My Favourite 100 Books - 2024
- Andy
- Apr 1, 2024
- 4 min read
Every three years I update my favourite 100 books and it's that time again. In the past three years I've read around 500 books, including some great ones, some of which have made their way into this list, some of which didn't quite make it. I've also changed my opinion on some of the books on my 2018 list.
My rules for this list are simple. Maximum one book per author. Fiction only. My favourite books I define as... books I love, which I reread regularly, which I want to reread again, and which I'd recommend. This is the order I would save them in a fire, heaven forbid!
Let me know what you think of my list and do comment your own personal top three.
1. Lord of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien
2. The Three Musketeers, by Alexander Dumas
3. Villette, by Charlotte Bronte
4. Cider House Rules, by John Irving
5. Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo
6. Crime and Punishment, Fyedor Dostoyevsky
7. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
8. Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
9. Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
10. David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
11. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
12. Anne of Green Gables, by LM Montgomery
13. O Pioneers, by Willa Cather
14. Kim, by Rudyard Kipling
15. Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake
16. Matilda, by Roald Dahl
17. Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
18. Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk
19. A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz
20. A Song of Ice and Fire, by GRR Martin
21. A Month in the Country, by JL Carr
22. Catcher in the Rye, by JD Salinger
23. Human Traces, by Sebastian Faulks
24. The 39 Steps, by John Buchan
25. Precious Bane, by Mary Webb
26. A Secret History, Donna Tartt
27. All Quiet on the Western Front, by E.M. Remarque
28. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
29. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
30. Jacob’s Room, by Virginia Woolf
31. Sunset Song, by Lewis Grassic Gibbons
32. Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges
33. The Scarlet and the Black, by Stendhal
34. The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett
35. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
36. Hunger, by Knut Hamsun
37. The Grand Meaulnes, by Alain-Fournier
38. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
39. Leave it to Psmith, by P.G. Wodehouse
40. Zigzag Street, by Nick Earls
41. As I walked out one Midsummer morning, by Laurie Lee
42. Middlemarch, by George Eliot
43. We have always lived in the castle, by Shirley Jackson
44. Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes
45. Journey to the River Sea, by Eva Ibbotson
46. Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons
47. The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak
48. The Heart of a Dog, by Mikael Bulgakov
49. Pollyanna, by Eleanor Porter
50. Room with a view, by EM Forster
51. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin
52. Jamaica Inn, by Daphne du Maurier
53. Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk
54. Restoration, by Rose Tremain
55. Stoneheart, by Charlie Fletcher
56. Girl with the Pearl Earring, by Tracy Chevalier
57. A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle
58. Treasure Island, by RL Stevenson
59. White Teeth, by Zadie Smith
60. Vernon God Little, by DBC Pierre
61. Miss Wyoming, by Douglas Coupland
62. Native Son, by Richard Wright
63. Perfume, by Patrick Suskind
64. Espedair Street, by Iain Banks
65. The Prisoner of Azkaban, by J K Rowling
66. Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, by Kiran Desai
67. Little Women, by Louisa M. Alcott
68. A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khalid Hosseini
69. Emma, by Jane Austen
70. A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
71. By Grand Central Station I sat down and wept, by Elizabeth Smart
72. Mary Barton, by Elizabeth Gaskell
73. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, by Rachel Joyce
74. Steppenwolf, by Herman Hesse
75. Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafön
76. The Honey Siege, by Gil Buhet
77. Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernadine Evaristo
78. Bonjour Tristesse, by Francoise Sagan
79. The Wall and the Wing, by Laura Ruby
80. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain
81. The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope
82. Therese Raquin, by Emile Zola
83. The Buddha of Suburbia, by Hanif Kureshi
84. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
85. Come Back Charleston Blue, by Chester Himes
86. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey
87. Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan
88. Eugenie Grandet, by Honore de Balzac
89. Kristin Lavrensdatter, by Sigrid Undset
90. Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy
91. The Grass Harp, by Truman Capote
92. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers
93. Manon Lescaut, by Abbe Prévost
94. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Bronte
95. Under the Net, by Iris Murdoch
96. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
97. Madonna in a Fur Coat, by Sabahattin Ali
98. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
99. The Haunted Bookshop, by Christopher Morley
100. A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles
I'm really impressed by your list, and by your keeping it up. I keep an ever-growing list of books I've read, noting ones I especially loved, and also ones that didn't do it for me. I keep the list on my phone, because people are always asking what I've read and liked lately, and when they do I usually can't remember what I've read lately. There are always books that are unforgettable, quite a few, though not always read lately, for which I don't need a list. (Like Jenny Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone—an all time favorite. And yes, A Gentleman in Moscow, what a delight.) Sometimes I look at my list and do recognize a title but can't recall …
I am inspired to create my own list. It will contain quite a few of the same and also many different such as The Awakening, Portrait of a Lady, Conditions of Faith, Gilead, and perhaps Madame Bovary.