THE BEST 60 BOOKS OF THE PAST 60 YEARS
As voted for by Times readers in a recent NovelList poll, to mark the 60th anniversary of the Cheltenham Literary Festival
These lists often make me realise how many good books I still have to read. I’ve read 34 of the 60 on the list which is not that bad (marked in green). How many have you read?
Usually I fail reading lists miserably, especially those that include the classics. I am an illiterate philistine when it comes to the classics. I can live with that.
1 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
2 The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
3 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
4 The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
5 The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
6 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
7 The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
8 Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J. K. Rowling
9 The Secret History by Donna Tartt
10 Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
11 A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
12 Atonement by Ian Mc Ewan
13 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
14 The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
15 Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Màrquez
16 The Road by Cormac McCarthy
17 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
18 A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
19 The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
20 Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
21 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
22 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
23 Watership Down by Richard Adams
24 World without End by Ken Follet
25 A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
26 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
27 The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
28 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
29 Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard
30 Smiley’s People by John le Carre
31 American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
32 Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
33 A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
34 On the Road by Jack Kerouac
35 Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
36 Dune by Frank Herbert
37 Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
38 Northern Lights by Philip Pullman
39 My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
40 Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
41 The Godfather by Mario Puzo
42 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
43 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
44 The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
45 The Magus by John Fowles
46 The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
47 The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
48 We need to talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver
49 Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
50 Possession by Antonia Byatt
51 Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
52 Restoration by Rose Tremain
53 Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
54 Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
55 Immortality by Milan Kundera
56 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carre
57 One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
58 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
59 A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
60 A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
My favourite of the 60 is "The Magus" of John Fowles which is the book that I keep on re-reading every few years and always I discover something new.