raju
28-08-2010, 04:55 PM
1. Don Quixote
Miguel De Cervantes
The story of the gentle knight and his servant Sancho Panza has entranced readers for centuries.
2. Pilgrim's Progress
John Bunyan
The one with the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair.
3. Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe
The first English novel.
4. Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift
A wonderful satire that still works for all ages, despite the savagery of Swift's vision.
5. Tom Jones
Henry Fielding
The adventures of a high-spirited orphan boy: an unbeatable plot and a lot of sex ending in a blissful marriage.
6. Clarissa
Samuel Richardson
One of the longest novels in the English language, but unputdownable.
7. Tristram Shandy
Laurence Sterne
One of the first bestsellers, dismissed by Dr Johnson as too fashionable for its own good.
8. Dangerous Liaisons
Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
An epistolary novel and a handbook for seducers: foppish, French, and ferocious.
9. Emma
Jane Austen
Near impossible choice between this and Pride and Prejudice. But Emma never fails to fascinate and annoy.
10. Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
Inspired by spending too much time with Shelley and Byron.
11. Nightmare Abbey
Thomas Love Peacock
A classic miniature: a brilliant satire on the Romantic novel.
12. The Black Sheep
Honore De Balzac
Two rivals fight for the love of a femme fatale. Wrongly overlooked.
13. The Charterhouse of Parma
Stendhal
Penetrating and compelling chronicle of life in an Italian court in post-Napoleonic France.
14. The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
A revenge thriller also set in France after Bonaparte: a masterpiece of adventure writing.
15. Sybil
Benjamin Disraeli
Apart from Churchill, no other British political figure shows literary genius.
16. David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
This highly autobiographical novel is the one its author liked best.
17. Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff have passed into the language. Impossible to ignore.
18. Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
Obsessive emotional grip and haunting narrative.
19. Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
The improving tale of Becky Sharp.
20. The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A classic investigation of the American mind.
21. Moby-Dick
Herman Melville
'Call me Ishmael' is one of the most famous opening sentences of any novel.
22. Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
You could summarise this as a story of adultery in provincial France, and miss the point entirely.
23. The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins
Gripping mystery novel of concealed identity, abduction, fraud and mental cruelty.
24. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
A story written for the nine-year-old daughter of an Oxford don that still baffles most kids.
25. Little Women
Louisa M. Alcott
Victorian bestseller about a New England family of girls.
26. The Way We Live Now
Anthony Trollope
A majestic assault on the corruption of late Victorian England.
27. Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
The supreme novel of the married woman's passion for a younger man.
28. Daniel Deronda
George Eliot
A passion and an exotic grandeur that is strange and unsettling.
29. The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Mystical tragedy by the author of Crime and Punishment.
30. The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James
The story of Isabel Archer shows James at his witty and polished best.
31. Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
Twain was a humorist, but this picture of Mississippi life is profoundly moral and still incredibly influential.
32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
A brilliantly suggestive, resonant study of human duality by a natural storyteller.
33. Three Men in a Boat
Jerome K. Jerome
One of the funniest English books ever written.
34. The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
A coded and epigrammatic melodrama inspired by his own tortured homosexuality.
35. The Diary of a Nobody
George Grossmith
This classic of Victorian suburbia will always be renowned for the character of Mr Pooter.
36. Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy
Its savage bleakness makes it one of the first twentieth-century novels.
37. The Riddle of the Sands
Erskine Childers
A prewar invasion-scare spy thriller by a writer later shot for his part in the Irish republican rising.
38. The Call of the Wild
Jack London
The story of a dog who joins a pack of wolves after his master's death.
39. Nostromo
Joseph Conrad
Conrad's masterpiece: a tale of money, love and revolutionary politics.
40. The Wind in the Willows
Kenneth Grahame
This children's classic was inspired by bedtime stories for Grahame's son.
41. In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust
An unforgettable portrait of Paris in the belle epoque. Probably the longest novel on this list.
42. The Rainbow
D. H. Lawrence
Novels seized by the police, like this one, have a special afterlife.
43. The Good Soldier
Ford Madox Ford
This account of the adulterous lives of two Edwardian couples is a classic of unreliable narration.
44. The Thirty-Nine Steps
John Buchan
A classic adventure story for boys, jammed with action, violence and suspense.
45. Ulysses
James Joyce
Also pursued by the British police, this is a novel more discussed than read.
46. Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
Secures Woolf's position as one of the great twentieth-century English novelists.
47. A Passage to India
E. M. Forster
The great novel of the British Raj, it remains a brilliant study of empire.
48. The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The quintessential Jazz Age novel.
49. The Trial
Franz Kafka
The enigmatic story of Joseph K.
