First Annual Personal Top 100 Update

Well, I've ranked all of the novels I read last year and I've added them in to my personal Top 100 list. The results confirm what I felt at the end of last year: that I'd read very few books that really blew me away. The Secret Garden ranked highest at #35, but that was after being dethroned from its position at #23. Again I have to remind myself that, having read over 700 books in my life to date, if even only two thirds of them are novels, that means I have to exclude about one out of every five books I've read from this list. The Dune series is in last place right now, for God's sake! And again I have to face the fact that many of the books on the upper reaches of this list are there for nostalgic purposes, or because of the profound effect they've had on me over the course of my life. The books I read last year are in bold in the list below.

My Personal Top 100

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. Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham
    
24. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll
    
25. Watership Down - Richard Adams
    
26. 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
    
27. 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
    
28. Where Nests the Water Hen - Gabrielle Roy
    
29. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
    
30. The Thirteenth Tale - Diane Setterfield
    
31. The Old Wives' Tale - Arnold Bennett
    
32. 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
    
33. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume
    
34. Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner
    
35. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
    
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. Double Indemnity - James M. Cain
    
51. The Cat Who Went to Heaven - Elizabeth Coatsworth
    
52. Black Beauty - Anna Sewell
    
53. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
    
54. Plowing the Dark - Richard Powers
    
55. Calculating God - Robert J. Sawyer
    
56. Summer Sisters - Judy Blume
    
57. Kane and Abel - Jeffrey Archer
    
58. Nightfall - Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg
    
59. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe - Douglas Adams
    
60. The Good Earth - Pearl S. Buck
    
61. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
    
62. The Red Tent - Anita Diamant
    
63. House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski
    
64. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
    
65. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
    
66. The Crimson Petal and the White - Michel Faber
    
67. The Dream Where the Losers Go - Beth Goobie
    
68. A High Wind in Jamaica - Richard Hughes
    
69. Howards End - E. M. Forster
    
70. Main Street - Sinclair Lewis
    
71. 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
    
72. Les Liaisons Dangereuses - Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
    
73. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
    
74. East of Eden - John Steinbeck
    
75. The Call of the Wild - Jack London
    
76. The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
    
77. A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
    
78. The Emily books (Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, Emily’s Quest) - Lucy Maud Montgomery
    
79. The Once and Future King - T. H. White
    
80. His Majesty's Dragon - Naomi Novik
    
81. 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
    
82. City of Stairs - Robert Jackson Bennett
    
83. The Canterville Ghost - Oscar Wilde
    
84. 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
    
85. 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
    
86. Olympiad - Tom Holt
    
87. Scoop - Evelyn Waugh
    
88. As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
    
89. Roadside Picnic - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
    
90. Carrie - Stephen King
    
91. The Sarantine Mosaic (Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors) - Guy Gavriel Kay
    
92. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke
    
93. Eifelheim - Michael Flynn
    
94. Master and Commander - Patrick O’Brian
    
95. Dolores Claiborne - Stephen King
    
96. Shogun - James Clavell
    
97. Doomsday Book - Connie Willis
    
98. The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
    
99. Battle Royale - Koushun Takami
    
100. The Dune series (Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, Chapterhouse: Dune) - Frank Herbert