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Book 1/100 - Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

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Blurb

So what’s going on? 

I’m going to attempt to read through these 100 books and keep a blog about my experiences of doing so. I have no idea what sort of structure this will take as right now it seems quite ambitious to try and nail down some literary parameters encompassing both the Twits and Crime & Punishment. But let’s see what happens.

Some of the books I have read before. Some I have actively avoided. Some I am probably still not ready for. Rather than read them in order I’m going to work through them at random and pick out anything interesting, both about what i’m reading and hopefully some wider context as well. In doing so I hope to learn, laugh, expand my horizons and finally be able to have opinions about some of the finest works ever written.

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Big Read Top 100 list

Here are the top 100 novels, as chosen by the British public in 2003:

The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernières

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling

The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Middlemarch by George Eliot

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

The Story of Tracy Beaker by Jacqueline Wilson

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute

Persuasion by Jane Austen

Dune by Frank Herbert

Emma by Jane Austen

Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

Watership Down by Richard Adams

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Animal Farm by George Orwell

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian

The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

The Stand by Stephen King

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

The BFG by Roald Dahl

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome

Black Beauty by Anna Sewell

Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough

Mort by Terry Pratchett

The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton

The Magus by John Fowles

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Perfume by Patrick Süskind

The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

Matilda by Roald Dahl

Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

Ulysses by James Joyce

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Double Act by Jacqueline Wilson

The Twits by Roald Dahl

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Holes by Louis Sachar

Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Vicky Angel by Jacqueline Wilson

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Magician by Raymond E. Feist

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

The Godfather by Mario Puzo

The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel

The Colour of Magic by Pratchett

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Katherine by Anya Seton

Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer

Love in the Time of Cholera by García Márquez

Girls in Love by Jacqueline Wilson

The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

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Prologue

Back in 2003, the BBC launched The Big Read. This poll celebrated the best of fiction in a survey that aimed to find the British public’s most beloved works of literature. Ultimately, Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings was perhaps a predictable winner but with nearly 7000 different nominated titles it was an engaging and celebratory walk through the eternal library of the nation.

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Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

Groucho Marx