the best novels

I had a bit of time yesterday so I wrote a list. I like lists. I was thinking about all the books that I’ve enjoyed reading. I thought I’d list my best 50. Of course that didn’t work. There were books I could not possibly leave out. So it soon blossomed to a 100.

I had to limit myself so I just did the novels (A few aren’t novels) and I missed out the Sci-fi and the Rock books (I might do them at a later date!)

It’s not comprehensive. Some writers like Julian Barnes, Sebastian Faulks, Jaspar Fforde, John Fowles, Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and Haruki Murakami, I like everything they’ve written – but that would make for a boring list, wouldn’t it?

Some that I love I know I will have missed off. (I will kick myself).

Anyway – this gives you a glimpse. I can’t imagine a world without reading. A man who reads lives a thousand lives. I have. I get lost in books. They’ve brought me more pleasure than anything else – as much as music and sex!!

So which fabulous writers have I missed out? Who would be on your list?

Opher Goodwin’s 100 Essential Reads:

1	Haruki Murakami – IQ84
2	Jack Kerouac – On the Road
3	Margaret Atwood – Oryx and Crake
4	Ken Kessey – One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
5	John Fowles – The Magus
6	Kasuo Ishiguro – The Remains of the Day
7	John Steinbeck – East of Eden
8	Robert Sheckley – Journey Beyond Tomorrow
9	Philip K Dick – A Scanner Darkly
10	George Orwell – 1984
11	Allen Ginsberg – Howl
12	D H Lawrence – Lady Chatterleys Lover
13	William Burrough – The Naked Lunch
14	Isaac Asimov – Foundation Series
15	Lynne Reed Banks – The L-Shaped Room
16	Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird
17	Allan Sillitoe – The Lonliness of the Long Distance Runner
18	Andrea Levy – Small Island
19	Nelson Mandela – the Long Walk to Freedom
20	Jack Kerouac – The Dharma Bums
21	Haruki Murakami – Norwegian Wood
22	Sebastian Faulks – Birdsong
23	Paul Auster – New York Trilogy
24	Philip Roth – American Pastoral
25	Kurt Vonnegut Jnr – Cat’s Cradle
26	Julian Barnes – The Noise of Time
27	Iain Banks – Whit
28	Iain McEwan – Atonement
29	Jonathan Franzen – Freedom
30	Ernest Hemmingway – For Whom the Bell Tolls
31	Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale
32	D H Lawrence – Women In Love
33	Stephen King – The Stand
34	Jaspar Fforde – First Among Sequels
35	Aldous Huxley – Brave New World
36	William Golding – The Inheritors
37	Gunter Gras – The Tin Drum
38	Salman Rushdie – Midnight’s Children
39	Anthony Burgess – A Clockwork Orange
40	John Steinbeck – The Grapes of Wrath
41	Ken Kessey – Sometimes A Great Notion
42	Salman Rushdie – The Satanic Verses
43	Haruki Murakami – Kafka on the Shore
44	John Le Carre – The Constant Gardener
45	Nikos Kazantzakis – Zorba The Greek
46	Richard Brautigan – Trout Fishing in America
47	Robert Heinlein – Stranger In a Strange Land
48	Hilary Mantel – Wolf Hall
49	Will Self – The Book of Dave
50	Arundhati Roy – The God of Small Things
51	Hilary Mantel – Bring Up The Bodies
52	John Fowles – The Collector
53	Iain McEwan – The Cement Garden
54	Henry Miller – The Tropic of Capricorn
55	Norman Mailer – The Naked and the Dead
56	J D Salinger – Catcher in the Rye
57	George Orwell – Keep the Aspidistras Flying
58	Vladimir Nabokov – Lolita
59	Joseph Heller – Catch 22
60	J R R Tolkein – Lord of the Rings
61	Franz Kafka – The Trial
62	Alice Walker – The Colour Purple
63	Milan Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness of Being
64	Douglas Adams – The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
65	Terry Pratchett – The Colour of Magic
66	Rachel Carson – Silent Spring
67	Anne Frank – Diary of a Young Girl
68	Erich Marie Ramarque – All Quiet on the Western Front
69	Ray Bradbury – Fahrenheit 451
70	Richard Dawkins – The Selfish Gene
71	Richard Dawkins – The God Delusion
72	Patti Smith – Just Kids
73	Alexander Solshenezshin – A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
74	Maya Angelou – I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings
75	Ben Okri – The Famished Road
76	Alexander Solshenezshin – The Gulag Archipelago
77	Heny Miller – The Air-conditioned Nightmare
78	Mezz Mezzrow – Really The Blues
79	Robert Harris – Ghost
80	Desmond Morris – The Naked Ape
81	Yuval Noah Harari – Sapiens
82	Yuval Noah Harari – Homo deus
83	Owen Jones – Chavs The Demonising of the Working Class
84	Owen Jones – The Establishment and how they get away with it
85	Margaret Atwood – Maddadam
86	Kasuo Ishiguro – Never Let Me Go
87	Charles Bukowski – Ham on Rye
88	Herman Hesse – Steppenwolf
89	Desmond Morris – The Human Zoo
90	Jane Goodall – In the Shadow of Man
91	Dian Fossey – Gorillas in the Mist
92	James Baldwin – Another Country
93	Philip Roth – I Married a Communist
94	Philip Roth – Portnoy’s Complaint
95	Pat Barker – Regeneration
96	Dee Brown – Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
97	Arthur C Clark – 2001 A Space Odyssey
98	Chris Mullins – A Very British Coup
99	Alexei Sayle – Stalin Ate My Homework
100	David Storey – This Sporting Life