Great Books

You can find many online lists of the greatest books of all time (usually headed by Don Quixote or something by Tolstoy, although the Telegraph properly heads its list with Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, as I would). But, here is my list of great authors and books mentioned in or alluded to in my favorite novella, The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett.

J. R. Ackerley, My Dog Tulip and My Father and Myself

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Lauren Bacall, By Myself and Then Some

Cecil Beaton, The Glass of Fashion,

Samuel Beckett, Watt

John Betjeman, Collected Poems

The Brontës, The Brontë Sisters and Agnes Grey and Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights

Anita Brookner, Hotel Du Lac

A.S. Byatt, Possession

Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland

David Cecil, A Portrait of Jane Austen

Ivy Compton-Burnett, Manservant and Maidservant

Noël Coward, The Noël Coward Diaries

Honoré_de_Balzac, Lost Illusions

Jean de Brunhoff, Babar

Walter de la Mare, The Return

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

George Eliot, Adam Bede

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Henry Fielding, Tom Jones

E. M. Forster, A Passage to India and Howards End

Dick Francis, Wild Horses

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken and Other Poems

Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

Thomas Hardy, Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy

David Hockney, Secret Knowledge

Winifred Holtby, South Riding

Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters: Poems

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories

Dr. Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands Scotland

Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip

Frank Kilvert, Kilverts Diary, 1870-1879

Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems

Ian McEwan, The Children Act

Andy McNab, Remote Control

John Masefield, Sea Fever: Selected Poems of John Masefield

Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate: Two Novels

Jan Morris, Venice

Alice Munro, Runaway

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

George Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography

Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Persia, The Empires of Ancient Persia: The History and Legacy of the Achaemenids, Parthians, and Sassanids in Antiquity

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Anthony Powell, Afternoon Men: A Novel

John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

J.B. Priestley, An Inspector Calls.

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

Mary Renault, The King Must Die: A Novel

Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint

J.K. Rowling, The Casual Vacancy

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy

William Shakespeare, King Lear

Sally Bedell Smith, Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

Dylan Thomas, The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas

Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

Joanna Trollope, Sense & Sensibility: A Novel

Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

Ur, Ur: The History and Legacy of the Ancient Sumerian Capital

Victoria, Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands

Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honor

Denton Welch, In Youth Is Pleasure

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

David Windsor, A King’s Story: The Memoirs of the Duke of Windsor

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse