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, James 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, Patrick Hamilton
21. City of Bohane, Kevin Barry
22. Eye of the Needle, Ken Follett
23. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
24. His Dark 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 The 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, Harper Lee
49. V for Vendetta, Alan Moore & David Lloyd
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, 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 was sure i'd already read 'Remains of the Day' but was such a joy to read again. really ought to buy a copy

read 55/ to read 45

Cloudstreet was very good, after a slow start, more a 4.5/5

read 59/ to read 41

Fugitive Pieces tackles some difficult subjects and the language is beautiful (not surprised the author is a poet) just some pieces don't quite fit together

read 66/ to read 34

now three quarters through
read 75/ to read 25
though some will be hard to track down