The Guardian’s list of 100 “books you can’t live without”
Posted by lilykarin on januari 3rd, 2010 . Filed under: Reading & Books .I found this list at Alice’s blog, but when I was to copy the link to the Guardian I found it was broken. When looking for the list I found a slightly different one at the Guardians site, but I am still going to use this one.
Bold the books you have read.
Emphasise ones you want to read.
and Strike Through those you have no interest in reading.
1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (when I was a kid)
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller (have it, have started it a couple of times without being too enthusiastic)
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare – William Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger (for the sake of it)
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35.Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernières
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (another one I own and have started on)
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
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram 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
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert (own this one aswell)
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole (started on once)
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
18/100, though none of the books I have already read here except the Little Prince would go on a list of my own favourites so I wouldn’t put much trust in this list to provide must read books for me.



januari 3rd, 2010 at 11:29 f m
I don’t put much trust in it either, I think a lot of the books are books people think we need to read because they are culturally significant or something like that. Which is fair enough, but if a book doesn’t interest me I’m not going to waste my time trying to read it when I can read something I find amazing instead.
januari 3rd, 2010 at 11:50 f m
Agreed!
januari 3rd, 2010 at 12:11 e m
I agree that it isn’t a very good list. I thought “The Time Traveler’s Wife” was a terrible waste of time, unless you really like romance novels. However, Khaled Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner” (and better yet, his follow-up “A Thousand Splendid Suns”) are beautifully written, stunning tales. I highly recommend them!
januari 3rd, 2010 at 12:21 e m
You did? I’ve been recommended it (time traveller’s wife that is), but no, I don’t like romance novels the slightest. Thanks for the warning, haha!
januari 3rd, 2010 at 5:41 e m
lolita tycker jag att du skall läsa. skit i resten.
januari 3rd, 2010 at 7:55 e m
Yeah some of these books are terrible, like why does anyone need to read the Da Vinci Code? But if you’re looking to read some J.D. Salinger, I’d recommend his short stories or more so his novellas about the Glass family (”Raise High the Roofbeams Carpenter”, “Seymour an Introduction”, or “Franny and Zooey”). These are by far his best works though not his most well recognized because they didn’t inspire any controversy. They did, however, inspire the Royal Tannenbaums if you have seen that film. One Hundred Years of Solitude is also excellent – the key to reading it is to give up trying to figure out what generation people are from and recognize that their fate will follow that of their namesake regardless of who the individual is. It’s much easier to keep up with two names rather than like 30 people.
januari 5th, 2010 at 7:38 e m
Johanna: :)
Carnet: Oh thank you for the tips!! especially on 100 years since that is the only one of those I currently have.. and should get started on some day. Soon.
januari 29th, 2010 at 10:07 f m
Well, I think I’ve read many, and browsed through a lot of more books on the list. One of my favorites has always been ‘To Kill a Mockingbird‘. Made into a movie in 1962, the book is a strong statement against racism and promotes standing up for what you believe in. Atticus Finch is one of the most memorable characters in literature. Set in a small town in Alabama called Maycomb, the story unfolds the racial discrimination that was so common in the era before the Civil Rights Movement began in America. There are some great background facts about this book on shmoop.com. Every year a contest is held in Alabama for school-going kids to write an essay on `To Kill a Mockingbird’. Needless to say, the book‘s influence remains strong even today.