50. Men Without Women
Ernest Hemingway
He is remembered for his novels, but it was the short stories that first attracted notice.
51. Journey to the End of the Night
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
The experiences of an unattractive slum doctor during the Great War: a masterpiece of linguistic innovation.
52. As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner
A strange black comedy by an American master.
53. Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
Dystopian fantasy about the world of the seventh century AF (after Ford).
54. Scoop
Evelyn Waugh
The supreme Fleet Street novel
55. USA
John Dos Passos
An extraordinary trilogy that uses a variety of narrative devices to express the story of America.
56. The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler
Introducing Philip Marlowe: cool, sharp, handsome - and bitterly alone.
57. The Pursuit Of Love
Nancy Mitford
An exquisite comedy of manners with countless fans.
58. The Plague
Albert Camus
A mysterious plague sweeps through the Algerian town of Oran.
59. Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell
This tale of one man's struggle against totalitarianism has been appropriated the world over.
60. Malone Dies
Samuel Beckett
Part of a trilogy of astonishing monologues in the black comic voice of the author of Waiting for Godot.
61. Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
A week in the life of Holden Caulfield. A cult novel that still mesmerises.
62. Wise Blood
Flannery O'Connor
A disturbing novel of religious extremism set in the Deep South.
63. Charlotte's Web
E. B. White
How Wilbur the pig was saved by the literary genius of a friendly spider.
64. The Lord Of The Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien
Enough said!
65. Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis
An astonishing debut: the painfully funny English novel of the Fifties.
66. Lord of the Flies
William Golding
Schoolboys become savages: a bleak vision of human nature.
67. The Quiet American
Graham Greene
Prophetic novel set in 1950s Vietnam.
68. On the Road
Jack Kerouac
The Beat Generation bible.
69. Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
Humbert Humbert's obsession with Lolita is a tour de force of style and narrative.
70. The Tin Drum
Günter Grass
Hugely influential, Rabelaisian novel of Hitler's Germany.
71. Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
Nigeria at the beginning of colonialism. A classic of African literature.
72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark
A writer who made her debut in The Observer - and her prose is like cut glass.
73. To Kill A Mockingbird
Harper Lee
Scout, a six-year-old girl, narrates an enthralling story of racial prejudice in the Deep South.
74. Catch-22
Joseph Heller
'[He] would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.'
75. Herzog
Saul Bellow
Adultery and nervous breakdown in Chicago.
Miguel De Cervantes
The story of the gentle knight and his servant Sancho Panza has entranced readers for centuries.
2. Pilgrim's Progress
John Bunyan
The one with the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair.
3. Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe
The first English novel.
4. Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift
A wonderful satire that still works for all ages, despite the savagery of Swift's vision.
5. Tom Jones
Henry Fielding
The adventures of a high-spirited orphan boy: an unbeatable plot and a lot of sex ending in a blissful marriage.
6. Clarissa
Samuel Richardson
One of the longest novels in the English language, but unputdownable.
7. Tristram Shandy
Laurence Sterne
One of the first bestsellers, dismissed by Dr Johnson as too fashionable for its own good.
8. Dangerous Liaisons
Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
An epistolary novel and a handbook for seducers: foppish, French, and ferocious.
9. Emma
Jane Austen
Near impossible choice between this and Pride and Prejudice. But Emma never fails to fascinate and annoy.
10. Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
Inspired by spending too much time with Shelley and Byron.
11. Nightmare Abbey
Thomas Love Peacock
A classic miniature: a brilliant satire on the Romantic novel.
12. The Black Sheep
Honore De Balzac
Two rivals fight for the love of a femme fatale. Wrongly overlooked.
13. The Charterhouse of Parma
Stendhal
Penetrating and compelling chronicle of life in an Italian court in post-Napoleonic France.
14. The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
A revenge thriller also set in France after Bonaparte: a masterpiece of adventure writing.
15. Sybil
Benjamin Disraeli
Apart from Churchill, no other British political figure shows literary genius.
16. David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
This highly autobiographical novel is the one its author liked best.
17. Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff have passed into the language. Impossible to ignore.
18. Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
Obsessive emotional grip and haunting narrative.
19. Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
The improving tale of Becky Sharp.
20. The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A classic investigation of the American mind.
21. Moby-Dick
Herman Melville
'Call me Ishmael' is one of the most famous opening sentences of any novel.
22. Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
You could summarise this as a story of adultery in provincial France, and miss the point entirely.
23. The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins
Gripping mystery novel of concealed identity, abduction, fraud and mental cruelty.
24. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
A story written for the nine-year-old daughter of an Oxford don that still baffles most kids.
25. Little Women
Louisa M. Alcott
Victorian bestseller about a New England family of girls.
