My Favourite 100 Books

Well, 105, but that’s what you get with this blog, free gifts are the best.  You may have been expecting posts about my trip to America but as jet lag is still making my head funny, you shall be treated to this instead, with proper posts coming soon, tomorrow or Sunday at the latest…

So anyway this is an ‘at this moment in time’ list, as it changes depending on what I am thinking of, so as a consequence this has to be done in no particular order…

1. Landscape and Memory – Simon Schama
2. The Coral Island – R. M Ballantyne
3. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
4. Moonfleet – John Meade Falkner
5. Three Men in a Boat – Jerome K Jerome
6. King Solomon’s Mines – H. Rider Haggard
7. The Pickwick Papers – Charles Dickens
8. Christmas Books – Charles Dickens
9. Endymion Spring – Matthew Skelton
10. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
11. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
12. The Story of England – Michael Wood
13. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
14. Baudolino – Umberto Eco
15. The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco*
16. The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
17. Batavia’s Graveyard – Mike Dash*
18. The Yacoubian Building – Alaa Al Aswaany
19. Teacher, Teacher – Jack Sheffield
20. Existentialism and Humanism – Jean Paul Sartre
21. Sea Room – Adam Nicolson
22. What was Lost – Catherine O’ Flynn
23. Measuring the World – Daniel; Kehlmann
24. The Lost City of Z – David Grann
25. Wasa Wasa – Harry Macfie and Hans G. Westurlund
26. The Weirdstone of Brasingamen – Alan Garner
27. The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
28. The Valley of Adventure – Enid Blyton
29. The Woman in the Dunes – Kobo Abe
30. The Solitaire Mystery – Jostein Gaarder
31. The Orange Girl – Jostein Gaarder*
32. Aku-Aku – Thor Heyerdahl
33. The Kon Tiki Expedition – Thor Heyerdahl
34. Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets – David Simon
35. The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner City Neighbourhood – David Simon and Ed Burns
36. Stalingrad – Antony Beevor
37. Conquistadors – Michael Wood
38. A History of Britain (Vol 1,2,3) – Simon Schama
39. Himalaya – Michael Palin
40. The News Where You Are – Catherine O’ Flynn
41. Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass – Lewis Carroll*
42. Bruno and Sylvie – Lewis Carroll*
43. Voss – PAtrick White*
44. Calum’s Road – Roger Hutchinson
45. The Mechanical Turk – Tom Standage
46. The Raw Shark Texts – Steven Hall
47. The Conquest of Mexico – Hugh Thomas
48. The Life of Pi – Yann Martell
49. The Age of Wonder – Richard Holmes
50. The Story of San Michele – Axel Munthe
51. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
52. Never admit to beige – Jonathan Drapes
53. Fermat’s LAst Theorem – Simon Singh
54. Collapse: How civilisations choose to Survive or Fail – Jared Diamond*
55. Guns, Germs and Steel – Jared Diamond
56. The Inimitable Jeeves – P. G Wodehouse
57. A Test of Time – David Rohl
58. Journey to the centre of the earth – Jules Verne
59. Crime and punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky*
60. Lord of the Rings – J.R.R Tolkien
61.  Different Seasons – Stephen King
62. 2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
63. 2010: The Second Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
64. The Midwich Cuckoos – John Wyndham
65. Chess – Stefan Zweig
66. Stig of the Dump – Clive King
67. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
68. Peter Pan – J. M Barrie
69. The Iliad – Homer
70. Le Morte D’arthur – Sir Thomas Mallory
71. All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarche
72. The Painted Veil – William Somerset Maugham
73. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
74. The Campaigns of Alexander – Arrian
75. The Aeneid – Virgil
76. Mountains of the Mind – Robert Macfarlane
77. The Riddles of Epsilon – Christine Morton Shaw
78. The Silmarrilion – J.R.R Tolkien
79. The Invention of Hugo Cabret – Brian Selznick
80. Ancient Mariner – Ken MacGoogan
81. Operation Mincemeat – Ben Macintyre
82. God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations for Modern Science – James Hannam
83. A Pound of Paper – John Baxter
84. Phaedo – Plato
85. Love in the time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
86. One hundred years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
87. The Iron Man – Ted Hughes
88. The English Patient – Michael Onjaatje
89. The Kraken Wakes – John Wyndham
90. Candide – Francois Voltaire
91. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitsyn
92. Jezebel – Irene Nemirovsky
93. Fire in the Blood – Irene Nemirovsky
94. Mr Palomar – Italo Calvino
95. Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
96. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
97. The Woman in Black – Susan Hill
98. A Month in the Country – J. L Carr
99. Five People You Meet in Heaven – Mitch Albom
100. Rendezvous With Rama – Arthur C. Clarke
101. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller*
102. Closing Time – Joseph Heller
103. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
104. The Prester Quest – Nicholas Jubber
105. The Lost World – Arthur Conan Doyle