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. 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.