Recently at work I suggested that we all write down our top 10 books, share them, and read each others’ favourites. We all took this idea pretty seriously, and soon emails full of book lists started flying around*. Coming up with a ‘Top 10’ was incredibly tricky, but I eventually managed to narrow down mine. Obviously, this list is subject to change.
My Top 10 Books
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
Antarctic Navigation – Elizabeth Arthur
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
The Seagull – Anton Chekhov
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass – Lewis Carroll
Villette – Charlotte Brontë
The Alexandria Quartet – Lawrence Durrell
The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
My colleagues have some interesting favourites, some of which I’ve read and others which I’ve either always been meaning to read, or else never come across before. I’ve highlighted the ones I’ve read.
S’s List
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Comet in Moominland – Tove Jansson
A Kestrel for a Knave – Barry Hines
East of Eden – John Steinbeck
The Giggler Treatment – Roddy Doyle
Just Kids – Patti Smith
To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The Virgin Suicides – Jeffery Eugenides
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
The Princess Bride – William Goldman
G’s List
The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
Our Ancestors (The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees, The Nonexistent Knight) – Italo Calvino
Orkneyinga Saga (The History of the Earls of Orkney)
High Fidelity – Nick Hornby
Two Hussars – Lev Tolstoy
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
Ghosts – Henrik Ibsen
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands – Jorge Amado
K’s List
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Grief is the Thing with Feathers – Max Porter
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Wave – Todd Strasser
Head Count – Ingrid Noll
The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
The Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank
Perfume – Patrick Süskind
Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories – Tim Burton
V’s List
The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories – Volume 2: Outer Space, Inner Lands – Ursula Le Guin
The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula Le Guin
Persuasion – Jane Austen
Good Omens – Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
We Need to Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver
The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins
Things the Grandchildren Should Know – Mark Oliver Everett
I’m excited to read some of these!
*We unanimously decided not to include Harry Potter on any of our lists, as we’ve all read them, all loved them, and didn’t want to bother with trying to choose just one of the seven books to fit on our lists.