This is a long list of luscious books, mostly fiction but not all… I’ve read them at least once, many of them over and over. I can recommend them all, for one reason or another – some are classics, some bestsellers, some personal discoveries, others were well-chosen gifts. All good reads. Which have you read? Any favourites here?
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
A Town Like Alice by Neville Shute
Animal Farm by George Orwell
A passage to India by EM Forster
Arabella by Georgette Heyer
Arabel’s Raven by Joan Aiken
Babe (The sheep pig) by Dick King-Smith
Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
Bolt by Dick Francis
Bothie the polar dog by Virginia & Ranulph Fiennes
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
Byron (biography) by Leslie Marchand
Cancer Ward by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
Charlotte’s Web by EB White
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
Corvus by Esther Woolfson
Devices and desires by PD James
Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith
Doctor at sea by Richard Gordon
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Dune by Frank Herbert
Erewhon by Samuel Butler
Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Glittering Images by Susan Howatch
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Goodnight, Mr Tom by Michelle Magorian
Gormenghast/Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
Hand in glove by Robert Goddard
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Heidi by Johanna Spyri
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Holes by Louis Sachar
I Claudius by Robert Graves
The Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Jemima Puddleduck by Beatrix Potter
Jonathan Livingstone Seagull by Richard Bach
Just so Stories by Rudyard Kipling
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Kiss Kiss by Roald Dahl
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
London by Edward Rutherfurd
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Lorna Doone by R.D. Blackmore
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
Madam, will you talk? by Mary Stewart
Mad, bad & dangerous to know by Ranulph Fiennes
Man and Boy by Tony Parsons
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
A month in the country by JL Carr
Mortal engines by Philip Reeve
Mr Golightly’s holiday by Sally Vickers
Mr Midshipman Hornblower by CS Forester
Mutant message down under by Marlo Morgan
Never the bride by Paul Magrs
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
Our man in Havana by Grahame Greene
Our mutual friend by Charles Dickens
Paddington Bear by Michael Bond
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Peter Pan by JM Barrie
Possession by A.S. Byatt
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Ramses by Christian Jacq
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Redwall by Brian Jacques
Reginald Perrin by David Nobbs
Right ho, Jeeves by PG Wodehouse
Sarum by Edward Rutherfurd
Shogun by James Clavell
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Small is beautiful by EF Schumacher
Stone’s Fall by Iain Pears
Stormbreaker by Anthony Horowitz
Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
The American Boy by Andrew Taylor
The blacksmith by Jenny Maxwell
The Canterbury tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M Auel
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat
The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart
The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth
The day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
The Eyre Affair by Jasper fforde
The Far Pavilions by M. M. Kaye
The Farship Traders by Robin Hobb
The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy
The girl with the dragon tattoo by Stieg Larsson
The glass bead game by Herman Hesse
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
The house at Pooh Corner by AA Milne
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis
The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Magician’s nephew by CS Lewis
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
The rescue man by Anthony Quinn
The secret diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾ by Sue Townsend
The secret garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The secret history by Donna Tartt
The shell seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher
The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier
The snow goose by Paul Gallico
The snow geese by William Fiennes
The stranger by Albert Camus
The sword in the stone by TH White
The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff
The Tao of physics by Fritjof Capra
The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
The weather in the streets by Rosamond Lehman
The wind in the willows by Kenneth Grahame
The woman in black by Susan Hill
The woman in white by Wilkie Collins
The wrong boy by Willy Russell
The young visiters by Daisy Ashford
They came from SW19 by Nigel Williams
This thing of darkness by Harry Thompson
Thomas the Tank Engine by the Rev. W Awdry
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Turn of the Screw by Henry James
Utopia by Thomas More
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantakis
101 Dalmatians by Dodie Smith
1984 by George Orwell
Freemagination 