1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (x)++
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (x)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (x)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 1984 - George Orwell (x)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (x)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (x)+
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (x)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (x)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (x)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (x)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (x)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (x)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (x)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (x)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (x)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (x)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (x)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (x) ++
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (x)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (x)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (x)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (x)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (x)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (x)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (x)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (x)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker (x)
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (x)+
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (x)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (x)+
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (x)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams (x)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (x)
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (x)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (x)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (x) +

I get 35, more or less. I had to do it twice because I missed some the first time. The more or less part is because I have read a single Harry Potter book, but not the whole series. On the other hand, there are six Dune books, and I'm only getting credit for one? The Lord of the Rings is three books as well.

I know for a fact that my own children will have read in the low single digits. I blame digital entertainment and a school system that doesn't want to promote the ideas of dead white Europeans. In my case though, many of these books were read when I was a child. My mother gave me a children's library when I was eight or so and that allowed me to check off the Little Prince, Little Women. My early education also exposed me to Shakespeare (although I have not read everything...) and authors like Aldous Huxley, Melville, Steinbeck and Dickens. Most of the French authors I've read in the original language, but again I'm perplexed that Voltaire is not on the list (Candide was a delight...).

If you haven't read many of these, do you feel like your missing something? If you have read a good whack of the list, do you feel that they're essential to the education of a modern person?

I think more people should be reading Aldous Huxley and George Orwell again. Seems like those books might have a renewed relevancy very soon.

Apart from Orwell the finest English stylists of the last century are excluded - Wodehouse, Dinesen, Chandler and Hemingway, rendering the list absurd.

Mark adds: We read Tom Sawyer aloud at age 10 in my London school, but it just didn't register, maybe because the milieu isn't in our folk memory. There's no prejudice against Mark Twain.

Mick's right that Orwell and Aldous Huxley are key to the politics of now, Orwell on language and Huxley on society and perhaps on science: "I remain an agnostic who aspires to be a gnostic."

The Hobbit is better than Lord of the Rings of which only Book 1 conveys the cosmic significance of the gathering storm. Then it degenerates into 'sword 'n sorcery'.

Apart from Orwell some of the finest English stylists of the last century are excluded - Wodehouse, Dinesen, Chandler and Hemingway - rendering the list absurd.

Look, Shakespeare stands alone. I may not be the first to notice but it's just true. And in some ways 'Hamlet' stands alone, apart from any other creation of the human mind."I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space were it not that I have bad dreams" wrote the man that never traveled outside a line between southern and middle England.

"This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man"

"I tell thee, churlish priest, A ministering angel shall my sister be, When thou liest howling"

"Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest"

Stop, stop, stop. Apart from the found-in-the-street naturalness of these phrases, when understood in context the words speak for the species, homo sapiens, observing itself. Hamlet alone could furnish a universal mind.