An old ambition was to read The Telegraph's '100 Novels Everyone Should Read' list (now behind a paywall).
- 100
The Lord of the Ringsby JRR Tolkein - 99
To Kill a Mockingbirdby Harper Lee - 98
The Home and the Worldby Rabindranath Tagore - 97
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxyby Douglas Adams - 96
One Thousand and One NightsAnon - 95
The Sorrows of Young Wertherby Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - 94
Midnight’s Childrenby Salman Rushdie - 93
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spyby John le Carré - 92
Cold Comfort Farmby Stella Gibbons - 91
The Tale of Genjiby Lady Murasaki - 90
Under the Netby Iris Murdoch - 89
The Golden Notebookby Doris Lessing - 88
Eugene Oneginby Alexander Pushkin - 87 On the Road by Jack Kerouac
- 86
Old Goriotby Honoré de Balzac - 85 The Red and the Black by Stendhal
- 84 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
- 83 Germinal by Emile Zola
- 82 The Stranger by Albert Camus
- 81 The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
- 80 Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
- 79 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
- 78 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
- 77 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- 76 The Trial by Franz Kafka
- 75 Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
- 74 Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan
- 73 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque
- 72 Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
- 71 The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
- 70 The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
- 69 If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
- 68
Crashby JG Ballard - 67 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul
- 66 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- 65 Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
- 64 The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
- 63 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
- 62 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
- 61 My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk
- 60 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
- 59 London Fields by Martin Amis
- 58 The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
- 57 The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
- 56 The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
- 55 Austerlitz by WG Sebald
- 54 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- 53 The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
- 52 The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
- 51 Underworld by Don DeLillo
- 50 Beloved by Toni Morrison
- 49
The Grapes of Wrathby John Steinbeck - 48 Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
- 47 The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
- 46 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
- 45 The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet
- 44 Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
- 43 The Rabbit books by John Updike
- 42 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- 41 The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
- 40 The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
- 39 Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
- 38
The Great Gatsbyby F Scott Fitzgerald - 37 The Warden by Anthony Trollope
- 36 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
- 35 Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
- 34 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
- 33 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
- 32 A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
- 31 Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky
- 30 Atonement by Ian McEwan
- 29 Life: a User’s Manual by Georges Perec
- 28 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
- 27 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- 26 Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
- 25 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
- 24 Ulysses by James Joyce
- 23 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- 22 A Passage to India by EM Forster
- 21 1984 by George Orwell
- 20 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
- 19 The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
- 18 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
- 17 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
- 16 Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
- 15 The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse
- 14 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
- 13 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
- 12 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
- 11 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- 10 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
- 9 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
- 8 Disgrace by JM Coetzee
- 7 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
- 6 In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
- 5 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- 4 The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
- 3 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- 2 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
- 1 Middlemarch by George Eliot