CLC’S TOP 125 BOOKS OF ALL TIME
This Spring Term, to celebrate 125 years since the Main Library was completed, we asked the College community to nominate their 10 favourite books that a CLC girl might want to read.
Some 185 voters – students, parents, staff and Guild members – collectively cast 1,383 votes for 779 books, and we can now confirm the 125 most popular recommendations. These books form the CLC 125 Reading List for pupils to enjoy during their seven years at College.
- Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
- Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
- The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
- Harry Potter - JK Rowling
- Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
- To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
- Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
- Animal Farm - George Orwell
- The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
- The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
- The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
- The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
- The Secret History - Donna Tartt
- Malory Towers - Enid Blyton
- Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
- The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
- A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini
- The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern
- The Tattooist of Auschwitz - Heather Morris
- Murder Most Unladylike - Robin Stevens
- Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
- Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
- Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
- Girl, Woman, Other - Bernardine Evaristo
- Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
- The Selection - Kiera Cass
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
- The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
- The Alchemist - Paolo Coelho
- Boy - Roald Dahl
- The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
- One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
- Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank
- Becoming - Michelle Obama
- This is Going to Hurt - Adam Kay
- The Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
- Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
- Middlemarch - George Eliot
- A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
- Beloved - Toni Morrison
- Lord of the Flies - William Golding
- A Long Walk to Freedom - Nelson Mandela
- Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China - Jung Chang
- One of Us Is Lying - Karen M McManus
- Six of Crows - Leigh Bardugo
- Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
- The Outsider - Albert Camus
- Dracula - Bram Stoker
- Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
- Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
- When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
- The Complete Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Hate U Give - Angie Thomas
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon
- Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Purple Hibiscus - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter
- The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende
- Throne of Glass - Sarah J Maas
- Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami
- Monstrous Regiment - Terry Pratchett
- A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
- The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller
- Sophie’s World - Jostein Gaarder
- The Colour Purple - Alice Walker
- Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens
- My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante
- Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine - Gail Honeyman
- A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder - Holly Jackson
- Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
- The Giver - Lois Lowry
- Noughts and Crosses - Malorie Blackman
- Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi
- Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
- All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr
- The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
- The Trial - Franz Kafka
- Odyssey - Homer
- Atonement - Ian McEwan
- Holes - Louis Sachar
- Kensuke’s Kingdom - Michael Morpurgo
- Perfume - Patrick Süskind
- Watership Down - Richard Adams
- Good Omens - Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
- A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
- Candide - Voltaire
- Life of Pi - Yann Martel
- Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
- A Monster Calls - Patrick Ness
- Educated - Tara Westover
- Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari
- The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
- A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking
- When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit - Judith Kerr
- His Dark Materials - Phillip Pullman
- Grimm’s Fairy Tales - The Brothers Grimm
- The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
- Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
- And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie
- Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie
- Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
- Normal People - Sally Rooney
- Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
- The Poet X - Elizabeth Acevedo
- Chinese Cinderella - Adeline Yen Mah
- Wonder - RJ Palacio
- Winnie-the-Pooh - AA Milne
- The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón
- The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
- The Help - Kathryn Stockett
- The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett
- White Teeth - Zadie Smith
- A Room with a View - EM Forster
- Orlando - Virginia Woolf
- Once - Morris Gleitzman
- Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson
- Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
- Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts
- A Woman of No Importance - Sonia Purnell
- The Dark Tower - Stephen King
- Romeo and Juliet - William Shakespeare
Top 125 books poster click here