M.R.'s Personal Top 100

In case it wasn't already extremely obvious, I am a woman who loves lists. First and foremost, here on the blog, is The List. But I also have a giant master to do list in an app that I consult pretty much all day every day, and I track all kinds of other things with lists, too.

For a while, I've been thinking about reorganizing The List at the end of this project, taking out the books that I really despised and replacing them with books from the Random/Romance side of things. But sometime last year, I decided that I didn't want to wait any longer. Also the Random/Romance books are a little too random.

I decided that I wanted to put together my own personal Top 100 list.

There are a few things you should know before you look at this list. First of all, I culled it from the master list of books I've read that is over seven hundred items long. I made a lot of hard choices, many of which I'm not at all sure of, given how many of the books I haven't read for over a dozen years. The difficulty I had made me feel pretty good about my reading, though: it's a good sign that I wanted to include so many books on my personal Top 100 that there wasn't enough room for all of them. Second, this list includes novels only (although I use The List's cheat of including entire series as single entries). I suspect that a list that included the non-fiction I've read would be somewhat different. Third, I must admit that there's a fair bit of nostalgia at work here.

Now that I've created this list, I'm going to update it every year.

Take a look:

1. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
   
2. We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson
   
3. Little Women and Little Men - Louisa May Alcott
   
4. The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
   
5. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
   
6. The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson
   
7. Silence - Shusaku Endo
   
8. The Long Walk - Richard Bachman
   
9. The Little Mermaid - Hans Christian Andersen
   
10. As for Me and My House - Sinclair Ross
    
11. The Discworld series (too many to list, including Small Gods) - Terry Pratchett
    
12. Good Omens - Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
    
13. His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass) - Philip Pullman
    
14. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
    
15. The House on the Strand - Daphne du Maurier
    
16. Bird Box - Josh Malerman
    
17. Fall on Your Knees - Ann-Marie MacDonald
    
18. Peter Pan - J. M. Barrie
    
19. A Room with a View - E. M. Forster
    
20. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - Anne Bronte
    
21. The Last Unicorn - Peter S. Beagle
    
22. One Hand Clapping - Anthony Burgess
    
23. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
    
24. Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham
    
25. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll
    
26. Watership Down - Richard Adams
    
27. The Anne books (Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Anne of Windy Poplars, Anne’s House of Dreams, Anne of Ingleside, Rainbow Valley, Rilla of Ingleside) - Lucy Maud Montgomery
    
28. The Harry Potter series (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) - J. K. Rowling
    
29. Where Nests the Water Hen - Gabrielle Roy
    
30. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
    
31. The Thirteenth Tale - Diane Setterfield
    
32. The Old Wives' Tale - Arnold Bennett
    
33. The Earth’s Children series (The Clan of the Cave Bear, The Valley of Horses, The Mammoth Hunters, The Plains of Passage, The Shelters of Stone, The Land of Painted Caves) - Jean M. Auel
    
34. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume
    
35. Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner
    
36. The Running Man - Richard Bachman
    
37. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
    
38. The Postman Always Rings Twice - James M. Cain
    
39. Jamaica Inn - Daphne du Maurier
    
40. Persuasion - Jane Austen
    
41. Le Petit Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
    
42. The Stone Angel - Margaret Laurence
    
43. A Passage to India - E. M. Forster
    
44. The Foundation series (Prelude to Foundation, Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation) - Isaac Asimov
    
45. The Orenda - Joseph Boyden
    
46. 1984 - George Orwell
    
47. My Ántonia - Willa Cather
    
48. Death Comes for the Archbishop - Willa Cather
    
49. Catherine, Called Birdy - Karen Cushman
    
50. The Cat Who Went to Heaven - Elizabeth Coatsworth
    
51. Black Beauty - Anna Sewell
    
52. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
    
53. Plowing the Dark - Richard Powers
    
54. Calculating God - Robert J. Sawyer
    
55. Summer Sisters - Judy Blume
    
56. Kane and Abel - Jeffrey Archer
    
57. Nightfall - Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg
    
58. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe - Douglas Adams
    
59. The Good Earth - Pearl S. Buck
    
60. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
    
61. The Red Tent - Anita Diamant
    
62. House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski
    
63. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
    
64. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
    
65. The Crimson Petal and the White - Michel Faber
    
66. The Dream Where the Losers Go - Beth Goobie
    
67. A High Wind in Jamaica - Richard Hughes
    
68. Main Street - Sinclair Lewis
    
69. The Dark Tower series (The Gunslinger, The Drawing of the Three, The Waste Lands, Wizard and Glass, The Wind Through the Keyhole, Wolves of the Calla, Song of Susannah, The Dark Tower) - Stephen King
    
70. Les Liaisons Dangereuses - Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
    
71. The Call of the Wild - Jack London
    
72. The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
    
73. A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
    
74. The Emily books (Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, Emily’s Quest) - Lucy Maud Montgomery
    
75. The Once and Future King - T. H. White
    
76. The Pendragon series (The Merchant of Death, The Lost City of Faar, The Never War, The Reality Bug, Black Water, The Rivers of Zadaa, The Quillan Games, The Pilgrims of Rayne, Raven Rise, The Soldiers of Halla) - D. J. MacHale
    
77. City of Stairs - Robert Jackson Bennett
    
78. The Canterville Ghost - Oscar Wilde
    
79. The Little House series (Little House in the Big Woods, Little House on the Prairie, Farmer Boy, On the Banks of Plum Creek, By the Shores of Silver Lake, Little Town on the Prairie, The Long Winter, These Happy Golden Years, The First Four Years) - Laura Ingalls Wilder
    
80. The Chronicles of Narnia (The Magician's Nephew; The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; The Horse and His Boy; Prince Caspian; The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’; The Silver Chair; The Last Battle) - C. S. Lewis
    
81. Olympiad - Tom Holt
    
82. Scoop - Evelyn Waugh
    
83. Carrie - Stephen King
    
84. The Sarantine Mosaic (Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors) - Guy Gavriel Kay
    
85. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke
    
86. Eifelheim - Michael Flynn
    
87. Master and Commander - Patrick O’Brian
    
88. Shogun - James Clavell
    
89. Doomsday Book - Connie Willis
    
90. The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
    
91. Battle Royale - Koushun Takami
    
92. The Troop - Nick Cutter
    
93. The Dune series (Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, Chapterhouse: Dune) - Frank Herbert
    
94. The Magnificent Ambersons - Booth Tarkington
    
95. The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton
    
96. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
    
97. The Road - Cormac McCarthy
    
98. The Bostonians - Henry James
    
99. Dhalgren - Samuel R. Delany
    
100. The Talisman and The Black House - Stephen King and Peter Straub