when I realised that I was never going to complete it, because there was no way I was ever going to attempt to read more than the first 50 pages of Gormenghast-life is too short.

There was no way I was going to bother with LotR either. I tried watching the films first, because I thought that if I knew the plot it might help me get through the novels. That's 3 hours of my life I'll never get back (gave up not very far into the 2nd film)

Don't understand all the Terry Pratchett hate on here-there's not enough of his books on the list, if you ask me...