This supposed “BBC Book list” has apparently no source, but whatever. I would star most of the list below that I’ve read (except Memoirs of a Geisha and The Three Musketeers), but there is something special about Austen. I spent my teen devouring her books and while going through other people’s bold lists, it makes me sad to see that a lot of people (in fact, from the ones I saw, most people) have not read Pride and Prejudice. I’ve read all of Austen’s books, including her unfinished stories and then when I got through them all, I felt a little glum. I wonder if any modern authors have taken up the mantle to finish her unfinished stories stories.

My other favourites from this list are Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Monkingbird. Lee only wrote one book in her life, but what a book. I want to be her and write that one great book. It’s a dream.

If the BBC actually created this list with a mixture of classics, popular novels and teen novels, I’m sure they would have included some Stephen King, so I suspect this list is not all that legit. Not to mention that there are some questionable ones included (in a sense that it must be restricted to 100 novels) and some truly great books which did not make the list. Also, if there’s going to be a few Thomas Hardy books listed, I would have added his Mayor of Casterbridge novel - for me, this is his best work. I like that Watership Down is on the list. It’s just a fine, easy to read, feel good novel that I highly recommend for everyone.

There is just so many great books to read. If you like to read writing that almost resembles poetry, Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind is a good one to try.

Instructions:

1) Bold those you have read.
2) Star the ones you loved.*
3) Italicize those you plan on reading. — I’m not even going to bother with this.

001 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

002 The Lord of the Rings- JRR Tolkien

003 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

004 Harry Potter series- JK Rowling

005 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

006 The Bible

007 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte —- I tried 5 times to read this. I don’t know why, but I just can’t read it.

008 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

009 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

010 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

011 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

012 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

013 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

014 Complete Works of Shakespeare (How about the incomplete works of Shakespeare?)

015 Rebecca- Daphne Du Maurier

016 The Hobbit- JRR Tolkien

017 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

018 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

019 The Time Traveller’s Wife- Audrey Niffenegger

020 Middlemarch – George Eliot

021 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

022 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

023 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

024 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

025 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

026 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

027 Crime and Punishment- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

028 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

029 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

030 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

031 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

032 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

033 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

034 Emma – Jane Austen

035 Persuasion - Jane Austen

036 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis

037 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

038 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere

039 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

040 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

041 Animal Farm – George Orwell

042 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

043 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

044 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

045 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

046 Anne of Green Gables- LM Montgomery

047 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

048 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

049 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

050 Atonement – Ian McEwan

051 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

052 Dune – Frank Herbert

053 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons I made it halfway through.

054 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

055 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

056 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

057 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

058 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

059 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

060 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

061 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

062 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

063 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

064 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

065 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

066 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

067 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

068 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

069 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

070 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

071 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

072 Dracula – Bram Stoker

073 The Secret Garden- Frances Hodgson Burnett

074 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

075 Ulysses – James Joyce

076 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

077 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

078 Germinal – Emile Zola

079 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

080 Possession- AS Byatt I have this book, somewhere.

081 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

082 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

083 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

084 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

085 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

086 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

087 Charlotte’s Web – EB White

088 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

089 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

090 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

091 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

092 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

093 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

094 Watership Down – Richard Adams

095 A Confederacy of Dunces- John Kennedy Toole

096 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

097 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

098 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

099 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo