Top 100 Reads!

This is the Top 100 Reads, taken from the BBC 's 2003 list. How many have you read? What books from 2003 - 2008 do you think should be on an updated list? Which are you surprised to see on here?

1. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
18. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone - JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets - JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban - JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch - George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany - John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath - John Steinbeck
30. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker - Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth - Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion - Jane Austen
39. Dune - Frank Herbert
40. Emma - Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down - Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited -Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm - George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom - Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers - Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men - John Steinbeck
53. The Stand - Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The BFG - Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons - Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty - Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl - Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses - Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha - Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds - Colleen McCollough
65. Mort - Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree - Enid Blyton
67. The Magus - John Fowles
68. Good Omens - Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards! - Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies - William Golding
71. Perfume - Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch - Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda - Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White - Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses - James Joyce
79. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
80. Double Act - Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits - Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle - Dodie Smith
83. Holes - Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel - Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
89. Magician - Raymond E Feist
90. On The RoadItalic - Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather - Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear - Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic - Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine - Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel - Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love - Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries - Meg Cabot
100. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

11 comments

  1. I've actually only read 9 of those! :s

    I suppose being from the BBC it's biased to mostly English book, but it's nice to see a lot of Roald Dahl on there. :)

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  2. Surprisngly, I've read 45!

    One thing that annoys me about this list (which I forgot to mention) is they appear to have lumped Lord of the Rings to comprise all three books, ditto for His Dark Materials ... yet include Harry Potter seperately ... strange!

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  3. It's looking like 27 for me - which surprised me, I hadn't expected to have read quite so many. Mind you, quite a few of the more "classic" ones I have read were part of my school syllabus. Although I did read a few like "Rebecca" and "Jane Eyre" out of choice, back when I was younger and could be bothered with classics.

    As for the point you made about LOTR, I don't know about "His Dark Materials" but with LOTR you can get all three books together as one giant novel - that's the one I have. As far as I'm aware, they haven't done that for Harry Potter. It's more of a series whereas LOTR appears to be more a novel in its own right which was broken down into three parts. If you know what I mean . . .

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  4. I know what you mean, Paula, but they've also seperated The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe from The Chronicles of Narnia and I have that as one big book, not seperately - it just doesn't seem very consistent to me!

    Ah well! I know it doesn't really matter ... it was just an annoyance I had! :0)

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  5. My...I'm impressed by your 45th book! Congrats on your 100th posts dear! Great weekend to you...

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  6. I have 3 lists to show you today.

    They've very very interesting.

    Out of this list, I've only read, 26. Some of them I can barely remember. There are other titles that I think I may have read in high school, but I was not sure that I just left them off the count. There's a lot of book reading in high school that became forgotten once the assignment was over.

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  7. Thank you, Lenorenevermore! Great weekend, to you too! :0)

    @Liza - I'm curious now to see these three lists you mention! Get posting! :p

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  8. I think it's hysterical to find Ulysses and The Thorn Birds on the same list. (I've never actually met anyone who's made it thru Ulysses and often wonder why it makes so many lists.)

    There's actually a pretty nice variety on this list!

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  9. I've read 10 of those but watched the movies of a lot of the other ones if that counts hehe! Nice list.

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  10. Yes, I think it's quite a balanced list (although I wouldn't think that if I'd only read 4 of them, opposed to 45 :p)!

    I think I'm going to use it as a basis to make a revised list up to 2008 in the New Year. Can anyone thnk of any books published between 2003-8 that also should be included? And in that case, which should be taken off this list?

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