- Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
- Dracula by Bram Stoker
- Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Braddon
- Precious Bane by Mary Webb
- I the Jury by Mickey Spillane
- From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming
- The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence
- Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson
- Chickamauga by Ambrose Bierce
- The Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper (I know it's cheating - there are five novels in the series!)
- The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
- Mr Greedy by Roger Hargreaves
- The Call of the Wild by Jack London
- Pudd'n Head Wilson by Mark Twain
- Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre by Algernon Blackwood
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- Sherlock Holmes Stories by Arthur Conan Doyle
- Heino und Hanno by Else Jung
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R.Tolkien (I know this is a trilogy so I'm cheating again)
- Centennial by James A Michener
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault
- Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Varney the Vampyre, or, The Feast of Blood by James Malcolm Rymer
- The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham
- The Divided Self by R.D. Laing
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Beetle by Richard Marsh
- The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens (even though not completed this would have been a brilliant detective novel)
- Horse Under Water by Len Deighton
- The Great Tontine by Hawley Smart
- Christine by Stephen King
If anybody had asked me to include plays or poetry in this top 40 I think my head would have exploded. I thought about ordering them alphabetically, or autobiographically..... but I decided against it!
However I thought I would just mention a couple of poets that I really love: W.B. Yeats; W.H. Auden; Byron; Keats and Dylan Thomas. I suppose I have to say that Emily Dickinson and Robert Lowell are my two favourite American poets.
However I thought I would just mention a couple of poets that I really love: W.B. Yeats; W.H. Auden; Byron; Keats and Dylan Thomas. I suppose I have to say that Emily Dickinson and Robert Lowell are my two favourite American poets.