101 Books to Read Before You Die

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Just how novel is a novel?
The creation of the novel has unlocked a world as extraordinary as the millions of hearts and minds that have shaped it. To celebrate, Exclusive Books would like to present the Exclusive Books 101 Books To Read Before You Die. The books that made the list are the books you've read, re-read and always wanted to read. Books which have made the list have defined eras, created friends instead of characters, entertained generation upon generation and have become true legends of literature.

So how did we go about choosing the 101 best books?
Selecting the 101 Books To Read Before You Die was no simple task. That's why we consulted the experts. You. Exclusive Books Fanatics members across South Africa were given the opportunity to vote for their 10 favourite fiction titles of all time. The nomination period lasted for two weeks with over 35000 votes received. The titles with the most votes made it to the list.

The list of 101 Books To Read Before You Die will be published as a booklet. It will be distributed at the Cape Town Book Fair and in Exclusive Books stores countrywide. Voted for by Exclusive Books customers, the list of must-reads offers an excellent snapshot of South African book readers' tastes.

With only 10 traditional classics on the list, plus a strong selection of fantasy, South African and children's books and a host of contemporary cult titles featured, the list also promises to be thought-provoking and contentious.

1. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien

2. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

3. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

4. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

5. The Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

6. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver

7. The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho

8. Life of Pi - Yann Martel

9. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

10. The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy

11. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

12. Spud - John van de Ruit

13. The Power of One - Bryce Courtenay

14. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien

15. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernieres

16. Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts

17. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

18. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

19. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

20. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

21. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

22. Disgrace - J. M. Coetzee

23. My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult

24. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

25. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

26. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

27. Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett

28. Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell

29. Cry, the Beloved Country - Alan Paton

30. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

31. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

32. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - Mark Haddon

33. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

34. Atonement - Ian McEwan

35. Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

36. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

37. The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje

38. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

39. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

40. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

41. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

42. I Know This Much is True - Wally Lamb

43. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

44. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell

45. War And Peace - Leo Tolstoy

46. Clan of the Cave Bear - Jean M. Auel

47. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

48. The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

49. The Secret History - Donna Tartt

50. Possession - A. S. Byatt

51. Perfume - Patrick Suskind

52. The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende

53. Chocolat - Joanne Harris

54. The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency - Alexander McCall Smith

55. Q & A - Vikas Swarup

56. Dune - Frank Herbert

57. Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

58. Fugitive Pieces - Anne Michaels

59. River God - Wilbur Smith

60. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott

61. Lord of the Flies - William Golding

62. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis

63. Mort - Terry Pratchett

64. Crime and Punishment - Feodor Dostoyevsky

65. The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood

66. East of Eden - John Steinbeck

67. The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco

68. The Other Boleyn Girl - Philippa Gregory

69. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas - John Boyne

70. The Prince of Tides - Pat Conroy

71. Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier

72. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding

73. The Shipping News - E. Annie Proulx

74. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

75. Animal Farm - George Orwell

76. The Red Tent - Anita Diamant

77. Watership Down - Richard Adams

78. Magician - Raymond E Feist

79. Middlemarch - George Eliot

80. The Day of the Jackal - Frederick Forsyth

81. We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver

82. The Magus - John Fowles

83. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

84. Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk

85. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

86. The Shell Seekers - Rosamunde Pilcher

87. The Colour Purple - Alice Walker

88. The Beach House - James Patterson

89. Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak

90. Kringe in 'n Bos - Dalene Matthee

91. The World according to Garp - John Irving

92. Northen Lights - Phillip Pullman

93. Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides

94. Shades - Marguerite Poland

95. Kane and Abel - Jeffrey Archer

96. Fiela se kind - Dalene Matthee

97. Story of an African Farm - Olive Schreiner

98. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

99. The Magic Faraway Tree - Enid Blyton

100. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

101. Winnie-the-Pooh - A.A. Milne

I've bolded what I've read, underlined what I own, and red-ed what is on my list of I'm-definitely-going-to-read-this-next. I realise this isn't as relevant to you as it is to me, since a few books are South African and/or Afrikaans, but bear with me and bold how many you've read? All Americans could benefit from learning about another country than their own.

[wkw]

Pride and Prejudice - good book
Dune - one of my favs
Crime and Punishment - great book

[sacrilegend]

Ahh, I need to read those still.

[captainofbeef]

The Alchemist at number 7? That book was awful.

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Fanatics members across South Africa were given the opportunity to vote for their 10 favourite fiction titles of all time. The nomination period lasted for two weeks with over 35000 votes received. The titles with the most votes made it to the list.

Not my fault that your opinion differs. Or it could be that a lot of South Africans have bad taste, who knows?

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And I don't know then why it's so popular.

[ie]

At least it has some animation... as in... Winnie-the-Pooh.

[mixed]

I have onlt read 2 of those

I have some of the, on the shelf though to read.

List misses out a few I'd expect to be there. In cold blood? Fear and Loathing? And more I can't think of because myill brain won't allow it

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Yes, but remember, this is South Africa. We haven't had much time for reading and writing and films and music, we're just catching up now.

[mixed]

Yes I didn't remember that. Its easy to forget that not all countries and so developed in certain respects.

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Yup, we had way bigger problems for the most part of the 20th century, with Apartheid and all, and before that we were fighting the English, trekking up, across the whole country for freedom, fighting Zulu tribes...

But anyway, literature, music, art, etc. in South Africa are really catching up.

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32. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - Mark Haddon

Busy reading this. It's so great!

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Finished it ages ago, and it was so fantastically unpretentiously beautiful. Wow.