How do you select your next book? Do you ask a friend, go to Amazon’s ‘Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…’, look at a top 100 list or simply brows books stores? I, like most people have done all of the above.
In order to better organize my reading, I have just completed my master list using 34 Top 100 or must read lists. I was able to compile all 13307 books and rank them.
How did I rank them? I used two numbers. First, I used the number of lists that a book was on. So if a book was on 8 lists it was automatically hither than a book that was on 7 lists. Secondly, all the books that are on the same number of lists were ranked by the placements on those lists. If a book was ranked number 1 on a list, I gave it 99 points, if a book was number 100, it got 0 points.
Some numbers:
- 34 Lists
- 13 307 total books
- 10 892 books are unique
- 184 books are on3 lists
- 97 books are on 4 lists
- 60 books are on 5 lists
- 50 books are on 6 lists
- 23 books are on 7 lists
- 16 books are on 8 lists
- 11 books are on 9 lists
- 10 books are on 10 lists
- 3 books are on 11 lists
- 3 books are on 12 lists
- 1 book is on 13 lists
- 3 books are on 14 lists
- 2 books are on 15 lists
- 5 books are on 16 lists
- 2 books are on 17 lists
- 1 book is on 18 lists
The lists that I used:
- 100 books nominated by Canadian readers
- Time’ s 100 best English-language nobels from 1923 to the present
- The 100 greatest novels of all time by the guardian-observer
- Random House 100 Best Novels (Board’s List)
- Random House 100 Best Novels (Redears’s List)
- NPR’s Audience Picks: 100 Best Beach Books Ever
- NYPL Books of the Century
- Telegraph’s top 100 Books
- Guardian’s 1000 novels everyone must read
- Telegraph’s 110 best books: the perfect library
- National Geographic’s The 100 Greatest Adventure Books of All Time
- The 100 Best Business Books of All Time
- CWA’s Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time CWA
- The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time The U.S. list
- BBC’s Big Read
- Top 100 Fantasy Books
- Sports Illustrated’s The Top 100 Sports Books of All Time
- Library of World Literature
- CounterPunch’s Top 100
- Goodread’s Best Books Ever
- Top 100 fantasy books of all time
- Radcliffe list
- Oprah’s Book Club
- CounterPunch’s Favorite 100 Nonfiction Books in Translation, Published in English Since 1900
- Top 100 Best Social Media Books
- St. John’s College reading list
- Wikipedia List of best-selling books
- 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
- New York Times bestsellers
- IMBA’s 100 Favorite Mysteries of the 20th Century
- Larry McCaffery’s “20th Century’s Greatest Hits: 100 English Language Books of Fiction“
- Waterstone’s Top 100 Books of the Century
- BBC’s Big Read 101-200
- Pulitzer Prize
My List of Best 100 Books
# |
Title |
Author |
# List |
total |
| 1 | 1984 | George Orwell | 18 | 869 |
| 2 | To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee | 17 | 892 |
| 3 | The Catcher in the Rye | J. D. Salinger | 17 | 889 |
| 4 | The Lord of the Rings | J. R. R. Tolkien | 16 | 1049 |
| 5 | Catch-22 | Joseph Heller | 16 | 802 |
| 6 | Gone with the Wind | Margaret Mitchell | 16 | 706 |
| 7 | Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov | 16 | 584 |
| 8 | One Hundred Years of Solitude | Gabriel García Márquez | 16 | 500 |
| 9 | The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald | 15 | 857 |
| 10 | Brave New World | Aldous Huxley | 15 | 560 |
| 11 | The Grapes of Wrath | John Steinbeck | 14 | 687 |
| 12 | Ulysses | James Joyce | 14 | 579 |
| 13 | On the Road | Jack Kerouac | 14 | 403 |
| 14 | Lord of the Flies | William Golding | 13 | 500 |
| 15 | The Hobbit | J. R. R. Tolkien | 12 | 636 |
