In my last blog I asked What is a Classic? and I considered that possibly the best we could do would be to cumulate all our “100 books you should read” lists and see what that looked like as a definition of a classic.
To kick things off I have created my own list, below. In doing so, I have tried to include writers from all continents, a mixture of male and female writers from different racial backgrounds, and a range of themes and genres, including: childrens’ literature; autobiographical, existential and adventure writing; current and older books; crime, dystopian and science fiction; non-fiction, poetry, civil rights, feminist, comedy; novels about war, slavery and mental health; magical realism, mystical and nature writing; historic, modernist and futuristic writing; and a smattering of personal favourites. I have limited myself to one book per writer.
Things to note are:
This is just my list. Whilst I’ve tried to be diverse the list is naturally biased to the white/male/European. This is fine though as it is subjective, and other people will cover different areas and come at this list from different angles.
Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is the only acknowledged LGBT book on my list. I thought about throwing a couple of other LGBT subject matter books in there but I didn’t know any books that were quite good enough to sneak into the 100. Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Rose Tremain's Music and Silence and EM Forster’s Maurice all came close but I’d be happy if you could recommend me books from this genre that should have made my list.
There is some overlap with my favourite 100 books list but not as much as you’d think. On this list I’ve gone for books I think you should read if you only ever read 100 books so have erred towards classics and important works, for example I’ve picked Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd over my favourite of his Under the Greenwood Tree, as it is more typical of his writing.
The decisions were not easy. As I got down to the last few difficult decisions were made. Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, Sebastian Faulks’ Human Traces, Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Douglas Coupland’s Miss Wyoming, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Iain Banks’ The Steep Approach to Garbadale, Mikhail Lermentov’s A Hero of Our Time and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis all narrowly missed out.
So with no further ado, here is my “If-you-only-ever-read-100-books-I-think-you-should-read-these” list:
1 1984, George Orwell
2 A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
3 A Fortunate Life, AB Facey
4 A Fraction of the Whole, Steve Toltz
5 A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
6 A Song of Ice and Fire, GRR Martin
7 A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle
8 A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
9 All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
10 Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
11 Anne of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
12 Beloved, Toni Morrison
13 Bonjour Tristesse, Francoise Sagan
14 Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame, Charles Bukowski
15 By Grand Central Station I sat down and wept, Elizabeth Smart
16 Catch 22, Joseph Heller
17 Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
18 Crime and Punishment, Fyedor Dostoievsky
19 Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler
20 Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
21 Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
22 Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev
23 Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes
24 Goodbye to all that, Robert Graves
25 Heart of a Dog, Mikhail Bulgakov
26 Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
27 Howard's End, EM Forster
28 Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, Kiran Desai
29 I know why the caged bird sings, Maya Angelou
30 Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
31 Jamaica Inn, Daphne du Maurier
32 Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Jules Verne
33 Journey to the River Sea, Eva Ibbotsen
34 Just Kids, Patti Smith
35 Kim, Rudyard Kipling
36 Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
37 Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
38 Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkein
39 Macbeth, William Shakespeare
40 Matilda, Roald Dahl
41 Middlemarch, George Eliot
42 My Antonia, Willa Cather
43 Narrative of the life of... Frederick Douglass
44 Native Son, Richard Wright
45 Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
46 North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell
47 Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami
48 One flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
49 Oranges are not the only fruit, Jeannette Winterson
50 Petronille, Amelie Nothomb
51 Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
52 Sonnets from the Portuguese, Elizabeth Barrett Browning
53 Sunset Song, Lewis Grassic Gibbon
54 Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu
55 Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain
56 The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan
57 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
58 The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
59 The Book of Sand, Jorge Luis Borges
60 The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
61 The Cider House Rules, John Irving
62 The Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse
63 The Collected Poems, Emily Dickinson
64 The Collected Poems, Langston Hughes
65 The Collected Poems, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
66 The Dice Man, Luke Rineheart
67 The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
68 The Girl with the Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier
69 The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
70 The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
71 The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
72 The Honey Siege, Gil Buhet
73 The House at Pooh Corner, AA Milne
74 The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd
75 The Odyssey (*poetry translation only), Homer
76 The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
77 The River Between, Ngugi wa thong'o
78 The Road, Cormac McCarthy
79 The Road Home, Rose Tremain
80 The Rubiayat of… Omar Khayyam
81 The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
82 The Secret History, Donna Tartt
83 The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
84 The Wild Places, Robert Macfarlane
85 The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
86 Their Eyes were watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
87 Therese Racquin, Emile Zola
88 Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
89 To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
90 To the lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
91 Two Sides of the Moon, David Scott and Alexei Leonov
92 Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre
93 Villette, Charlotte Bronte
94 We, Yevgeny Zamyatin
95 We have always lived in the castle, Shirley Jackson
96 We should all be feminists, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
97 White Teeth, Zadie Smith
98 White Tiger, Aravind Adiga
99 Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
100 Zigzag Street, Nick Earls
What do you think of that!?
