According to the BBC, the average person has only read six of the books on the list below. I’m going to try and make it my goal to read all 100! As of now, I’ve read 43 (if I counted right, and I’m pretty sure I did), not including the individual books in a series. And really, this is way more than 100 as it includes trilogies, series, and collections!
1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (love the book and the 2005 Keira Knightley movie)
2. The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien (ties for the top spot on my all-time favorites list with HP. books all the way! Peter Jackson didn’t do them justice!)
3. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series by JK Rowling (love them to death!)
5. To Kill A Mockingbirg by Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (the movie was awful. seriously. what was with the ending?)
10. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
11. Little Women by Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (that’s way more than one book!)
15. Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien (I’m glad he went on to write LotR, this isn’t nearly as good.)
17. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffegger
20. Middlemarch by George Elliot
21. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (as you can probably tell if you know anything about this series, I love them)
26. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (it was a pretty good movie,too)
27. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (it’s actually called Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)
30. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis
34. Emma by Jane Austen
35. Persuasion by Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by CS Lewis (didn’t they already say the Chronicles of Narnia?)
37. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hossein
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis De Berneires
39. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne (that’s actually quite a few books!)
41. Animal Farm by George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (I read the other one—Angels and Demons)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving
45. The Woman in While by Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery (Anne is my hero. and that’s like seven books right there!)
47. Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies by William Golding (Maybe my all-time favorite stand-alone book)
50. Atonement by Ian McEwan (good movie though! but really depressing)
51. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
52. Dune by Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (though I like The Prince and the Pauper more—why isn’t there any Mark Twain on here?)
58. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon (had to read it in school after suffering through it on my own time. one of the strangest books I’ve ever read.)
60. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
62. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (tried, failed miserably after the agony of the first five pages)
65. Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
66. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (though I did read Haroun and the Sea of Stories)
70. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
72. Dracula by Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From a Small Island by Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses by James Joyce
76. The Inferno by Dante
77. Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome (I cannot believe this was on here! I thought I was like the only person in the universe who knew about these! They’re brilliant and way up there on my favorites list—top 5, at least. They used to be tied with HP, before LotR came along.)
78. Germinal by Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackery
80. Possession by AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishigurox
85. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web by EB White
88. The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection by Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince by Antone De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
94. Watership Down by Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
97. The Three Mustketeers by Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
