You know I can’t resist book lists, even though I haven’t actually finished a book in over a year (awful, isn’t it?). Anyway, I’ve seen this around. Apparently there is a list of the U.K.’s favorite books, as determined by a survey. I’ve bolded the ones I’ve actually read.
- Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Lord of the Rings, The, JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter Series, JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Bible (Well, most of it)
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell
His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Little Women, Louisa M Alcott
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
Catch 22, Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare, William Shakespeare
Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
The Time Travellers Wife, Audrey Niffenneger
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald F Scott
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
War and Peace, L.N Tolstoy
The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia, C.S Lewis
Emma, Jane Austen
Persuasion, Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, C.S.Lewis
The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh, A A Milne
Animal Farm, George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney, John Irving
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Atonement, Ian McEwan
Life of Pi, Yann Martel
Dune, Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy, Vikrem Seth
The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
Dracula, Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson
Ulysses, James Joyce
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
Germinal, Emil Zola
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession, A S Byatt
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven, Mitch Alborn
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection, Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince, Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
Watership Down, Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers, Alexander Dumas
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
Twenty out of 100. Not great, but it could be worse.