| 16 | Animal Farm | George Orwell | 12 | 585 |
| 17 | Rebecca | Daphne du Maurier | 12 | 522 |
| 18 | The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy | Douglas Adams | 11 | 568 |
| 19 | Beloved | Toni Morrison | 11 | 314 |
| 20 | A Clockwork Orange | Anthony Burgess | 11 | 275 |
| 21 | Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen | 10 | 488 |
| 22 | Dune | Frank Herbert | 10 | 418 |
| 23 | Slaughterhouse-Five | Kurt Vonnegut | 10 | 364 |
| 24 | To the Lighthouse | Virginia Woolf | 10 | 359 |
| 25 | Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy | 10 | 357 |
| 26 | War and Peace | Leo Tolstoy | 10 | 274 |
| 27 | Invisible Man | Ralph Ellison | 10 | 270 |
| 28 | The Big Sleep | Raymond Chandler | 10 | 264 |
| 29 | The Little Prince | Antoine de Saint-Exupéry | 10 | 236 |
| 30 | The Handmaid’s Tale | Margaret Atwood | 10 | 197 |
| 31 | Midnight’s Children | Salman Rushdie | 10 | 177 |
| 32 | The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe | C. S. Lewis | 9 | 487 |
| 33 | The Wind in the Willows | Kenneth Grahame | 9 | 446 |
| 34 | Wuthering Heights | Emily Brontë | 9 | 420 |
| 35 | Watership Down | Richard Adams | 9 | 380 |
| 36 | The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner | 9 | 346 |
| 37 | A Passage to India | E. M. Forster | 9 | 285 |
| 38 | Heart of Darkness | Joseph Conrad | 9 | 250 |
| 39 | Brideshead Revisited | Evelyn Waugh | 9 | 238 |
| 40 | The Color Purple | Alice Walker | 9 | 194 |
| 41 | Dracula | Bram Stoker | 9 | 168 |
| 42 | Love in the Time of Cholera | Gabriel García Márquez | 9 | 115 |
| 43 | Harry Potter Series | J. K. Rowling | 8 | 496 |
| 44 | Little Women | Louisa M. Alcott | 8 | 460 |
| 45 | Jane Eyre | Charlotte Brontë | 8 | 440 |
| 46 | Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland | Lewis Carroll | 8 | 394 |
| 47 | The Count of Monte Cristo | Alexandre Dumas | 8 | 364 |
| 48 | A Prayer for Owen Meany | John Irving | 8 | 308 |
| 49 | Crime and Punishment | Fyodor Dostoevsky | 8 | 304 |
| 50 | The Name of the Rose | Umberto Eco | 8 | 296 |
| 51 | The Woman In White | Wilkie Collins | 8 | 295 |
| 52 | Of Mice And Men | John Steinbeck | 8 | 284 |
| 53 | The Maltese Falcon | Dashiell Hammett | 8 | 253 |
| 54 | Charlotte’s Web | E. B. White | 8 | 229 |
| 55 | Tropic Of Cancer | Henry Miller | 8 | 161 |
| 56 | The French Lieutenant’s Woman | John Fowles | 8 | 135 |
| 57 | The Old Man and the Sea | Ernest Hemingway | 8 | 102 |
| 58 | Things Fall Apart | Chinua Achebe | 8 | 67 |
| 59 | Life of Pi | Yann Martel | 7 | 300 |
| 60 | The Sun Also Rises | Ernest Hemingway | 7 | 283 |
| 61 | The Stand | Stephen King | 7 | 275 |
| 62 | The Pillars of the Earth | Ken Follett | 7 | 249 |
| 63 | Emma | Jane Austen | 7 | 246 |
| 64 | Under The Volcano | Malcolm Lowry | 7 | 236 |
| 65 | The Thirty-Nine Steps | John Buchan | 7 | 214 |
| 66 | Native Son | Richard Wright | 7 | 203 |
| 67 | Sons and Lovers | D. H. Lawrence | 7 | 199 |
| 68 | The World According to Garp | John Irving | 7 | 197 |
| 69 | The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain | 7 | 193 |
| 70 | The Spy Who Came in from the Cold | John le Carré | 7 | 191 |
| 71 | The Poisonwood Bible | Barbara Kingsolver | 7 | 188 |
| 72 | The Godfather | Mario Puzo | 7 | 179 |
| 73 | Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy | John le Carré | 7 | 159 |
| 74 | Middlemarch | George Eliot | 7 | 153 |
| 75 | Moby Dick | Herman Melville | 7 | 128 |
| 76 | The Magus | John Fowles | 7 | 109 |
| 77 | Mrs Dalloway | Virginia Woolf | 7 | 108 |
| 78 | Perfume | Patrick Süskind | 7 | 101 |
| 79 | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest | Ken Kesey | 7 | 82 |
| 80 | The Unbearable Lightness of Being | Milan Kundera | 7 | 72 |
