These are The Observer’s Top 100 Novels. As I progressed down the list I grew ashamed of the few starred titles I have read, despite their greatness. I felt smaller still coming across a title & thinking “Huh? What’s that?” Shame on me. Oh well, lots to keep me busy then. I personally there are many books that are missing from my favourites … I needs a plan to get me a library card!
Don Quixote – Miguel De Cervantes
The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
Clarissa – Samuel Richardson
Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
Emma – Jane Austen *
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley*
Nightmare Abbey – Thomas Love
The Black Sheep – Honore De Balzac
The Charterhouse of Parma – Stendhal
The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
Sybil – Benjamin Disraeli
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte *
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne*
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll *
Little Women – Louisa M. Alcott
The Way We Live Now – Anthony Trollope
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Daniel Deronda – George Eliot
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson *
Three Men in a Boat – Jerome K. Jerome
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde *
The Diary of a Nobody – George Grossmith
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
The Riddle of the Sands – Erskine Childers
The Call of the Wild – Jack London*
Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame *
In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust
The Rainbow – D.H. Lawrence
The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan
Ulysses – James Joyce
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald *
The Trial – Franz Kafka
Men Without Women – Ernest Hemingway
Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Celine
As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley*
Scoop – Evelyn Waugh
USA – John Dos Passos
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
The Pursuit of Love – Nancy Mitford
The Plague – Albert Camus
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell *
Malone Dies – Samuel Beckett
Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger *
Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White *
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien *
Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
Lord of the Flies – William Golding *
The Quiet American – Graham Greene
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Tin Drum – Gunter Grass
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee *
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller *
Herzog – Saul Bellow *
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez *
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont – Elizabeth Taylor
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carre
Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
The Bottle Factory Outing – Beryla Bainbridge
The Executioner’s Song – Norman Mailer
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul
Waiting for the Barbarians – J.M. Coetzee
Housekeeping – Marilynne Robinson
Lanark – Alasdair Gray
The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
The BFG – Roald Dahl *
The Periodic Table – Primo Levi
Money – Martin Amis
An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro
Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey *
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera
Haroun and the Sea of Stories – Salman Rushdie
LA Confidential – James Ellroy
Wise Children – Angela Carter
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Northern Lights – Philip Pullman *
American Pastoral – Philip Roth
Austerlitz – W.G. Sebald
