The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. I’ve bolded the books I’ve read. I disagree with some books on this list and completely agree with others. I’ll compile my own lists of must reads soon. Here’s my question for you. What books do you think should have been on this list but weren’t, and what books shouldn’t be on the list? Please leave comments on this. It will be fun to hear your opinions. I’ve added mine.
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (deserves to be on the list)
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (long and wordy, but still a good read, deserves to be on the list)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte (deserves to be on the list)
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible (This is the book everyone should read.)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (deserves to be on the list)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell (One of my favorite sci-fi novels)
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (I love Charles Dickens, but there are other novels of his that I like better.)
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott – (love this book)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy (deserves to be on the list)
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (No list would be complete without it.)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien (better than “Lord of the Rings” in my opinion)
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 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 (the best Fitgerald novel)
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (great read, but doesn’t belong on this list)
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (one of my favorites)
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (a must read)
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame (very good book)
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens (a must read)
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis (I love this series.)
34 Emma-Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (This is the first novel of the Chronicles of Narnia series already listed.)
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 (I don’t think this one should be on the list although it’s good.)
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell (No list like this would be complete without this one.)
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 (good series, not sure it’s good enough to be on the list)
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 (good, but not good enough to be on the list)
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen (The compliler of this list seems to be heavily into regency romances and British authors. Jane Austen is great and deserves to be on the list, but she shouldn’t have every book she ever wrote on here.)
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens (oh yes, but should have been higher up)
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley (great read)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck (deserves to be on list)
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas (one of my favorites)
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 (boring)
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens (deserves to be on list)
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett (good novel, but not good enought for list)
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante (not sure this should be on list)
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 (my all time favorite, should be number 1)
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 (great children’s story)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (of course)
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 (good book)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas (deserves to be on list)
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare (Isn’t his part of the Complete Works of Shakespeare listed above?)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo (should be on list)
Where’s Hawthorne, Hemingway, and Graham Greene? Of course BBC would lean heavily toward european authors. So give me some ideas. I’ll compile a list based on your choices soon. Then I’ll post my list in a few weeks. This should be fun.
While I haven’t read about 25 of these, I have read others by the authors. It is not based on quality, but upon popularity. I liked War and Peace better than Crime and Punishment or The Idiot. I think Jane Austen, like Dickens captures human frailty while making them appealing. I prefer Sense and Sensibility to Persuasion. It might have been a better list, had they simply listed the authors and suggested any works by the author–rather than listing Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen so many times. Many of the authors have multiple masterpieces. Nice list though. I saw a couple I should read and haven’t.
I agree with you. Are there any other books you would add to the list?
Where are these?
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Paradise Lost by John Milton
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Dafoe
My goodness, those are some major, major works. No Twain, no Hemingway, no Faulkner. Robert Louis Stevenson, nowhere to be found. Yikes!
Scott,
I totally agree with your choices. The BBC list was woefully lacking.