The ones I have read already are bolded.
The ones I have started reading, but have not completed, are italicized.
The ones in regular print, I have not read yet.
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (all)
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 May 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 Travellers Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
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 Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - William 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 Martell
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 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
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 Colour 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 & the Chocolate factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
The first thing missing from "the list" is anything by Mark Twain. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer would be my pick. This could be due to the fact that it was my Dad's favorite book, but realistically, Twain has a large enough catalog of excellent works that surely at least one should have made its way onto the list. Perhaps in place of #14, the complete works of Shakespeare. This is a list of books, and Shakespeare's Hamlet already occupies #98. Lets be realistic, a man with as much to his credit as Shakespeare has a few loser titles under his belt. Everything in his complete works cannot possibly be literary gold.
In that vein, I call #6, The Bible, into question. Certainly its an important tome to all Christians, but lets take it on its merits as a literary work: it gets very boring in places. All the epistles in the new testament are just long winded sermons, as are many of the old testament works of the prophets. I certainly would not be so bold as to say every person needs to read it.
I would be so bold as to say The Gospel of the Redman by Ernest Thompson Seton would make a suitable replacement. Native American Indians have no formal bible of their spiritual beliefs, but in this work, the core values are distilled and presented in a way that is understandable and appealing to any person, no matter what faith. It shows the moral core that is the foundation of any religion, but that so many religions forget about as they become political machines.
On to #66, On The Road. Why does this piece of ramblings keep cropping up as a must read title? Its more boring than The Bible, and makes even less sense. It took me three times as long to read this as it did to read Dune, a novel three times the length. Do not waste your time with it. Kerouac joins Hemingway as an author that should only be read under duress.
That also applies to The Great Gatsby. Do high schools continue to force this into their curriculum? That would be the only excuse I can give as to why I read it. Skip it.
I also begin to wonder if these top 100 titles appear in random order. That would explain why Pride and Prejudice is at #1. It certainly deserves a place on this list, but to find it at the top? And for that matter, how many titles does Jane Austen get on this list? Is the BBC biased towards its native authors? Thomas Hardy also has multiple entries, all of which I've never heard of. Hopefully they are better that The Return of The Native.
Stop what you're doing right now. If you haven't already, pick up #41, Animal Farm, and #8, 1984. Read them. Right now. It won't take you long...
Finished? Good. Read them again. Not right now, but soon. Maybe after you read # 13, catch-22. These three are all amazing works. That is all I have to say.
Think twice about #36, The Scarlet Letter. I was told it was the first evidence of transcendentalist thought in american writing, and thus important. This in incorrect; Herman Melville's Typee is full on transcendentalist ideas, and was published in 1846, a full four years before Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne himself wrote a favorable review of Typee, praising it for showcasing ideals that would later come to be known as transcendentalism. Can you tell I enjoyed Typee more than The Scarlet Letter?
Ah, #91, Josef Conrad's Heart of Darkness. So many levels to this book. Read it. Then watch Apocalypse: Now. A journey up a river, through the human soul, and into the depths of hell itself. We are all our own devil.
And one last bit of praise for Watership Down, Richard Adams #94 entry. Spectacular.
These are just some of my opinions, and you know what they say: Opinions are like assholes; everyone's got one, but no one wants to hear yours. That can't be entirely true, since you've read this far. And since I'd like to hear yours in return. What else should be on this list. What else shouldn't? What should the top ten entries be?