26. The Way We Live Now
Anthony Trollope
A majestic assault on the corruption of late Victorian England.
27. Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
The supreme novel of the married woman's passion for a younger man.
28. Daniel Deronda
George Eliot
A passion and an exotic grandeur that is strange and unsettling.
29. The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Mystical tragedy by the author of Crime and Punishment.
30. The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James
The story of Isabel Archer shows James at his witty and polished best.
31. Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
Twain was a humorist, but this picture of Mississippi life is profoundly moral and still incredibly influential.
32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
A brilliantly suggestive, resonant study of human duality by a natural storyteller.
33. Three Men in a Boat
Jerome K. Jerome
One of the funniest English books ever written.
34. The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
A coded and epigrammatic melodrama inspired by his own tortured homosexuality.
35. The Diary of a Nobody
George Grossmith
This classic of Victorian suburbia will always be renowned for the character of Mr Pooter.
36. Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy
Its savage bleakness makes it one of the first twentieth-century novels.
37. The Riddle of the Sands
Erskine Childers
A prewar invasion-scare spy thriller by a writer later shot for his part in the Irish republican rising.
38. The Call of the Wild
Jack London
The story of a dog who joins a pack of wolves after his master's death.
39. Nostromo
Joseph Conrad
Conrad's masterpiece: a tale of money, love and revolutionary politics.
40. The Wind in the Willows
Kenneth Grahame
This children's classic was inspired by bedtime stories for Grahame's son.
41. In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust
An unforgettable portrait of Paris in the belle epoque. Probably the longest novel on this list.
42. The Rainbow
D. H. Lawrence
Novels seized by the police, like this one, have a special afterlife.
43. The Good Soldier
Ford Madox Ford
This account of the adulterous lives of two Edwardian couples is a classic of unreliable narration.
44. The Thirty-Nine Steps
John Buchan
A classic adventure story for boys, jammed with action, violence and suspense.
45. Ulysses
James Joyce
Also pursued by the British police, this is a novel more discussed than read.
46. Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
Secures Woolf's position as one of the great twentieth-century English novelists.
47. A Passage to India
E. M. Forster
The great novel of the British Raj, it remains a brilliant study of empire.
48. The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The quintessential Jazz Age novel.
49. The Trial
Franz Kafka
The enigmatic story of Joseph K.
50. Men Without Women
Ernest Hemingway
He is remembered for his novels, but it was the short stories that first attracted notice.
51. Journey to the End of the Night
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
The experiences of an unattractive slum doctor during the Great War: a masterpiece of linguistic innovation.
52. As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner
A strange black comedy by an American master.
53. Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
Dystopian fantasy about the world of the seventh century AF (after Ford).
54. Scoop
Evelyn Waugh
The supreme Fleet Street novel
55. USA
John Dos Passos
An extraordinary trilogy that uses a variety of narrative devices to express the story of America.
56. The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler
Introducing Philip Marlowe: cool, sharp, handsome - and bitterly alone.
57. The Pursuit Of Love
Nancy Mitford
An exquisite comedy of manners with countless fans.
58. The Plague
Albert Camus
A mysterious plague sweeps through the Algerian town of Oran.
59. Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell
This tale of one man's struggle against totalitarianism has been appropriated the world over.
60. Malone Dies
Samuel Beckett
Part of a trilogy of astonishing monologues in the black comic voice of the author of Waiting for Godot.
61. Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
A week in the life of Holden Caulfield. A cult novel that still mesmerises.
62. Wise Blood
Flannery O'Connor
A disturbing novel of religious extremism set in the Deep South.
63. Charlotte's Web
E. B. White
How Wilbur the pig was saved by the literary genius of a friendly spider.
64. The Lord Of The Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien
Enough said!
65. Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis
An astonishing debut: the painfully funny English novel of the Fifties.
66. Lord of the Flies
William Golding
Schoolboys become savages: a bleak vision of human nature.
67. The Quiet American
Graham Greene
Prophetic novel set in 1950s Vietnam.
68. On the Road
Jack Kerouac
The Beat Generation bible.
69. Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
Humbert Humbert's obsession with Lolita is a tour de force of style and narrative.
70. The Tin Drum
Günter Grass
Hugely influential, Rabelaisian novel of Hitler's Germany.
71. Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
Nigeria at the beginning of colonialism. A classic of African literature.
72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark
A writer who made her debut in The Observer - and her prose is like cut glass.
73. To Kill A Mockingbird
Harper Lee
Scout, a six-year-old girl, narrates an enthralling story of racial prejudice in the Deep South.
74. Catch-22
Joseph Heller
'[He] would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.'
75. Herzog
Saul Bellow
Adultery and nervous breakdown in Chicago.