1984, George Orwell
Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
Catch 22, Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
I voted for the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy because:
- I wanted to vote for SF, so this was the only choice
- It's probably the book that comes to my thoughts most frquently, of all the 21 options
- It's more experimental in form than any of the others
I was tempted by Pride and Prejudice and His Dark Materials. I suspect that LotR will win, because it is the single obvious choice of a particular group of readers, whereas the votes of a different type of reader will be dispersed between P&P, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, for example.
PS, Philip Pullman should have named the third book in his trilogy 'That Just About Wraps It Up For God' thus neatly tying the metaphysical ends of existence into a nice neat bow.