Under the cut I will share my 100 favourite books. This was so hard as I realised there are not 100 books that are necessarily a favourite, even though I read a lot. At first I wanted to be strictly fiction but I expanded it to have poetry and some plays:
100-91:
Out by Natsuo Kirino (1997)
Bear by Marian Engel (1976)
Dune by Frank Herbert (1965)
The Vegetarian by Han Kang (2007)
The Wife of Martin Guerre by Janet Lewis (1941)
The Monk by Matthew Lewis (1795)
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (1971)
Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire (1957)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (1925)
East Lynne by Ellen Wood (1860)
90-81:
They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple (1944)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll (1871)
Kindred by Octavia Butler (1979)
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1943)
The Mabinogion by Unknown (1199)
Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte (1847)
Dream Story by Arthur Schnitzler (1926)
The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns (1959)
The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares (1940)
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
80-71:
The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925)
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (1911)
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (1939)
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (1971)
Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille (1928)
Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (1952)
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin (1901)
Quicksand by Nella Larsen (1928)
Maurice by E. M. Forster (1971)
70-61:
Last Words from Montmartre by Qiu Miaojin (1996)
The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon Kay Penman (1982)
Monsieur Venus by Rachilde (1883)
Alcools by Guillaume Apollinaire (1913)
Life? Or Theatre? By Charlotte Salomon (1981)
Une année studieuse by Anne Wiazemsky (2012)
The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark (1970)
Penance by Eliza Clark (2023)
The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin (1972)
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho by Sappho, Anne Carson (Translator) (2003)
60-51:
Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (1880)
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector (1977)
La dame aux camelias by Alexandre Dumas fils (1847)
Orlando by Virginia Woolf (1928)
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (1951)
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (1938)
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (1862)
The Wild Iris by Louise Glück (1992)
Moby Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905)
50-41:
Native Son by Richard Wright (1940)
Beware of Pity by Stephan Zweig (1939)
The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima (1963)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1879)
The Collector by John Fowles (1963)
Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys (1934)
The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers (1946)
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962)
The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch (1973)
Manon Lescaut by Abbé Prévost (1730)
40-31:
Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin (1967)
The White Book by Jean Cocteau (1927)
Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott (1929)
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959)
Cat Diary by Junji Ito (2009)
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (1956)
The Country Girls Trilogy by Edna O’Brien (1960, 1962, 1964)
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (1962)
Paroles by Jacques Prévert (1946)
Piercing by Ryu Murakami (1994)
30-21:
Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith (1957)
Empress by Shan Sha (2003)
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)
Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami (1980)
East of Eden by John Steinbeck (1952)
The Group by Mary McCarthy (1963)
Therese Raquin by Emile Zola (1866)
Medea by Euripides (422)
Down Below by Leonora Carrington (1945)
Nadja by Andre Breton (1928)
20-11:
Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain (1941)
After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie by Jean Rhys (1930)
The House Without Windows by Barbara Newhall Follett (1927)
Froth on the Daydream by Boris Vian (1947)
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1855)
Washington Square by Henry James (1880)
Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (1781)
Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham (1915)
Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse (1930)
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
10-1
The Magus by John Fowles (1965)
L’Assomoir by Emile Zola (1875)
The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (1952)
Persuasion by Jane Austen (1817)
The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (1928)
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein (1933)
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (1925)
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (1995)
The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley (1953)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (1891)
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