Fiiiniiished - so what's the top 101-200 then?

"There's more to life than books you know, but not much more"

Well, I've finally finished and what a lot of fun I've had. I've enjoyed the self-imposed discipline that using the list has imposed, and conversely I can't wait to get stuck into the backlog of stuff I've got waiting on my bookshelf - much of it non-fiction. I feel that I'm much more clued up about novels than I was 2 years years ago but I still don't consider myself well-read; further reading would include Middlemarch, Bleak House, Humphrey Clinker, Roderick Random, The Decameron, The Bible, The Koran, Dante, Milton, bits of Shakespeare...

Check out the original Observer article and a subsequent, largely ill-informed discussion.

Scroll down for the full list and my individual comments on each book. Meanwhile I thought I would answer a few of the questions that have come up throughout in the form of a few lists, as follows:

Vital Statistics
100 novels
63 I had never read before starting out
About 2 years - that's about 11 or 12 days per book
Longest book: (6) Clarissa - 1500 pages
Shortest book: I reckon it's (88) the BFG, but I could be wrong

Favourite books, in no particular order
Don Quixote
Tristram Shandy
Dangerous Liaisons
Emma
The Way We Live Now
Huckleberry Finn
The Great Gatsby
Lolita
Money
Wise Children

Least favourite books, in no particular order
Clarissa
Nightmare Abbey
Little Women
Call of the Wild
Housekeeping

"What the?" - Right author, wrong book
Daniel Deronda - George Eliot (Middlemarch is the one most people rate as one of the great novels - though I've yet to read it)
Nostromo - Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness, innit?)
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire or Sebastian Knight for me)
Haroun and the Sea of Stories - Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children makes all the other lists, and I have a soft spot for Shame)
Atonement - Ian McEwan (A close call, but Enduring Love is a remarkable book)

"Where the hell?" - Books that should be there, but aren't
The Monk - M.G.Lewis (Hilariously OTT gothic romp)
The Awakening - Kate Chopin (Everyone on my degree course loved it, no-one else has ever heard of it)
P.G.Wodehouse - The Inimitable Jeeves (My knowledge of PGW is scant, but surely he's one of the greatest of all comic writers?)
On Broadway - Damon Runyon (Short stories but with a novelistic feel, I'm saying. S'Wonderful)
Graham Swift - Waterland (Stunning stuff both technically and emotionally)
Not to mention American Psycho, Downriver, Possession, the Regeneration trilogy, The English Patient, Nice Work etc ad nauseam.....

See the full list with my comments at http://www.angelfire.com/oz/tomgoodfellow/Top100Novels.htm

As to what's next? I was thinking about this...