Not every book, even a classic, is going to enthrall every reader. Even if we're talking about classic literature that is full of adventure and anecdotal humor ("Treasure Island" and "Huckleberry Finn" come to mind), these great books might not interest every age group or ethnic group. Camus' "The Stranger" might be over the heads of some, and "Tell-Tale Heart and Selected Short Stories of Poe" might possibly be irrelevant to people in a country where racial hatred and violence is the norm, and there's no interest in symbolism or pondering existential neurosis. Why kill? Why not!
There's also a question of whether to include a book that's just a "good read" and escapist fun, like, oh, "And Then There Were None" by Agatha Christie, or other tomes that simply encourage a reader to sit down and let imagination take over.
None of the four books I've mentioned made it to The Telegraph (UK newspaper) Top 40...while Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell did. At least Twain and Camus managed to land inside the limit of the Top 100!
You might think the list was slanted as the "Top 100 Books British People Should Read," based on an interest in British topics as well as what is considered "classic" literature, but very American authors made the lower regions of the list; Updike, Steinbeck and Salinger. Joseph Heller's "Catch 22" arrived at #77 and Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" at #87, not too far from the low-ranked "The Stranger" at # 82.
Below? I'm just quoting the Top 20, which will keep you busy enough!
20 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
Samuel Johnson thought Sterne’s bawdy, experimental novel was too odd to last. Pah!
19 The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
Bloodsucking Martian invaders are wiped out by a dose of the sniffles.
18 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
Waugh based the hapless junior reporter in this journalistic farce on former Telegraph editor Bill Deedes.
17 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Sexual double standards are held up to the cold, Wessex light in this rural tragedy.
16 Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
A seaside sociopath mucks up murder and marriage in Greene’s literary Punch and Judy show.
15 The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse
A scrape-prone toff and pals are suavely manipulated by his gentleman’s personal gentleman.
14 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Out on the winding, windy moors Cathy and Heathcliff become each other’s “souls”. Then he storms off.
13 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Debt and deception in Dickens’s semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman crammed with cads, creeps and capital fellows.
12 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
A slave trader is shipwrecked but finds God, and a native to convert, on a desert island.
11 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Every proud posh boy deserves a prejudiced girl. And a stately pile.
10 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Picaresque tale about quinquagenarian gent on a skinny horse tilting at windmills.
9 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Septimus’s suicide doesn’t spoil our heroine’s stream-of-consciousness party.
8 Disgrace by JM Coetzee
An English professor in post-apartheid South Africa loses everything after seducing a student.
7 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Poor and obscure and plain as she is, Mr Rochester wants to marry her. Illegally.
6 In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Seven-volume meditation on memory, featuring literature’s most celebrated lemony cake.
5 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
“The conquest of the earth,” said Conrad, “is not a pretty thing.”
4 The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
An American heiress in Europe “affronts her destiny” by marrying an adulterous egoist.
3 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy’s doomed adulteress grew from a daydream of “a bare exquisite aristocratic elbow”.
2 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Monomaniacal Captain Ahab seeks vengeance on the white whale which ate his leg.
1 Middlemarch by George Eliot
“One of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” said Virginia Woolf.
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