Perfectly okay with posting this list on a Saturday night.

[grammargirl]

Stolen from a couple people. Bold for the ones I've read, italics for the ones I've tried to read, stars next to my top ten.

1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen [Elizabeth Bennet is my hero]
2. Lord of the Rings, The, JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter Series, JK Rowling* [Boy howdy!]
5. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee* [Fun fact: my soon-to-be company published a reissue of this, one of my favorite books from childhood]
6. Bible [Like sternel:Took a class. Am not that devoted.]
7. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte* [Emily's my favorite Bronte]
8. Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell
8. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens [My favorite Dickens.]
11. Little Women, Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22, Joseph Heller [I know, I'm ashamed. One of these days I'll finish it, I swear...]
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare, William Shakespeare [I've read a lot of 'em, but nowhere near all.]
15. Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger [Liked it. Like Franny and Zooey a lot more, clearly.]
19. The Time Travellers Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch, George Eliot
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald F Scott
23. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace, L.N Tolstoy [All 49372 pages of Russian aristocratic goodness, baby.]
25. The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams* [I've read this a completely absurd number of times.]
26. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky [Subway reading my first few months in New York.]
28. Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll [One of the books I reread over and over again and post-it flagged to death while writing my honors thesis.]
30. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy [Read it my freshman year of college, for fun, because I had waaaaaaay too much time on my hands.]
32. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia, C.S Lewis
34. Emma, Jane Austen
35. Persuasion, Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, C.S.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, A A Milne*
41. Animal Farm, George Orwell [Back in, like, 7th or 8th grade. I should really reread it now that I know what it's about]
42. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown [Not even if you paid me.]
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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
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 [Somehow I've only read the alliterative Austens]
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikrem 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
60. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez [One of these days.]
61. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
62. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov* [The first paragraph of this book gives me shivers. Also contains my favorite parenthetical qualifier of all time.]
63. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas [It's on the list.]
66. On the Road, Jack Kerouac [I know it's all famous and revered and everything, but the misogyny makes me absolutely insane.]
67. Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie [I saw the play performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company, does that count?]
70. Moby Dick, Herman Melville [Eventually.]
71. Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens [Read it when I stage managed Oliver! in high school]
72. Dracula, Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett [Love!]
74. Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses, James Joyce [24 hour out-loud group reading, what? I loved my Joyce class.]
76. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath*
77. Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal, Emil Zola
79. Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray [Never read any Thackery. Should really get on that.]
80. Possession, A S Byatt* [OMG SO GOOD.]
81. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens [Huh... you know, I don't think I've actually read this. I've seen about 47 different movie adaptations, though.]
82. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert [Not as sexy as I was led to believe.]
86. A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White [Read it to some very bored 4th graders last year.]
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven, Mitch Alborn [I am in wholehearted agreement with sternel here: No. Just...no.]
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection, Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad [I still remember the paper I wrote about this my senior year. It was fantastic. I wish I still had a copy.]
92. The Little Prince, Antoine De Saint-Exupery [In English AND French!]
93. The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
94. Watership Down, Richard Adams [A grownup book about talking rabbits! What's not to love?]
95. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole [I held a copy of this book hostage for several months last year. Much to my surprise, it worked.]
96. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers, Alexander Dumas [Also on the list.]
98. Hamlet, William Shakespeare [Whiny bastard.]
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl [I can't believe this is on the list and not Matilda or The BFG.]
100. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo [I've owned a copy of this for years. One of these days.]

Comments

[naiveinsight.livejournal.com]

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the classic. How come the complete works is on there separate from Hamlet?

[grammargirl.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure. I'm also curious why The Chronicles of Narnia is separate from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and why there are all those series that each count as one book. Honestly, I mostly just felt like showing off how many books I've read. *shrug*

favorite parenthetical qualifier

[iconoclam.livejournal.com]

Would that be (picnic, lightning)? And if so, have you read this?

[iconoclam.livejournal.com]

Oh, and The Three Musketeers = highly recommended. I think I'm almost due for a re-read of that, actually. Also, if you like Victorian lit, then you really have to read The Woman in White and The Moonstone.

Re: favorite parenthetical qualifier

[grammargirl.livejournal.com]

(picnic, lightning), indeed. I hadn't seen that book before, but I respect Billy Collins way more now that I have.

[minniethemoocha.livejournal.com]

Fucking Harry Potter? Give me a break. I'm serious. I am so goddamn sick of how the entire world has set out to kiss Jo Rowling's tush for making it trendy for the entire English-speaking world to gush over books aimed at 4th-7th graders.

