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The World Book Night top 100 books to read, give and share

An image of the front cover of the Pullitzer Prize winning book, To Kill A MockingbirdThe folks over at World Book Night – www.worldbooknight.org – asked readers to nominate the 10 books they most love to read, give and share. Over 6,000 people nominated more than 8,000 titles and the top 100 are displayed below.

I am pleased to say that I have read 22 of the listed titles and have many others on my shelves ready to read. I was shocked to realise that I still haven’t read Dune, The Lovely Bones and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle despite having owned them for so long – this must be remedied.

I was also pleased to see Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell on there. As you can see from the reader reviews on this site not all were as smitten by it as me but I still think it is one of the best books I have read over the past decade (not for the casual reader though).

I would happily read every book on this list:

  1. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
  2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
  3. The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
  4. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
  5. The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
  6. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
  7. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
  8. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
  9. Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
  10. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
  11. American Gods, Neil Gaiman
  12. A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini
  13. Harry Potter Adult Hardback Boxed Set, JK Rowling
  14. The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon
  15. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
  16. One Day, David Nicholls
  17. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
  18. The Help, Kathryn Stockett
  19. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
  20. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
  21. The Notebook, Nicholas Sparks
  22. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
  23. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
  24. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  25. Little Women, Louisa M. Alcott
  26. Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
  27. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
  28. Atonement, Ian McEwan
  29. Room, Emma Donoghue
  30. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
  31. We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver
  32. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
  33. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis De Bernieres
  34. The Island, Victoria Hislop
  35. Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman
  36. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
  37. The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
  38. Chocolat, Joanne Harris
  39. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
  40. The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom
  41. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  42. Animal Farm, George Orwell
  43. The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett
  44. The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde
  45. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
  46. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
  47. I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
  48. The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
  49. Life of Pi, Yann Martel
  50. The Road, Cormac McCarthy
  51. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
  52. Dracula, Bram Stoker
  53. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
  54. Small Island, Andrea Levy
  55. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
  56. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
  57. Persuasion, Jane Austen
  58. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
  59. Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson
  60. Watership Down, Richard Adams
  61. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
  62. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
  63. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon
  64. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
  65. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
  66. My Sister’s Keeper, Jodi Picoult
  67. The Stand, Stephen King
  68. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
  69. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
  70. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
  71. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
  72. Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
  73. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer
  74. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
  75. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
  76. The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman
  77. The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
  78. The Princess Bride, William Goldman
  79. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
  80. Perfume, Patrick Suskind
  81. The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
  82. The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
  83. Middlemarch, George Eliot
  84. Dune, Frank Herbert
  85. Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
  86. Stardust, Neil Gaiman
  87. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
  88. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
  89. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling
  90. Shantaram, Gregory David Roberts
  91. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
  92. Possession: A Romance, A. S. Byatt
  93. Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin
  94. Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
  95. The Magus, John Fowles
  96. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, John Boyne
  97. A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
  98. Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood
  99. Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami
  100. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

Comments

Ryan Lawler
September 14th, 2011

If you haven’t read The Book Thief by Markus Zusak then you are really doing yourself a disservice. He is a fantastic new Australian author and I am very happy to see it so far up on the list. Also good to see a good balance of genres and literary fiction on the list.

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