100 Books

So I have just witnessed one of my close friends disagree, and dismiss about roughly half of these books so I have decided to share a few of my thoughts briefly. The ones in bold are novels I have fully read. 




1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 
 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (LOVE- We did this for female Gothic last year and it was one of my favourite books on the module)
 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (You can't go wrong with a bit of HP, How that women created a world in which every little detail was thought of, to the point where it isn't included in the book but if you ask her about it she will go into such detail astonishes me)
 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (Another one of my favourites, although my little brother scribbled all over my copy...)
 6 The Bible (A lovely piece of fiction)
 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (HATE- It is my stepdad's favourite book but for me I had to drag myself through it!)
 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (I own this book and I'm about halfway through it...and have been for 2 years- I will finish it!)
 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (Good when I was younger, but I tried to re-read the first one a couple of years ago and I just wasn't interested)
 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (Own, to read)
 11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (Own, to read)
 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (Own, to read)
 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 
 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Own two copies of for some reason, to read)
 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (Great book, also the Hitchcock film is pretty good)
 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien 
 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk (Long but it is one of those 'once you get started you can't put down types)
 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (I like this book a lot, but I think I like my copy of it the most, as I 'borrowed' it from my Grandparent's house. It's a lovely edition)
 19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (I personally didn't like this book, it kept me interested and it wasn't like anything I had read before but it just wasn't for me)
 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 
 27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky 
 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
 30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame  
 31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 
 32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (Own, to read)
 33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (I like the first two and Caspian is ok... but after that- pretty average for me.)
 34 Emma -Jane Austen (I haven't read any other Austen apart from Northanger Abby, and that was enough)
 35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
 36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis (Love)
 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 
 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 
 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (I compared this to 'The Joy Luck Club' for an A-level piece. I really enjoyed both novels. Memoirs hooked me in and I read it in 2-3 days. Long book but worth it)
 40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne (Childhood) 
 41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (Halfway through again! Maybe it's just that Orwell and myself just don't get along!)
 42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (I personally didn't like it, I read it because everyone else recommended it and that usually puts me off because I am stubborn!)
 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving 
 45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins (Got halfway through...then gave up, maybe I will revisit)
 46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (I wasn't keen on this novel, purely because I have read better things)
 47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
 48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (This was recommended to be by a classmate in A-levels and I thought it was great)
 49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (Good, but I don't idolise it like my good friend Tom)
 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 Huxley 
 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (Maths was the thing that put me off this book. It is a very clever book and an interesting plot, but I read it when I was younger and just the sight of numbers makes my brain close down and I lose interest rapidly. It sounds pathetic but that's the reason why I don't like this book)
 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
 61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (I preferred seeing this on the stage)
 62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (Own, to read)
 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 (Read it as part of a women's writing course.  It is ok, but not for me) 
 69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie 
 70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville 
 71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens 
 72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (Great book. Van Helsing features a lot less than I thought he would- I obviously heard about this book a long time before I read it)
 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett 
 74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
 75 Ulysses - James Joyce  
 76 The Inferno - Dante 
 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome (EURGH. I have tried SO many times to get through this as it was a present from my mum and one of her favourite books. But no.)
 78 Germinal - Emile Zola 
 79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
 80 Possession - AS Byatt
 81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (Love)
 82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
 83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker (Great book)
 84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro 
 85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (Halfway through)
 86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
 87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White 
 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (I rather liked this book. My friend found it incredibly dull- he's wrong)
 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 (Love this play. Loved seeing David Tennant has Hamlet in Stratford. Love that I got a first writing my independant study on it- boom!)
 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (This man was my childhood- one of my favourites out of his books!)
 100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo