Mr Rochester pleads his damned cause with Jane Eyre, breaking the good reader’s heart in the process.
The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. I don’t think I will be able to finish this list. A lot of the material honestly seem to be beyond my depth and (to be completely frank) my interests. But I’ve gotten through 19 as of this month, so I guess at the very least I am not most people 🙂
Besides, I also feel that other worthy books are not included in the 100 must-reads. To be fair though, the literary world is an ever changing, evolving space and no list will ever be complete. The magic of books, I daresay, is that the story never quite ends.
Check the list and see how you fare.
1 Pride and Prejudice – 1Â
2 The Lord of the Rings –
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte – 2
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling – 3
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee -4
6 The Bible – 5
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 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 Faulk –
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger – 6
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger – 7
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 Galaxy – Douglas Adams –
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 – 8
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen – 9
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 – 10
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown – 11
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – 17
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 – 12
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 – 13
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 – 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 – 14
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 Inferno – Dante- 15
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 Albom – 18
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 and the Chocolate Factory – 16
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo – <photo id=”1″ />
