100 Books I have to read ...

Revisiting my 100 books list. I have been making progress. I have read far more books than the list implies, because this list is merely a guideline. I am inclined to make another, which shows all the other books that have caught my interest since making this list two years ago. It has been a great way to find some new favourites. Wally Lamb and Margaret Atwood spring to mind as two authors I had not really broached, but now read avidly. The Bookfest is coming up soon, and that always is a great spree!

For my 100th post celebration I have decided to branch out a little from the traditional '100 things about me' posts. Instead I have been working on a list of books I really want to read. This is not a finite list, obviously, and there are other books that I will be reading simply because I have them! The list is composed of books that I have always wanted to read, and books that have been recommended to me from various sources. Some of them are already sitting on my shelves (lucky me!), and I will mark them with an *.


1. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

2. Candide - Voltaire

3. White Oleander - Janet Fitch

4. I Know This Much is True - Wally Lamb*

5. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood*

6. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez*

7. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John LeCarre

8. She's Come Undone - Wally Lamb

9. The Inferno - Dante

10. The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer

11. Paradise Lost - John Milton

12. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackery

13. Tess of the D'Urbevilles - Thomas Hardy

14. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James*

15. Bleak House - Charles Dickens

16. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald*

17. Sons and Lovers - D. H. Lawrence *

18. The Power and the Glory - Grahame Greene

19. Decline and Fall - Evelyn Waugh

20. Scoop - Evelyn Waugh

21. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh*

22. The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger

23. Madame Bovary - Gustaye Flaubert *

24. The Plague - Albert Camus

25. Middlemarch - George Elliot*

26. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky

27. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez *

28. The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton

29. Beloved - Toni Morrison*

30. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

31. Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

32. The Shell Seekers - Rosamunde Pilcher

33. Anne of Green Gables - L. M. Montgomery*

34. Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier

35. Swallows And Amazons - Arthur Ransome

36. Ulysses - James Joyce

37. The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner

38. A Passage to India - E. M. Forster

39. A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemmingway

40. The Old Wives' Tale - Arnold Bennett

41. The Epic of Gilgamesh - Maureen Gallery Kovacs

42. Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf*

43. Memoirs of Hadrian - Marguerite Yourcenar

44. The Pilot's Wife - Anita Shreve*

45. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini *

46. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes

47. Walden - Henry David Thoreau*

48. Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

49. Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde*

50. Journal of the Plague Year - Daniel Dafoe *

51. The Color Purple - Alice Walker

52. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

53. Hornblower - C. S. Forester*

54. The Forsyte Saga - John Galsworthy *

55. The Warden - Anthony Trollope

56. Barchester Towers - Anthony Trollope

57. Like Water For Chocolate - Laura Esquivel

58. The Tale of Genji - Lady Murasaki

59. Feast - Nigella Lawson

60. How to be a Domestic Goddess - Nigella Lawson*

61. Cook With Jamie - Jamie Oliver*

62. The Writer's Book of Hope: Getting from Frustration to Publication - Ralph Keyes

63. The Secret River - Kate Grenville*

64. My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult

65. Everyday - Bill Granger

66. The Memory Keeper's Daughter - Kim Edwards

67. The Sixth Wife - Suzannah Dunn

68. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver*

69. A Perfect Day - Richard Evans

70. The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings - Amy Tan

71. The Sacrifice - Beverly Lewis

72. The Emperor's Children - Claire Messud

73. Birdsong - Sebastion Faulks

74. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

75. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Graham (read years ago, but want to reread)

76. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

77. The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho

78. The Life of Pi - Yann Martel

79. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

80. The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus - Margaret Atwood*

81. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers

82. I, Claudius - Robert Graves

83. In a Sunburned Country - Bill Bryson

84. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling - Henry Fielding*

85. Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe

86. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

87. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

88. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou

89. Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut

90. Aspects of the Novel - E. M. Forster

91. Reading Like a Writer: A Guide For People who love Books and for those who want to write them - Francine Prose*

92. On Becoming a Novelist - John Gardiner

93. Clarissa - Samuel Richardson

94. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne

95. Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome

96. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

97. The Quiet American - Graham Greene

98. Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson

99. Lanark - Alasdair Gray

100. Oscar and Lucinde - Peter Carey

Here I am, a whole day after I started this post. I have read more book reviews than I thought possible and perused more top 100 lists than I dreamed of. I love books with a passion, but found this list a struggle, because I was avoiding books that I have already read, and trying not to list books that I just wasn't interested in.

If you're one of those people who is obligated to buy me a gift from time to time this would be a brilliant place to start ;)