[boucinoffdawall.livejournal.com]

I actually rather enjoyed Remains of the Day. Read it for freshman English at U of M. That and short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri. :-P

Also, there are several others by Conrad that realllllly should be on this list, like the Secret Sharer, even though it is technically a short story.

I'm also curious as to why Dostoevsky's The Idiot didn't make it on here, nor most philosophy books, such as Kirkegaard's Sickness Unto Death, Plato's Republic, etc.

[stevenglassman.livejournal.com]

Re: Les Miserables- get yourself the abridged version. The unabridged has a lot of historical/geographical type stuff that is as dull as toast points.

[grammargirl.livejournal.com]

*shrug* Have you read them? They're really very good. Sometimes when lots of people inexplicably decide that something is wonderful, it's because, well, it's wonderful. I also don't know how much YA lit you've been reading recently (my guess is not much), but it is often just as well-written as anything written with adults in mind.

[grammargirl.livejournal.com]

I refuse to read abridged anything. Call me snobbish if you want, but I like my books the way the author wrote them.

[cucumbersarnies.livejournal.com]

It was voted for by the British public- hence the inclusion of The Da Vinci Code, and the absence of the books you mention. It's the books people want to have with them, not the ones they should read.

[iconoclam.livejournal.com]

I do understand when people complain about Rowling's slightly awkward prose and fake Latin. But she really is *excellent* at plot and character development.

[grammargirl.livejournal.com]

Oh sure, her writing certainly has weaknesses. She way overuses adverbs and ellipses, and she's in DESPERATE need of an editor who's not too in awe of her reputation to tell her when she's suffering from verbal diarrhea. But, as you said, her plotting and character development are brilliant, and I find it difficult to condemn a series that has single-handedly gotten millions of kids, and a huge number of adults for that matter, excited about reading.

[minniethemoocha.livejournal.com]

Yes, I read through #5. I liked them just fine as light reading (although #5 was awash with boring 2-dimensional side characters), and there was a sentimental bond with my sister over reading a couple of the books aloud to each other (other books we read to each other included Good Omens and Slaughterhouse-Five). But they're just not all that great compared to other things that kids could read and relate to just as easily (Diane Duane's Wizard series comes to mind, and has a ton more depth), and I hate when something that's OK but not brilliant is touted as brilliant. I read a lot of YA literature, actually. I love a lot of it. Wouldn't it be great, though, to see more talented writers with better stories to tell get this kind of attention? I'm tired of the craze. It's shallow and media-fueled.

[grammargirl.livejournal.com]

I highly recommend #6. It's far and away the strongest in the series, writing-wise, and the fact that Rowling is in desperate need of a merciless editor is far less apparent than in #5.

See my comment to iconoclam for my analysis of Rowling's strengths and weaknesses as a writer, but what it comes down to is that, shallow and media-fueled as the craze may be (and I don't dispute that), it's single-handedly responsible for getting millions of kids excited about reading. I like to think of it as kind of a literature gateway drug: kids who devour the Harry Potter books will, hopefully, be more likely to fall in love with better books down the road. There's no doubt in my mind that a whole lot of kids are going to become lifetime readers because of these books, and I wouldn't be able to condemn that even if I thought the books were utter tripe. As it happens, I think they're wonderful, though flawed, and I'm glad that I live in a world where a series of children's books can generate this much loyalty and angst and passion.

[minniethemoocha.livejournal.com]

I'd be interested in a longitudinal study of what the kids who got into HP starting in 2000 (say, when they were between 8 and 10 years old) are choosing to read as they grow up. Specifically check groups of reluctant or first-time pleasure readers against groups of kids who were already avid pleasure readers. I wonder if there's anything like that in the works. That would be cool.

[naiveinsight.livejournal.com]

Oh I was so impressed too by your amazing wonderfulity. And stuff.

[misanthropicsob.livejournal.com]

Ive been trying to read Thackeray's The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. I have, so far, found it only slightly more entertaining than the movie.

There sure is a lot of crap and books of the day in this list. Mitch Albom. Dan Brown (OMG, What the fuck were they thinking? The writing style in this is braindead to the point of being worse than what you'd find in an average livejournal). Helen Fielding (while I have read it and enjoyed it, I think I could have lived without it). And, three Thomas Hardy books?

Of course, I've read more on this list than on their 2003 list of 100 Greatest Books of all time (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1061037,00.html), which at least has some post-modern books on it, like if on a winter's night a traveler..., Catch-22, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy Gentleman, etc.