100 Books (mostly FICTION)

The non-fiction choice, Book 101, is ‘The magnificent Mrs Tennant by David Waller’.

Having kept a diary since my early teens in which I recorded what I was reading (including school text books), I have an extraordinary insight into what was being put in front of my mind. What I find remarkable is how, if courtesty of the Internet and Ebay I dig out these books how quickly my mind can pick up where it left off 30+ years ago. This ‘window’ is a short one, at this level. In a few years I abandoned the set format of the ‘Five Year Diary’ with its specific pages to complete. On the other hand, are there not blog and social media platforms that go out of their way to encourage you to reveal something of yourself through what you read, watch and do?

This list is fluid and understandably incomplete. I have not put in Dan Brown’s ‘Da Vinci’ for example, as I feel it would have to come with a caveat – I read it to find out what the fuss was about. I felt as if I’d been made to play a game of snakes and ladders through an alternative and ridiculous world. It may also have put me off ever believing I could compete as a commercial author if this is what it requires. My excuse might be quaified by the French Movie Director Francois Truffaut who argued that you had to read everything, especially the ‘trash mags’ – indeed, the trashier the book the easier it is to turn into a film?

What attracts us to lists?

I should create a list of the books I’ve tried to read but could not: Ulysseys, War and Peace, Enid Blyton … any other Dan Brown! (Actually, Michael Crichton, even Stephen King, can be as daft and crass).

I see too there are still a few non-fiction works in here; I’ll filter these out in due course as I build my 100 Non-Fiction list.

I am also electing to leave out books that had to be read at school, so I ought not to have Thomas Hardy, T S Elliot or Shakespeare. Nor do I include a book if all I’ve done is see the film, which is how I suspect the ‘popular’ lists compiled by the likes of the BBC are created.

As an exercise, you make a list and immediately start to change it, indeed, I’ve just thought of a very important piece of ficton I read based on recommendation; these often turn out to be the best reads, from people who know you. All my reading of Haruki Murakimi is the product of being part of a writer’s group for a while.

As I edit I will be seeking to keep books in that matter to me, that I could discuss and defend and that I’d like others to read.

Some choices are informed by a friend who read English at Oxford; others from the Guardian’s ‘Thousands Books’ you must read before you die, which, where the library could supply them I would follow, though often having to read something else by the same author (or getting distracted by something else on the shelf).

I will also extract children’s books, those I recall reading as a child, but also those I have read to my children.

Now I’m starting to sound like a bookstore 😦

1  Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3 Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller

4 Foundation Series – Isaac Asimov

5 Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel  Proust

6 Tides of War  – Steven Pressfield

7 Gates of War – Steven Pressfield

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9 Return to Arms – Ernest Hemmingway

10 Fatherland – Robert Harris

11 The  Naked and the Dead – Norman Mailer

12 Harlot’s Ghost – Norman Mailer

13 The Executioner’s Song – Norman Mailer

14 Engelby – Sebastian Faulk

15 The Birds and other stories – Daphne Du  Maurrier

16 Sunset Song – Lewis Grassick Gibbon

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk

18 Regeneration Series – Pat Barker

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Life Drawing – Pat Barker

21 One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch – Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

23 The Gulgag Archipelago- Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26 Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams

29 Vox – Nicholas Baker

30 The Decameron – Giovanni Boccaccio

31 How the  Dead Live – Will Self

32 Time Enough for Love – Robert Heinlein

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 The Foundation of Paradise – Arthur.C.Clarke

35 Enigma – Robert Harris

36 The Ghost – Robert Harris

37 Pompeii – Robert Harris

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres

39 Orlando – Virginia Woolf

40 Girl in a Coma – Douglas Coupland

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Space Trilogy series – C .S.Lewis

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque

45 A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf

46 The Wind-up Bird Chronicles – Haruki Murakami

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 The Time Machine – H.G.Wells

52The War of the Worlds – H.G.Wells

53 The Invisible Man – H.G.Wells

54 Tono-Bungay – H.G.Wells

55 The Last Kingdom – Bernard Cornwell

56 The Lords of the North – Bernard Cornwell

57 The Island – Victoria Hislop

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 The Lost Continent. Travels in small town America – Bill Bryson

61 Mother Tongue – Bill Bryson

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce

65 Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh

66 Tropic of Capricorn – Henry Miller

67 Sexus, Plexus & Nexus – Henry Miller

68 Quiet Days in Clichy – Henry Miller

69 The Crimson Petal and The White – Michel Faber

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Under a Glass Bell – Anais Nin

72 House of Incest – Anais Nin

73 The Diary of Anais Nin (7 volumes) – Anais Nin

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson.

75 Boy – Roald Dahl

76 The Hungry Caterpillar – Eric Carle

77 State of Fear – Michael Crichton

78  The Last Juror – John Grisham

79 A Painted House – John Grisham

80 The Testament – John Grisham

81 A Time to Kill – John Grisham

82 Duma Key – Stephen King

83 Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel

84 Stranger in Strange Land – Robert Heinlein

85 Going Solo – Roald Dahl

86 Crash – J.G.Ballard

87 Timeline – Stephen King

88 Super-Cannes – J.G.Ballard

89 Atomised – Michel Houellbecq

90 Platform – Michel Houellbecq

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 Steve Jobs: The Authorised Biography – Walter Isaacson

93 The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95  Macbeth – William Shakespeare

96 I, Claudius – Robert Graves

97 Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl.

100 Where the Wild Things Are – Maurice Sandak