| 81 | The Time Traveler’s Wife | Audrey Niffenegger | 6 | 331 |
| 82 | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | James Joyce | 6 | 305 |
| 83 | The Kite Runner | Khaled Hosseini | 6 | 302 |
| 84 | A Tale of Two Cities | Charles Dickens | 6 | 279 |
| 85 | The Fountainhead | Ayn Rand | 6 | 267 |
| 86 | Memoirs Of A Geisha | Arthur Golden | 6 | 252 |
| 87 | Winnie-the-Pooh | A. A. Milne | 6 | 231 |
| 88 | The Diary of a Young Girl,The Diary of Anne Frank | Anne Frank | 6 | 224 |
| 89 | Great Expectations | Charles Dickens | 6 | 219 |
| 90 | Atlas Shrugged | Ayn Rand | 6 | 205 |
| 91 | East of Eden | John Steinbeck | 6 | 203 |
| 92 | Bridget Jones’s Diary | Helen Fielding | 6 | 182 |
| 93 | Gravity’s Rainbow | Thomas Pynchon | 6 | 176 |
| 94 | The Lovely Bones | Alice Sebold | 6 | 172 |
| 95 | The Call of the Wild | Jack London | 6 | 166 |
| 96 | U. S. A. | John Dos Passos | 6 | 164 |
| 97 | The Postman Always Rings Twice | James M. Cain | 6 | 158 |
| 98 | A Town Like Alice | Nevil Shute | 6 | 150 |
| 99 | Their Eyes Were Watching God | Zora Neale Hurston | 6 | 149 |
| 100 | Pale Fire | Vladimir Nabokov | 6 | 146 |
And the others are…
| 101 | Frankenstein | Mary Shelley | 6 | 140 |
| 102 | The Picture of Dorian Gray | Oscar Wilde | 6 | 140 |
| 103 | Don Quixote | Miguel de Cervantes | 6 | 123 |
| 104 | Red Harvest | Dashiell Hammett | 6 | 106 |
| 105 | A Fine Balance | Rohinton Mistry | 6 | 104 |
| 106 | Les Misérables | Victor Hugo | 6 | 104 |
| 107 | The Odyssey | Homer | 6 | 103 |
| 108 | Vanity Fair | William Makepeace Thackeray | 6 | 102 |
| 109 | The Age of Innocence | Edith Wharton | 6 | 100 |
| 110 | The Brothers Karamazov | Fyodor Dostoevsky | 6 | 100 |
| 111 | Gulliver’s Travels | Jonathan Swift | 6 | 96 |
| 112 | Song of Solomon | Toni Morrison | 6 | 96 |
| 113 | Middlesex | Jeffrey Eugenides | 6 | 94 |
| 114 | Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert | 6 | 93 |
| 115 | The Talented Mr Ripley | Patricia Highsmith | 6 | 84 |
| 116 | The Bell Jar | Sylvia Plath | 6 | 83 |
| 117 | The Hound of the Baskervilles | Arthur Conan Doyle | 6 | 68 |
| 118 | The Secret History | Donna Tartt | 6 | 68 |
| 119 | Atonement | Ian McEwan | 6 | 53 |
| 120 | Portnoy’s Complaint | Philip Roth | 6 | 48 |
| 121 | The Master and Margarita | Mikhail Bulgakov | 6 | 46 |
| 122 | The Bonfire of the Vanities | Tom Wolfe | 6 | 44 |
| 123 | The Tin Drum | Günter Grass | 6 | 42 |
| 124 | The Golden Notebook | Doris Lessing | 6 | 41 |
| 125 | All Quiet on the Western Front | Erich Maria Remarque | 6 | 30 |
| 126 | The Sheltering Sky | Paul Bowles | 6 | 28 |
| 127 | KIM | Rudyard Kipling | 6 | 27 |
| 128 | Wide Sargasso Sea | Jean Rhys | 6 | 25 |
| 129 | Possession | A. S. Byatt | 6 | 20 |
| 130 | Cry, the Beloved Country | Alan Paton | 6 | 6 |
| 131 | Anne of Green Gables | Lucy Maud Montgomery | 5 | 361 |
| 132 | The Da Vinci Code | Dan Brown | 5 | 281 |
| 133 | His Dark Materials | Philip Pullman | 5 | 279 |
| 134 | The Alchemist | Paulo Coelho | 5 | 259 |
| 135 | As I Lay Dying | William Faulkner | 5 | 227 |
| 136 | Birdsong | Sebastian Faulks | 5 | 223 |
| 137 | Charlie and the Chocolate Factory | Roald Dahl | 5 | 220 |
| 138 | David Copperfield | Charles Dickens | 5 | 218 |
| 139 | The Thorn Birds | Colleen McCollough | 5 | 192 |
| 140 | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | Agatha Christie | 5 | 183 |
| 141 | Finnegans Wake | James Joyce | 5 | 169 |
| 142 | Tess of the D’Urbervilles | Thomas Hardy | 5 | 163 |
| 143 | The Day of the Jackal | Frederick Forsyth | 5 | 163 |
| 144 | Howard’s End | E. M. Forster | 5 | 162 |
| 145 | Presumed Innocent | Scott Turow | 5 | 156 |
| 146 | Women in Love | D. H. Lawrence | 5 | 152 |
