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. 

  1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
  2. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
  3. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
  4. Harry Potter - JK Rowling
  5. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
  6. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
  7. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
  8. Animal Farm - George Orwell
  9. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
  10. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
  11. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
  12. The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
  13. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
  14. Malory Towers - Enid Blyton
  15. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
  16. The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
  17. A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini
  18. The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern
  19. The Tattooist of Auschwitz - Heather Morris
  20. Murder Most Unladylike - Robin Stevens
  21. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
  22. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
  23. Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
  24. Girl, Woman, Other - Bernardine Evaristo
  25. Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
  26. The Selection - Kiera Cass
  27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
  28. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
  29. The Alchemist - Paolo Coelho
  30. Boy - Roald Dahl
  31. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
  32. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
  33. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
  34. Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank
  35. Becoming - Michelle Obama
  36. This is Going to Hurt - Adam Kay
  37. The Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
  38. Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
  39. Middlemarch - George Eliot
  40. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
  41. Beloved - Toni Morrison
  42. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
  43. A Long Walk to Freedom - Nelson Mandela
  44. Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  45. Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China - Jung Chang
  46. One of Us Is Lying - Karen M McManus
  47. Six of Crows - Leigh Bardugo
  48. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
  49. The Outsider - Albert Camus
  50. Dracula - Bram Stoker
  51. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
  52. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
  53. When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi
  54. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
  55. The Complete Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
  56. The Hate U Give - Angie Thomas
  57. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon
  58. Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  59. Purple Hibiscus - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  60. The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter
  61. The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende
  62. Throne of Glass - Sarah J Maas
  63. Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami
  64. Monstrous Regiment - Terry Pratchett
  65. A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
  66. The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller
  67. Sophie’s World - Jostein Gaarder
  68. The Colour Purple - Alice Walker
  69. Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens
  70. My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante
  71. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine - Gail Honeyman
  72. A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder - Holly Jackson
  73. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
  74. The Giver - Lois Lowry
  75. Noughts and Crosses - Malorie Blackman
  76. Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi
  77. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
  78. All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr
  79. The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  80. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
  81. The Trial - Franz Kafka
  82. Odyssey - Homer
  83. Atonement - Ian McEwan
  84. Holes - Louis Sachar
  85. Kensuke’s Kingdom - Michael Morpurgo
  86. Perfume - Patrick Süskind
  87. Watership Down - Richard Adams
  88. Good Omens - Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
  89. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
  90. Candide - Voltaire
  91. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
  92. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
  93. A Monster Calls - Patrick Ness
  94. Educated - Tara Westover
  95. Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari
  96. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
  97. A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking
  98. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit - Judith Kerr
  99. His Dark Materials - Phillip Pullman
  100. Grimm’s Fairy Tales - The Brothers Grimm
  101. The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
  102. Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
  103. And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie
  104. Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie
  105. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
  106. Normal People - Sally Rooney
  107. Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
  108. The Poet X - Elizabeth Acevedo
  109. Chinese Cinderella - Adeline Yen Mah
  110. Wonder - RJ Palacio
  111. Winnie-the-Pooh - AA Milne
  112. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón
  113. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
  114. The Help - Kathryn Stockett
  115. The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett
  116. White Teeth - Zadie Smith
  117. A Room with a View - EM Forster
  118. Orlando - Virginia Woolf
  119. Once - Morris Gleitzman
  120. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson
  121. Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
  122. Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts
  123. A Woman of No Importance - Sonia Purnell
  124. The Dark Tower - Stephen King
  125. Romeo and Juliet - William Shakespeare

    Top 125 books poster click here
9 March 2021