I found this post via Olivia’s blog here, but MovieCritic made it here.
Also, I’m not sure there is any evidence that the BBC ever made such a list or made such a claim. Nevertheless, this tag is fun.
The ones I’ve read (17), I’ve highlighted. I plan to read some of more of these titles. I’m not absolutely certain about all the ones I’ve skimmed or started (or which is which), so I didn’t mark those. Many of the others I’ve never heard of. I’m not going to tag anyone, but feel free to tag yourself.
1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. Gormenghast Trilogy – Mervyn Peake
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte BrontĂ«
4. Temple of the Golden Pavilion – Yukio Mishima
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Story of the Eye – George Bataille
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily BrontĂ«
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
9. Adrift on the Nile – Naguib Mahfouz
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Rhinoceros – Eugene Ionesco
15. Baron in the Trees – Italo Calvino
16. The Master of Go – Yasunari Kawabata
17. Woman in the Dunes – Abe Kobo
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Feast of the Goat – Mario Vargas Llosa
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gogol’s Wife – Tomasso Landolfi
22. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
23. Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. Ferdydurke – Gombrowicz
26. Narcissus and Goldmund – Herman Hesse
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
33. Tom Sawyer / Huck Finn – Mark Twain
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
36. Delta Wedding – Eudora Welty
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Naomi – Junichiro Tanizaki
39. Cosmicomics – Italo Calvino
40. The Joke – Milan Kundera
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. Labyrinths – Gorge Luis Borges
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. Under My Skin – Doris Lessing
46. Anne of Green Gables – L. M. Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. Don Quixote – Miguel Cervantes
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Absalom Absalom – William Faulkner
51. Beloved – Toni Morrison
52. The Flounder – Gunther Grass
53. Dead Souls – Nikolai Gogol
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. My Name is Red – Orhan Pamuk
56. A Dolls House – Henrik Ibsen
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman
64. Death on the Installment Plan – Celine
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Pedro Paramo – Juan Rulfo
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Metamorphosis – Kafka
74. Epitaph of a Small Winner – Machado De Assis
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Inferno – Dante
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. To the Light House – Virginia Woolf
80. Disgrace – John Maxwell Coetzee
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Zorba the Greek – Nikos Kazantzakis
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Box Man – Abe Kobo
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. The Stranger – Camus
88. Acquainted with the Night – Heinrich Boll
89. Don’t Call It Night – Amos Oz
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
94. Memoirs of Hadrian – Marguerite Yourcenar
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Faust – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
100. Metamorphosis – Ovid