| 147 | The Once and Future King | T. H. White | 5 | 142 |
| 148 | A Suitable Boy | Vikram Seth | 5 | 140 |
| 149 | The Portrait of a Lady | Henry James | 5 | 135 |
| 150 | The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter | Carson McCullers | 5 | 131 |
| 151 | The Trial | Franz Kafka | 5 | 129 |
| 152 | All the King’s Men | Robert Penn Warren | 5 | 126 |
| 153 | Go Tell It on the Mountain | James Baldwin | 5 | 125 |
| 154 | The Rainbow | D. H. Lawrence | 5 | 125 |
| 155 | Brighton Rock | Graham Greene | 5 | 124 |
| 156 | Murder Must Advertise | Dorothy L. Sayers | 5 | 122 |
| 157 | A Farewell to Arms | Ernest Hemingway | 5 | 115 |
| 158 | Nostromo | Joseph Conrad | 5 | 114 |
| 159 | A Room with a View | E. M. Forster | 5 | 113 |
| 160 | I, Claudius | Robert Graves | 5 | 113 |
| 161 | A Tree Grows in Brooklyn | Betty Smith | 5 | 103 |
| 162 | An American Tragedy | Theodore Dreiser | 5 | 100 |
| 163 | Blood Meridian | Cormac McCarthy | 5 | 98 |
| 164 | Jude the Obscure | Thomas Hardy | 5 | 97 |
| 165 | Jonathan Livingston Seagull | Richard Bach | 5 | 83 |
| 166 | The Naked and the Dead | Norman Mailer | 5 | 80 |
| 167 | At Swim-Two-Birds | Flann O’Brien | 5 | 77 |
| 168 | Day Of The Locust | Nathanael West | 5 | 76 |
| 169 | The Wasp Factory | Iain Banks | 5 | 75 |
| 170 | A Confederacy of Dunces | John Kennedy Toole | 5 | 74 |
| 171 | Lonesome Dove | Larry McMurty | 5 | 73 |
| 172 | Lady Chatterley’s Lover | D. H. Lawrence | 5 | 71 |
| 173 | For Whom the Bell Tolls | Ernest Hemingway | 5 | 70 |
| 174 | Lucky Jim | Kingsley Amis | 5 | 65 |
| 175 | Treasure Island | Robert Louis Stevenson | 5 | 65 |
| 176 | Neuromancer | William Gibson | 5 | 64 |
| 177 | The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay | Michael Chabon | 5 | 60 |
| 178 | A Dance to the Music of Time | Anthony Powell | 5 | 57 |
| 179 | The Plague | Albert Camus | 5 | 54 |
| 180 | The Road | Cormac McCarthy | 5 | 53 |
| 181 | The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie | Muriel Spark | 5 | 52 |
| 182 | American Psycho | Bret Easton Ellis | 5 | 47 |
| 183 | Naked Lunch | William S. Burroughs | 5 | 47 |
| 184 | Doctor Zhivago | Boris Pasternak | 5 | 46 |
| 185 | Night | Elie Wiesel | 5 | 36 |
| 186 | Lord Jim | Joseph Conrad | 5 | 29 |
| 187 | Herzog | Saul Bellow | 5 | 25 |
| 188 | The Adventures Of Augie March | Saul Bellow | 5 | 19 |
| 189 | Maus | Art Spiegelman | 5 | 0 |
| 190 | The Corrections | Jonathan Franzen | 5 | 0 |
| 191 | And Then There Were None | Agatha Christie | 4 | 258 |
| 192 | Twilight | Stephenie Meyer | 4 | 235 |
| 193 | Ender’s Game | Orson Scott Card | 4 | 228 |
| 194 | The Collected Sherlock Holmes Short Stories | Arthur Conan Doyle | 4 | 189 |
| 195 | The Moonstone | Wilkie Collins | 4 | 185 |
| 196 | Captain Corelli’s Mandolin | Louis de Bernieres | 4 | 177 |
| 197 | Absalom, Absalom! | William Faulkner | 4 | 174 |
| 198 | Outlander | Diana Gabaldon | 4 | 173 |
| 199 | The Long Goodbye | Raymond Chandler | 4 | 172 |
| 200 | Interview with the Vampire | Anne Rice | 4 | 164 |
| 201 | The Ambassadors | Henry James | 4 | 150 |
| 202 | Wise Blood | Flannery O’Connor | 4 | 144 |
| 203 | Persuasion | Jane Austen | 4 | 127 |
| 204 | The Good Soldier | Ford Madox Ford | 4 | 127 |
| 205 | Sophie’s World | Jostein Gaarder | 4 | 119 |
| 206 | The Five People You Meet in Heaven | Mitch Albom | 4 | 115 |
| 207 | I Know This Much Is True | Wally Lamb | 4 | 113 |
| 208 | The Recognitions | William Gaddis | 4 | 112 |
| 209 | Tender is the Night | F. Scott Fitzgerald | 4 | 110 |
| 210 | Far From The Madding Crowd | Thomas Hardy | 4 | 105 |
| 211 | The Wings of the Dove | Henry James | 4 | 105 |
| 212 | Bleak House | Charles Dickens | 4 | 98 |
