200th Birthday Celebrations

Today is the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens.  This morning I finished reading The Catcher In The Rye, and instead of rolling a dice or sticking a pin into the list to choose the next book I decided to read the first Dickens book on the list I that came across, to honour his birthday.


And the first book I discovered as I perused the list was David Copperfield, so the decision has been made, this is the next book for me to explore and discover on my voyage through the greatest literature in the canon.

Hugely admired by Tolstoy, David Copperfield is the novel that draws most closely from Charles Dickens's own life. Its eponymous hero, orphaned as a boy, grows up to discover love and happiness, heartbreak and sorrow amid a cast of eccentrics, innocents, and villains. 


Praising Dickens's power of invention, Somerset Maugham wrote: "There were never such people as the Micawbers, Peggotty and Barkis, Traddles, Betsey Trotwood and Mr. Dick, Uriah Heep and his mother. They are fantastic inventions of Dickens's exultant imagination...you can never quite forget them."


"The most perfect of all the Dickens novels."
--Virginia Woolf

The List Is Growing!

The List was at 51 books last time I posted it - thanks to many more suggestions from visitors to the site - it is now numbering 74 amazing books.  Is your favourite book on the list?  

1.    Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë

2.    Jamaica Inn – Daphne Du Maurier

3.    Iliad – Homer

4.    War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

5.    Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

6.    1984 – George Orwell

7.    Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

8.    Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift

9.    Lord Of The Flies  - William Golding

10. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

11. Tess of The D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

12. Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

13. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

14. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë

15. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

16. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

17. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  - Philip K. Dick

18. Murders In The Rue Morgue – Edgar Allen Poe

19. Middlemarch – George Elliot

20. The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

21. Bleak House – Charles Dickens

22. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

23. The Time Machine – HG Wells

24. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

25. Foundation – Isaac Asimov

26. Ulysses – James Joyce

27. Paradise Lost – Milton

28. The Pearl – John Steinbeck

29. Twenty thousand Leagues Under The Sea – Jules Verne

30. I Claudius – Robert Graves

31. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler

32. East Of Eden - John Steinbeck

33. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

34. Odyssey – Homer

35. Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie

36. Diceman - George Cockcroft

37. To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee

38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis de Berniéres

39. Persuasion – Jane Austen

40. Animal Farm – George Orwell

41. Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco

42. Lord Of The Rings – JRR Tolkien

43. Cat’s Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

44. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carré

45. Neuromancer – William Gibson

46. A Perfect Spy – John Le Carré

47. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott

48. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

49. 100 Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

50. Cider With Rosie – Laurie Lee

51. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

52. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes

53. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

54. Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man – James Joyce   

55. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

56. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

57. The Sound and The Fury – William Faulkner

58. Sons and Lovers – DH Lawrence

59. The Wings Of The Dove – Henry James

60. A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh

61. As I Lay Dying- William Faulkner

62. The French Lieutentant’s Woman – John Fowles

63. Howards End – EM Forster

64. Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller

65. On The Road – Jack Kerouac

66. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

67. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

68. The Call of the Wild – Jack London

69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys

71. Naked Lunch – William S Burroughs

72. The Magus – John Fowles

73. Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon

74. A Town Like Alice – Neville Shute