In April 2003, the BBC's Big Read began the search for Britain’s best-loved novel. Viewers voted for their favorite book until December 13, 2003, when the final list was complete.
The Top 100 list is below. The contest tallied the top 200 vote-getters, with the books ranked 101 to 200 sometimes referred to as the Bigger Read. This is definitely a people’s choice list that, while it includes many very good books, reflects popular tastes as much as literary merits.
I have read 51 of the 100. I may never get through all of these because the list includes four Harry Potter books, too many kids books, and a lot of sci-fi. There are at least 29 that I do not plan to read. Those I have read are in red. Those currently on my TBR shelf are in blue.
If anyone else is tracking this list, please feel free to leave comment with a link to your progress report and I will add it to this post.
1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams (reviewed here)
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier (reviewed here)
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame (reviewed here)
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens (reviewed here)
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher (reviewed here)
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts and Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles (notes here)
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake (reviewed here)
85. The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons (reviewed here)
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan of the Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane and Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls in Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie (reviewed here)
NOTES
List updated on January 4, 2019.
OTHERS READING THESE BOOKS
(If you would like to be listed here, please leave a comment with your links to any progress reports or reviews and I will add them here.) .
I'm guessing green are the ones you won't be reading. The Stand is one of my favourites from years back and Wilkie Collins is a classic I thoroughly enjoyed as well.
ReplyDeleteYou've read more than half the list. That's very commendable. I'm embarassed to say I've only read 37, although I have read Anna Karenina 3 times. That's gotta count for something, right? I would never read the Harry Potter or sci fi either.
ReplyDeleteThere are some in green that I will read someday -- they are just not sitting on my TBR shelf right now. The Wilkie Collins book is one of them. I want to read The Woman in White and The Moonstone. But probably not The Stand, although people really like that one.
ReplyDeleteAnna Karenina is one of my "shame" books. I can't believe I haven't read it yet! Part of the reason is that I one got halfway through it, left it at the gym by mistake, and it was gone for good. By the time I got another copy, I was on the fence about starting over or picking up where I left off. I dithered too long, now I have to start over. But that bugs me, so I procrastinate. All silly, I know.
There certainly is too many Terry Pratchett books on that list. But I have read 56 of them. I'm quite impressed that by number is so high. Mostly down to reading all the kid's books!
ReplyDeleteI haven't read the Harry Potter books either, but I am told by adult readers they are quite good. You might want to give Dune and Watership Down a chance, too.
ReplyDeleteMichelle -- 56 is quite an accomplishment, no matter what! If you make a blog post about it, link it here and I will add it.
ReplyDeleteCS -- Watership Down is one I will read someday. I can't make a promise about Dune. The movie almost killed me dead.
Oh, Dune is definitely worth it. Not the sequels, but it's a great book. I find it interesting, though, that most of my app. 40 books read are precisely those childrens' books that you and most adult readers are avoiding. I'll check this list again in ten years from now, see how I've improved...
ReplyDeleteWhoa! You knocked off LOTR and didn't tell us?????
ReplyDeleteI agree The Woman in White and Watership Down are well worth your time. Dune, too, probably, though I haven't read it yet.
Also agree with your resistance to Harry Potter. I suspect 4 slots out of 100 are at least 3 too many.
wow that does have a lot of children's and YA when it comes to best books in English. But I guess it's not best books in English: it's MOST LOVED which is totally different.
ReplyDeleteI've only read 34 of them, but many are on my to read list. I'm in the middle of Woman in White and loving it. I read Dune a year or so ago. It was okay, but I'm not about to read the sequels.
I meant Children's books and Sci Fi, not YA
ReplyDeleteI've read 29 (including every single Harry Potter, some twice), but if you factor in the number of pages of the books I didn't finish I think I should get credit for at least 32!
ReplyDeleteOOPS! Sorry to say, I have NOT finished LOTR. I did finish the first one, The Fellowship of the Ring, two weeks ago. For some reason (probably overheated brain because of our heat wave) I thought Fellowship was the book on this list and marked it as read. But I unmarked it now. The other two are on my TBR shelf and I plan to finish the whole trilogy this year.
ReplyDelete