Top 100 books chosen by viewers (re-edited and remastered from the BBC site) The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Copy this , Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt. 
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen 
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien 
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling 
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee 6 The Bible 7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell 
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman 
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott 
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy 
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller 
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier 
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien 
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk 
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger 
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger 
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot 21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell 
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald 24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams 
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky 
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck 
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll 
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame 31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy 32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens 
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis 
34 Emma -Jane Austen 
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen 
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres 
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden 40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne 41 Animal Farm - George Orwell 
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown 
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving 
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins 46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery 47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy 
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood 
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding 
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan 
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel 
52 Dune – Frank Herbert 
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons 
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen 55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth 
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon 
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens 58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley 
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon 
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck 62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt 
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 65 The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas 
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac 
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy 
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding 69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie 
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville 
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens 
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker 
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett 74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson 
75 Ulysses – James Joyce 
76 The Inferno – Dante 77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome 
78 Germinal – Emile Zola 
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray 
80 Possession – AS Byatt 
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens 82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell 
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker 
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro 
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry 
87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom 
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton 
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad 92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (English) 93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks 
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams 
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole 
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute 
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas 
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare 
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl 100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo 
Additional books that seemed to have been excised from the list above and replaced with some others. 
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving 
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson 
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett 41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery 
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh 
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian 
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher 53. The Stand, Stephen King 
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl 
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome 
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell 59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer 
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough 
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett 
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton 
67. The Magus, John Fowles 
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman 
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett 
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell 
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett 
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl 
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 85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy 
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson 
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons 
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist 
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 
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson 
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot 100. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie 
What Have You Read?
I was amazed that I had read about 85% of the books listed. The one that made the biggest impression on me was The Secret Garden. I still have an old photo of me curled up in a chair in front of the Christmas tree when I was in 4th or 5th grade reading it! That one book made be a book fanatic for life.
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