My List of Top 100 Books 

This includes some that are on everyone else's Top 100 Lists and that I should really get around to reading sometime, plus a heap of others that I think people should read. The list is definitely not, perhaps, as high-brow as others around - but you can check out the Guardian's Top 100 list and university graduate literature programmes for more along those lines.  I have hacked pretty ruthlessly at times, so as to be able to include a short SF/Fantasy section.

Fiction

1.                  Richard Adams.  Watership Down

2.                  Anon.  Beowulf  (Seamus Heaney Translation)

3.                  Margaret Atwood.  The Handmaid’s Tale

4.                  Jane Austen.  Persuasion

5.                  Beryl Bainbridge.  A Very Big Adventure

6.                  J G Ballard.  Empire of the Sun

7.                  Pat Barker.  The Regeneration Trilogy

8.                  Charlotte Bronte.  Jane Eyre

9.                  Rita Mae Brown.  Rubyfruit Jungle

10.              Anthony Burgess.  A Clockwork Orange

11.              Willa Cather.  My Antonia

12.              Cervantes.  Don Quixote

13.              Joseph Conrad.  Heart of Darkness

14.              Daniel Defoe.  Moll Flanders

15.              Charles Dickens.  Great Expectations

16.              Isak Dinesen.  Out of Africa

17.              Fedor Dostoyevsky.  Crime and Punishment

18.              George Eliot.  Middlemarch

19.              William Faulkner.  The Sound and the Fury

20.              F Scott Fitzgerald.  The Great Gatsby

21.              E M Forster.  A Room With a View

22.              Janet Frame.  Owls Do Cry

23.              Stella Gibbons.  Cold Comfort Farm

24.              David Gutterson.  Snow Falling on Cedars

25.              Thomas Hardy.  The Mayor of Casterbridge

26.              Ernest Hemingway.  A Farewell to Arms

27.              Keri Hulme.  The Bone People

28.              Zora Neale Hurston.  Their Eyes Were Watching God

29.              Aldous Huxley.  Brave New World

30.              Henry James.  The Wings of a Dove

31.              Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.  Heat and Dust

32.              James Joyce.  Ulysses

33.              Thomas Keneally.  Schindler’s List

34.              Ken Kesey.  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

35.              Barbara Kingsolver.  The Poisonwood Bible

36.              Giuseppe di Lampedusa.  Il Leopardo

37.              D H Lawrence.  Lady Chatterley’s Lover

38.              Harper Lee.  To Kill A Mockingbird

39.              Jack London.  The Call of the Wild

40.              Anita Loos.  Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

41.              Olivia Manning.   The Balkan Trilogy

42.              Gabriel Garcia Marquez.   Love in the Time of Cholera

43.              Henry Miller.  Tropic of Cancer

44.              John Milton.  Paradise Lost

45.              Nancy Mitford.  Love in a Cold Climate/In Pursuit of Love

46.              Toni Morrison.  Beloved

47.              Alice Munro.  Lives of Girls and Women

48.              Haruki Murakami.  The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

49.              Iris Murdoch.  The Sea, The Sea

50.              George Orwell.  Animal Farm

51.              Dorothy Parker.  Stories

52.              Sylvia Plath.  The Bell Jar

53.              E Annie Proulx.  The Shipping News

54.              Salman Rushdie.  Midnight’s Children

55.              J D Salinger.  Catcher in the Rye

56.              Vikram Seth.  A Suitable Boy

57.              Mary Shelley.  Frankenstein

58.              Anita Shreve.  The Weight of Water

59.              Jane Smiley.  Moo

60.              Muriel Spark.  The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

61.              John Steinbeck.  The Grapes of Wrath

62.              Jonathon Swift.  Gulliver’s Travels

63.              William Thackeray.  Vanity Fair

64.              Anthony Trollope.  Barchester Towers

65.              Jane Urquhart.  Away

66.              Kurt Vonnegut.  Slaughterhouse Five

67.              Alice Walker.  The Color Purple

68.              H G Wells.  War of the Worlds

69.              Edith Wharton.  The Age of Innocence

70.              Antonia White.  Frost in May

71.             Tim Winton.  Cloudstreet

72.              Tom Wolfe.  Bonfire of the Vanities

73.              Virginia Woolf.  To the Lighthouse

Science Fiction and Fantasy

74.              William Gibson.  Neuromancer

75.              Frank Herbert.  Dune

76.              Vonda McIntyre.  Dreamsnake

77.              Robin McKinley.  The Blue Sword

78.              J R R Tolkein.  The Lord of the Rings (The Fellowship of the Ring; The Two Towers; The Return of the King)

79.              Connie Willis.  The Doomsday Book

Non Fiction

80.              Charles Darwin.  The Origin of Species

81.              Richard Dawkins.  The Blind Watchmaker

82.              Jared Diamond.  Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies

83.              David Landes.  The Wealth and Poverty of Nations

84.              Matt Ridley.  The Origins of Virtue

85.              Simon Singh.  The Code Book

Autobiography/Biography

86.              Andrea Ashworth.  Once in a House on Fire

87.              Janet Frame.  To the Is-land/An Angel At My Table/ Envoy From Mirror City

88.              Ian Kershaw.  Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis

89.              Primo Levi.  If This Is A Man/The Truce

90.              James McBride.  The Color of Water

Children’s Books

91.              Frances Hodgson Burnett.  The Secret Garden

92.              Kenneth Grahame.  The Wind in the Willows

93.              Rudyard Kipling.  Just So Stories

94.              Madeleine L’Engle.  The Time Quartet

95.              A A Milne.  Winnie the Pooh

96.              E B White.  Charlotte’s Web

Plays 

97.              Arthur Miller.  The Crucible

98.              William Shakespeare.  Hamlet

99.              William Shakespeare.  The Taming of the Shrew

100.          Oscar Wilde.  The Importance of Being Ernest