| 213 | Eye of the Needle | Ken Follett | 4 | 98 |
| 214 | Ball Four | Jim Bouton | 4 | 97 |
| 215 | Of Human Bondage | W. Somerset Maugham | 4 | 97 |
| 216 | She’s Come Undone | Wally Lamb | 4 | 97 |
| 217 | Fifth Business | Robertson Davies | 4 | 95 |
| 218 | In Cold Blood | Truman Capote | 4 | 93 |
| 219 | The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman | Laurence Sterne | 4 | 93 |
| 220 | American Gods | Neil Gaiman | 4 | 92 |
| 221 | The Moviegoer | Walker Percy | 4 | 91 |
| 222 | Trainspotting | Irvine Welsh | 4 | 90 |
| 223 | Light in August | William Faulkner | 4 | 89 |
| 224 | Angela’s Ashes | Frank McCourt | 4 | 87 |
| 225 | Stranger in a Strange Land | Robert A. Heinlein | 4 | 84 |
| 226 | Gorky Park | Martin Cruz Smith | 4 | 83 |
| 227 | The Glass Key | Dashiell Hammett | 4 | 81 |
| 228 | Underworld | Don DeLillo | 4 | 81 |
| 229 | The Third Man | Graham Greene | 4 | 80 |
| 230 | A Thief of Time | Tony Hillerman | 4 | 78 |
| 231 | Kane And Abel | Jeffrey Archer | 4 | 76 |
| 232 | A Christmas Carol | Charles Dickens | 4 | 75 |
| 233 | Red Dragon | Thomas Harris | 4 | 73 |
| 234 | Sense and Sensibility | Jane Austen | 4 | 71 |
| 235 | The Remains of the Day | Kazuo Ishiguro | 4 | 71 |
| 236 | The Riddle of the Sands | Erskine Childers | 4 | 71 |
| 237 | Shogun | James Clavell | 4 | 68 |
| 238 | The Secret Agent | Joseph Conrad | 4 | 68 |
| 239 | A Handful Of Dust | Evelyn Waugh | 4 | 66 |
| 240 | The House of Mirth | Edith Wharton | 4 | 66 |
| 241 | The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists | Robert Tressell | 4 | 66 |
| 242 | The Diary of a Nobody | George Grossmith | 4 | 65 |
| 243 | The Hunt for Red October | Tom Clancy | 4 | 63 |
| 244 | The Heart of the Matter | Graham Greene | 4 | 60 |
| 245 | Cold Comfort Farm | Stella Gibbons | 4 | 59 |
| 246 | Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance | Robert M. Pirsig | 4 | 59 |
| 247 | Deliverance | James Dickey | 4 | 58 |
| 248 | The Jungle | Upton Sinclair | 4 | 55 |
| 249 | Angle of Repose | Wallace Stegner | 4 | 54 |
| 250 | Franny and Zooey | J. D. Salinger | 4 | 54 |
| 251 | Journey to the End of the Night | Louis-Ferdinand Céline | 4 | 49 |
| 252 | IT | Stephen King | 4 | 45 |
| 253 | Cider with Rosie | Laurie Lee | 4 | 44 |
| 254 | The New York Trilogy | Paul Auster | 4 | 44 |
| 255 | The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time | Mark Haddon | 4 | 41 |
| 256 | A Bend in the River | V. S. Naipaul | 4 | 34 |
| 257 | Main Street | Sinclair Lewis | 4 | 33 |
| 258 | Breakfast of Champions | Kurt Vonnegut | 4 | 32 |
| 259 | Hamlet | William Shakespeare | 4 | 29 |
| 260 | Infinite Jest | David Foster Wallace | 4 | 29 |
| 261 | The Power and the Glory | Graham Greene | 4 | 28 |
| 262 | Waiting for the Barbarians | J. M. Coetzee | 4 | 24 |
| 263 | The Horse Whisperer | Nicholas Evans | 4 | 23 |
| 264 | The Iliad | Homer | 4 | 20 |
| 265 | White Noise | Don DeLillo | 4 | 18 |
| 266 | All the Pretty Horses | Cormac McCarthy | 4 | 17 |
| 267 | The God of Small Things | Arundhati Roy | 4 | 15 |
| 268 | The War of the Worlds | H. G. Wells | 4 | 15 |
| 269 | Ragtime | E. L. Doctorow | 4 | 14 |
| 270 | Loving | Henry Green | 4 | 11 |
| 271 | Money | Martin Amis | 4 | 10 |
| 272 | Under the Net | Iris Murdoch | 4 | 5 |
| 273 | The Shining | Stephen King | 4 | 4 |
| 274 | Rabbit, Run | John Updike | 4 | 3 |
| 275 | American Pastoral | Philip Roth | 4 | 1 |
| 276 | Gargantua and Pantagruel | François Rabelais | 4 | 0 |
| 277 | Get Shorty | Elmore Leonard | 4 | 0 |
| 278 | Humboldt’s Gift | Saul Bellow | 4 | 0 |
| 279 | Play It As It Lays | Joan Didion | 4 | 0 |
| 280 | The Bluest Eye | Toni Morrison | 4 | 0 |
| 281 | The Day of the Triffids | John Wyndham | 4 | 0 |
