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.

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).

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

x posts

Hmm, what about this one?

www.newsweek.com/id/204478

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

I can't even spell it MrsCad

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

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

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).

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

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

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...