BBC Top 100 discussion

1. Beloved, Toni Morrison
2. Days Without End, Sebastian Barry
3. Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels
4. Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
5. Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
6. Small Island, Andrea Levy
7. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
8. The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
9. Things Fall Part, Chinua Achebe
10. White Teeth, Zadie Smith
11. Bridget Jones’ Diary, Helen Fielding
12. Forever…, Judy Blume
13. Giovanni’s Room, Hames Baldwin
14. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
15. Riders, Jilly Cooper
16. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
17. The Far Pavilions, M.M. Kaye
18. The Forty Rules of Love, Elif Shafak
19. The Passion, Jeanette Winterson
20. The Slaves of Solitude, Patric Hamilton
21. City of Bohane, Kevin Barry
22. Eye of the Needle, Ken Follett
23. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
24. His Dar Materials Trilogy, Philip Pullman
25. Ivanhoe, Walter Scott
26. Mr Standfast, John Buchan
27. The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
28. The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
29. The Jack Aubrey Novels, Patrick O’Brian
30. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
31. A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin
32. Astonishing Gods, Ben Okri
33. Dune, Frank Herbert
34. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
35. Gilead, Marilynn Robinson
36. The Chronicles of Narnia
37. The Discworld Series, Terry Pratchett
38. The Earthsea Trilogy, Ursula K. Le Guin
39. The Sandman Series, Neil Gaiman
40. The Road, Cormac McCarthy
41. A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini
42. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
43. Home Fire, Kamila Shamsi
44. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
45. Noughts and Crosses, Malorie Blackman
46. Strumpet City, James Plunkett
47. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
48. To Kill A Mockingbird
49. V for Vendetta, Alan Moore
50. Unless, Carol Shields
51. A House for Mr Biswas, V.S. Naipaul
52. Cannery Row, John Steinbeck
53. Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee
54. Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens
55. Poor Cow, Nell Dunn
56. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Alan Sillitoe
57. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Brian Moore
58. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
59. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
60. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
61. Emily of New Moon, L.M. Montgomery
62. Golden Child, Claire Adam
63. Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
64. So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell
65. Swami and Friends, R.K. Narayan
66. The Country Girls, Edna O’Brien
67. Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling
68. The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton
69. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, Sue Townsend
70. The Twilight Saga, Stephenie Meyer
71. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
72. Ballet Shoes, Noel Streatfeild
73. Cloudstreet, Tim Winton
74. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
75. I capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
76. Middlemarch, George Eliot
77. Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin
78. The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
79. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte
80. The Witches, Roald Dahl
81. American Tabloid, James Ellroy
82. American War, Omar El Akkad
83. Ice Candy Man, Bapsi Sidhwa
84. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
85. Regeneration, Pat Barker
86. The Children of Men, P.D. James
87. The Hound of Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle
88. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid
89. The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith
90. The Quiet American, Graham Greene
91. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
92. Bartleby, the Scrivener, Herman Melville
93. Habibi, Craig Thompson
94. How to Be Both, Ali Smith
95. Orlando, Virginia Woolf
96. Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter
97. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
98. Psmith, Journalist, P.G. Wodehouse
99. The Moor’s Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie
100. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Audre Lorde

I've requested
91. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

i finally read Beloved last week, after abandoning it a couple of years ago, and glad to have given it another go. only read 40 of these (not finished Discworld series quite yet).

Gormenghast is a super dry read for me.

Finished
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake

Starting
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

i didn't read the others in the Peake series, there were parts which i liked but overall found it a hard read, unlike Toole which was very funny if a bit gross at times. you're nearly there, just 2 books to go!

Started 91. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole this morning.

I just finished

95. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

Thank god! I found it very hard to get through it. Main character reminded me of certain people in my life, vulgar individuals who no respect for anyone or anything and always made excuses for both his failures and his lack of drive. I don't see how it won a Pulitzer Prize over So Long, See You Tomorrow. I read somewhere that it won because it has been cited as the most accurate literary representation of Yat. I believe that it has reached cult status much in the same way that The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy did. What I didn't realize is that the book was published some 12 years after the author's loss in the battle against depression.

The title was derived from a quote by Jonathan Swift: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”

As my reward for persevering, I'm going to read the next book in the Wheel of Time series: The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan