The List

The Big Read Top 100

In 2003 the BBC put together a list of the top 100 reads as nominated by their audience (readers? subscribers?). This is The List that I’m working my way through for this blog. Why a list from across the pond and as dated as 2003? Check out my “About” page and my first post to find out how this craziness all got started.

I have linked the titles below to their related posts. The books that are crossed out are the ones I have read.

A Note: Some books have multiple posts, for which I’ve provided links in parentheses. Some books are crossed out but have no related posts – these are books which I read prior to starting this blog, thus no related posts.

The List:

1. 1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
   2. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
   3. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (Post #1, Post #2)
   4. The Bible 
   5. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
   6. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell 
   7. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (the first one) 
   8. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
   9. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
   10. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
   11. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
   12. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
   13. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
   14. The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
   15. Middlemarch – George Eliot
   16. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
   17. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald 
   18. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller (Post #1, Post #2, Post #3, Post #4, Post #5)
   19. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
   20. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adam 
   21. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
   22. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
   23. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
   24. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
   25. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (Post #1, Post #2, Post #3, Post #4)
   26. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
   27. Emma -Jane Austen (Post #1)
   28. Persuasion – Jane Austen
   29. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
   30. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
   31. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
   32. Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
   33. Animal Farm – George Orwell
   34. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
   35. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
   36. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
   37. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
   38. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery (Post #1)
   39. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
   40. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
   41. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
   42. Atonement – Ian McEwan
   43. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
   44. Dune – Frank Herbert (Post #1, Post #2, Post #3, Post #4)
   45. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
   46. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
   47. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
   48. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
   49. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
   50. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
   51. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
   52. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
   53. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
   54. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
   55. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
   56. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
   57. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas  (post #1, post #2, post #3)
   58. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
   59. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
   60. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
   61. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie (Post #1, Post #2)
   62. Moby Dick – Herman Melville (Post #1, Post #2, Post #3)
   63. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
   64. Dracula – Bram Stoker
   65. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
   66. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
   67. Ulysses – James Joyce
   68. The Inferno – Dante
   69. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
   70. Germinal – Emile Zola
   71. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
   72. Possession – AS Byatt
   73. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
   74. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
   75. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
   76. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
   77. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
   78. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
   79. Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
   80. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
   81. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Post #1, Post #2)
   82. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
   83. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
   84. Le Petit Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (Post #1, Post #2)
   85. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
   86. Watership Down – Richard Adams
   87. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
   88. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
   89. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
   90. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
   91. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
   92. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (Post #1, Post #2, Post #3, Post #4)
   93. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers – JRR Tolkien (Post #1, Post #2, Post #3)
   94. Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King – JRR Tolkien
   95. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
   96. Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew – CS Lewis
   97. Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
   98. Chronicles of Narnia: The Horse and His Boy – CS Lewis
   99. Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Return to Narnia – CS Lewis
   100. Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – CS Lewis
   101. Chronicles of Narnia: The Silver Chair – CS Lewis
   102. Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle – CS Lewis
   103. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – JK Rowling
   104. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets – JK Rowling
   105. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – JK Rowling
   106. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – JK Rowling
   107. Harry Potter and the Order of Pheonix – JK Rowling
   108. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – JK Rowling
   109. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – JK Rowling
   110. The Two Gentlemen of Verona – Shakespeare (Post #1)
   111. The Taming of the Shrew – Shakespeare
   112. The Comedy of Errors – Shakespeare
   113. Love’s Labor’s Lost – Shakespeare
   114. A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Shakespeare
   115. The Merchant of Venice – Shakespeare
   116. The Merry Wives of Windsor – Shakespeare
   117. Much Ado About Nothing – Shakespeare
   118. As You Like It – Shakespeare
   119. Twelfth Night – Shakespeare
   120. The History of Troilus and Cressida – Shakespeare
   121. Measure for Measure – Shakespeare
   122. All’s Well That Ends Well – Shakespeare
   123. Pericles Prince of Tyre – Shakespeare
   124. The Winter’s Tale – Shakespeare
   125. The Tempest – Shakespeare (Post #1)
   126. Henry VI Pt 1 – Shakespeare (Post #1)
   127. Henry VI Pt 2 – Shakespeare (Post #1)
   128. Henry VI Pt 3 – Shakespeare (Post #1)
   129. The Tragedy of King Richard III – Shakespeare
   130. The Tragedy of King Richard II – Shakespeare
   131. The Life and Death of King John – Shakespeare
   132. King Henry IV Pt 1 – Shakespeare (Post #1)
   133. King Henry IV Pt 2 – Shakespeare (Post #1)
   134. The Life of King Henry V – Shakespeare
   135. The Life of King Henry VIII – Shakespeare
   136. Titus Andronicus – Shakespeare
   137. Romeo and Juliet – Shakespeare
   138. The Tragedy of Julius Ceasar – Shakespeare (Post #1, Post #2, Post #3)
   139. The Tragical History of Hamlet Prince of Denmark – Shakespeare
   140. The Tragedy of Othello the Moor of Venice – Shakespeare
   141. The Life of Timon of Athens – Shakespeare
   142. King Lear – Shakespeare
   143. Macbeth – Shakespeare
   144. Antony and Cleopatra – Shakespeare
   145. The Tragedy of Coriolanus – Shakespeare

Here is a link to the original list: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml – You will notice a few differences between the two lists. Mainly I’ve split out all of the series and complete works to be individual lines, where as they are represented as one line on the BBC Big Read Top 100.

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