| 282 | The Lover | Marguerite Duras | 4 | 0 |
| 283 | The Magic Mountain | Thomas Mann | 4 | 0 |
| 284 | The Shipping News | E. Annie Proulx | 4 | 0 |
| 285 | The Time Machine | H. G. Wells | 4 | 0 |
| 286 | White Teeth | Zadie Smith | 4 | 0 |
| 287 | The Bible | Various | 3 | 248 |
| 288 | The Princess Bride | William Goldman | 3 | 216 |
| 289 | The Daughter of Time | Josephine Tey | 3 | 195 |
| 290 | Magician | Raymond E. Feist | 3 | 187 |
| 291 | Farewell My Lovely | Raymond Chandler | 3 | 172 |
| 292 | Wizard’s First Rule | Terry Goodkind | 3 | 164 |
| 293 | The Nine Tailors | Dorothy L. Sayers | 3 | 154 |
| 294 | The IPCRESS File | Len Deighton | 3 | 148 |
| 295 | Mort | Terry Pratchett | 3 | 138 |
| 296 | The Red Tent | Anita Diamant | 3 | 138 |
| 297 | Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell | Susanna Clarke | 3 | 137 |
| 298 | The Mists Of Avalon | Marion Zimmer Bradley | 3 | 133 |
| 299 | Trent’s Last Case | E. C. Bentley | 3 | 133 |
| 300 | Rogue Male | Geoffrey Household | 3 | 131 |
| 301 | Water for Elephants | Sara Gruen | 3 | 124 |
| 302 | Black Beauty | Anna Sewell | 3 | 117 |
| 303 | Murder on the Orient Express | Agatha Christie | 3 | 109 |
| 304 | The Moving Toyshop | Edmund Crispin | 3 | 103 |
| 305 | The Secret Garden | Frances Hodgson Burnett | 3 | 101 |
| 306 | The Public Burning | Robert Coover | 3 | 96 |
| 307 | Tom Jones | Henry Fielding | 3 | 95 |
| 308 | Clarissa | Samuel Richardson | 3 | 94 |
| 309 | Dangerous Liaisons | Pierre Choderlos De Laclos | 3 | 92 |
| 310 | Darkness at Noon | Arthur Koestler | 3 | 92 |
| 311 | Tuesdays with Morrie | Mitch Albom | 3 | 90 |
| 312 | A River Runs Through It | Norman Maclean | 3 | 89 |
| 313 | The Silmarillion | J. R. R. Tolkien | 3 | 89 |
| 314 | Wild Swans | Jung Chang | 3 | 89 |
| 315 | The Way of All Flesh | Samuel Butler | 3 | 88 |
| 316 | The Charterhouse of Parma | Stendhal | 3 | 87 |
| 317 | The Colour of Magic | Terry Pratchett | 3 | 86 |
| 318 | She: A History of Adventure | H. Rider Haggard | 3 | 84 |
| 319 | The Silence of the Lambs | Thomas Harris | 3 | 84 |
| 320 | Fall on Your Knees | Ann-Marie MacDonald | 3 | 83 |
| 321 | The Spirit of St. Louis | Charles A. Lindbergh | 3 | 81 |
| 322 | Seven Years in Tibet | Heinrich Harrer | 3 | 80 |
| 323 | The Scarlet Letter | Nathaniel Hawthorne | 3 | 80 |
| 324 | Henderson the Rain King | Saul Bellow | 3 | 79 |
| 325 | Titus Groan | Mervyn Peake | 3 | 78 |
| 326 | Jaws | Peter Benchley | 3 | 77 |
| 327 | Like Water for Chocolate | Laura Esquivel | 3 | 73 |
| 328 | Daniel Deronda | George Eliot | 3 | 72 |
| 329 | Judgement in Stone | Ruth Rendell | 3 | 72 |
| 330 | The Shell Seekers | Rosamunde Pilcher | 3 | 72 |
| 331 | SCOOP | Evelyn Waugh | 3 | 71 |
| 332 | The Accidental Tourist | Anne Tyler | 3 | 71 |
| 333 | The Thin Man | Dashiell Hammett | 3 | 69 |
| 334 | The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde | Robert Louis Stevenson | 3 | 68 |
| 335 | Sister Carrie | Theodore Dreiser | 3 | 67 |
| 336 | The Clan of the Cave Bear | Jean M. Auel | 3 | 67 |
| 337 | Three Men in a Boat | Jerome K. Jerome | 3 | 67 |
| 338 | Swallows and Amazons | Arthur Ransome | 3 | 66 |
| 339 | Cat’s Cradle | Kurt Vonnegut | 3 | 65 |
| 340 | The Bridge of San Luis Rey | Thornton Wilder | 3 | 63 |
| 341 | Housekeeping | Marilynne Robinson | 3 | 62 |
| 342 | Gormenghast | Mervyn Peake | 3 | 61 |
| 343 | Crash | J. G. Ballard | 3 | 60 |
| 344 | The Hollow Man | John Dickson Carr | 3 | 60 |
| 345 | In Search of Lost Time | Marcel Proust | 3 | 59 |
| 346 | The BFG | Roald Dahl | 3 | 59 |
| 347 | Valley of the Dolls | Jacqueline Susann | 3 | 57 |
| 348 | Cold Mountain | Charles Frazier | 3 | 56 |
| 349 | Smallbone Deceased | Michael Gilbert | 3 | 56 |
