So, everyone's doing this "top 100" BBC book list, or other lists, and I decided that I wanted a list that would both reflect my own views of the literary canon and concurrently make me feel good (aka, only books I've read on it). We'll call it . . . THE NEB LIST: TOP 50.
1. The Bible
2. The Qur'an
3. The Iliad and The Odyssey
4. The Aeneid
5. The Divine Comedy
6. Beowulf
7. The Canterbury Tales
8. The Complete Works of Shakespeare
9. Pride and Prejudice
10. Emma
11. Sense and Sensibility
12. Jane Eyre
13. Great Expectations
14. A Tale of Two Cities
15. In Memoriam, A.H.H.
16. Hunchback of Notre Dame
17. Anna Karenina
18. Madame Bovary
19. The Three Musketeers
20. The Secret Garden
21. The Jungle Book
22. The Picture of Dorian Grey
23. The Importance of Being Earnest
24. Howard's End
25. A Handful of Dust
26. To the Lighthouse
27. The Years
28. The Village in the Jungle
29. Things Fall Apart
30. The Lord of the Rings
31. The Chronicles of Narnia
32. The Strangers
33. The Glass Menagerie
34. Our Town
35. The Scarlet Letter
36. The Great Gasby
37. The Old Man and the Sea
38. For Whom the Bells Toll
39. The Grapes of Wrath
40. Watership Down
41. Ender's Game
42. 1984
43. Lord of the Flies
44. Till We Have Faces
45. Confessions (Augustine)
46. The Pilgrim's Progress
47. Institutes of the Christian Religion
48. Idylls of a King
49. Middlemarch
50. Paradise Lost
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I love love love paradise lost.
ReplyDeleteNeene it's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" NOT "For Whom the Bells Toll"
ReplyDeleteI think I've read about half of these. Not sure I'd put them all on my list - but then, my list is waay too long and includes very strange things.
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