| 350 | Empire Falls | Richard Russo | 3 | 55 |
| 351 | My Antonia | Willa Cather | 3 | 55 |
| 352 | The Laughing Policeman | Maj Sjöwall | 3 | 54 |
| 353 | Death Comes for the Archbishop | Willa Cather | 3 | 50 |
| 354 | The Awakening | Kate Chopin | 3 | 50 |
| 355 | Nightwood | Djuna Barnes | 3 | 48 |
| 356 | A Taste for Death | P. D. James | 3 | 47 |
| 357 | Sophie’s Choice | William Styron | 3 | 47 |
| 358 | The Celestine Prophecy | James Redfield | 3 | 46 |
| 359 | Libra | Don DeLillo | 3 | 45 |
| 360 | Jazz | Toni Morrison | 3 | 44 |
| 361 | Parades End | Ford Madox Ford | 3 | 43 |
| 362 | Smiley’s People | John le Carré | 3 | 42 |
| 363 | Malone Dies | Samuel Beckett | 3 | 40 |
| 364 | Our Man in Havana | Graham Greene | 3 | 39 |
| 365 | From Here to Eternity | James Jones | 3 | 38 |
| 366 | The Wapshot Chronicle | John Cheever | 3 | 37 |
| 367 | The Quiet American | Graham Greene | 3 | 33 |
| 368 | Watchmen | Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons | 3 | 33 |
| 369 | Look Homeward, Angel | Thomas Wolfe | 3 | 29 |
| 370 | Oliver Twist | Charles Dickens | 3 | 29 |
| 371 | A House for Mr. Biswas | V. S. Naipaul | 3 | 28 |
| 372 | Ironweed | William Kennedy | 3 | 28 |
| 373 | The English Patient | Michael Ondaatje | 3 | 26 |
| 374 | How to Win Friends and Influence People | Dale Carnegie | 3 | 25 |
| 375 | The Friends of Eddie Coyle | George V. Higgins | 3 | 24 |
| 376 | Fahrenheit 451 | Ray Bradbury | 3 | 23 |
| 377 | Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas | Hunter S. Thompson | 3 | 22 |
| 378 | Germinal | Emile Zola | 3 | 22 |
| 379 | The Manchurian Candidate | Richard Condon | 3 | 21 |
| 380 | Cannery Row | John Steinbeck | 3 | 19 |
| 381 | The Hobbit | Nicholas Blake | 3 | 19 |
| 382 | The Executioner’s Song | Norman Mailer | 3 | 19 |
| 383 | Cloud Atlas | David Mitchell | 3 | 18 |
| 384 | I Capture The Castle | Dodie Smith | 3 | 18 |
| 385 | The Death of the Heart | Elizabeth Bowen | 3 | 16 |
| 386 | V | Thomas Pynchon | 3 | 15 |
| 387 | Lanark | Alasdair Gray | 3 | 14 |
| 388 | Peyton Place | Grace Metalious | 3 | 14 |
| 389 | The Collector | John Fowles | 3 | 14 |
| 390 | The Old Wives Tale | Arnold Bennett | 3 | 13 |
| 391 | The Stone Diaries | Carol Shields | 3 | 12 |
| 392 | Blindness | José Saramago | 3 | 11 |
| 393 | The Guns of Navarone | Alistair MacLean | 3 | 11 |
| 394 | Devil in a Blue Dress | Walter Mosley | 3 | 8 |
| 395 | Jurassic Park | Michael Crichton | 3 | 8 |
| 396 | Oscar And Lucinda | Peter Carey | 3 | 8 |
| 397 | The Book of Laughter and Forgetting | Milan Kundera | 3 | 7 |
| 398 | The Good Earth | Pearl S. Buck | 3 | 7 |
| 399 | Babbitt | Sinclair Lewis | 3 | 6 |
| 400 | High Fidelity | Nick Hornby | 3 | 5 |
| 401 | The Bourne Identity | Robert Ludlum | 3 | 5 |
| 402 | The Cat in the Hat | Dr. Seuss | 3 | 5 |
| 403 | The Three Musketeers | Alexandre Dumas | 3 | 3 |
| 404 | White Oleander | Janet Fitch | 3 | 3 |
| 405 | Austerlitz | W. G. Sebald | 3 | 1 |
| 406 | The Magnificent Ambersons | Booth Tarkington | 3 | 1 |
| 407 | The Satanic Verses | Salman Rushdie | 3 | 1 |
| 408 | A Death in the Family | James Agee | 3 | 0 |
| 409 | A Thousand Acres | Jane Smiley | 3 | 0 |
| 410 | Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle | Vladimir Nabokov | 3 | 0 |
| 411 | Andersonville | MacKinlay Kantor | 3 | 0 |
| 412 | Berlin Alexanderplatz | Alfred Döblin | 3 | 0 |
| 413 | Bonjour Tristesse | Françoise Sagan | 3 | 0 |
| 414 | Breakfast at Tiffany’s | Truman Capote | 3 | 0 |
| 415 | Call it Sleep | Henry Roth | 3 | 0 |
| 416 | Canterbury Tales | Geoffrey Chaucer | 3 | 0 |
| 417 | Cat’s Eye | Margaret Atwood | 3 | 0 |
| 418 | Christ Stopped at Eboli | Carlo Levi | 3 | 0 |
| 419 | Confessions of Zeno | Italo Svevo | 3 | 0 |
| 420 | Cryptonomicon | Neal Stephenson | 3 | 0 |
| 421 | Dead Souls | Nikolai Gogol | 3 | 0 |
| 422 | Delta of Venus | Anaïs Nin | 3 | 0 |
| 423 | Divine Comedy | Dante Alighieri | 3 | 0 |
| 424 | Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? | Philip K. Dick | 3 | 0 |
| 425 | Everything is Illuminated | Jonathan Safran Foer | 3 | 0 |
| 426 | Foundation | Isaac Asimov | 3 | 0 |
| 427 | Gilead | Marilynne Robinson | 3 | 0 |
| 428 | House of Leaves | Mark Z. Danielewski | 3 | 0 |
| 429 | Hunger | Knut Hamsun | 3 | 0 |
| 430 | Independent People | Halldór Laxness | 3 | 0 |
| 431 | London Fields | Martin Amis | 3 | 0 |
| 432 | Love in a Cold Climate | Nancy Mitford | 3 | 0 |
| 433 | Master and Commander | Patrick O’Brian | 3 | 0 |
| 434 | On Beauty | Zadie Smith | 3 | 0 |
| 435 | Personal History | Katharine Graham | 3 | 0 |
| 436 | Rabbit is Rich | John Updike | 3 | 0 |
| 437 | Remembrance of Things Past | Marcel Proust | 3 | 0 |
| 438 | Rickshaw Boy | Lao She | 3 | 0 |
| 439 | Season of Migration to the North | Tayeb Salih | 3 | 0 |
| 440 | Silas Marner | George Eliot | 3 | 0 |
| 441 | Smilla’s Sense of Snow | Peter Høeg | 3 | 0 |
| 442 | The Blind Assassin | Margaret Atwood | 3 | 0 |
| 443 | The Caine Mutiny | Herman Wouk | 3 | 0 |
| 444 | The Castle | Franz Kafka | 3 | 0 |
| 445 | The Confessions of Nat Turner | William Styron | 3 | 0 |
| 446 | The Cruel Sea | Nicholas Monsarrat | 3 | 0 |
| 447 | The Crying of Lot 49 | Thomas Pynchon | 3 | 0 |
| 448 | The End of the Affair | Graham Greene | 3 | 0 |
| 449 | The Go-Between | L. P. Hartley | 3 | 0 |
| 450 | The Good Soldier Schweik | Jaroslav Hasek | 3 | 0 |
| 451 | The Heat of the Day | Elizabeth Bowen | 3 | 0 |
| 452 | The Hours | Michael Cunningham | 3 | 0 |
| 453 | The Human Stain | Philip Roth | 3 | 0 |
| 454 | The Idiot | Fyodor Dostoevsky | 3 | 0 |
| 455 | The Leopard | Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa | 3 | 0 |
| 456 | The Man Who Loved Children | Christina Stead | 3 | 0 |
| 457 | The Man with the Golden Arm | Nelson Algren | 3 | 0 |
| 458 | The Man without Qualities | Robert Musil | 3 | 0 |
| 459 | The Mandarins | Simone de Beauvoir | 3 | 0 |
| 460 | The Mayor of Casterbridge | Thomas Hardy | 3 | 0 |
| 461 | The Optimist’s Daughter | Eudora Welty | 3 | 0 |
| 462 | The Reader | Bernhard Schlink | 3 | 0 |
| 463 | The Red and the Black | Stendhal | 3 | 0 |
| 464 | The Souls of Black Folk | W. E. B. DuBois | 3 | 0 |
| 465 | The Stranger | Albert Camus | 3 | 0 |
| 466 | The Tipping Point | Malcolm Gladwell | 3 | 0 |
| 467 | The Tree of Man | Patrick White | 3 | 0 |
| 468 | The Turn of the Screw | Henry James | 3 | 0 |
| 469 | Vineland | Thomas Pynchon | 3 | 0 |

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It’s a damn shame then that this meticulously crafted, psychedelic visual-journey isn’t matched with a screenplay that was given just as much effort. The inbuilt metaphors of the Alice tale are still there however writer Linda Woolverton adds very little in the way of character development or plot undercurrents, seemingly intent on relying on the visual effects wizards and actors to contribute the extra layers. Her biggest missed opportunity is further exploration into the Mad Hatter or even the White Queen – both of whom are half-baked caricatures – with the Hatter coming off as a mere chance for Depp to be quirky, rather than the cleverly-written character with an interesting back story that he should have been. To Woolverton’s credit though, she did manage to concoct some deliriously amusing dialogue for the Hatter and the Red Queen; a small highlight of her script which partially redeems her lack-lustre attempts elsewhere.