The results garnered a very mixed response. The absence of poetry and the small number of women writers was lamented.

Germaine Greer, writing in Waterstones in-house magazine W (Winter/Spring 1997) commented, "Ever since I arrived at Cambridge as a student in 1964 and encountered a tribe of full-grown women wearing puffed sleeves, clutching teddies and babbling excitedly about the doings of Hobbits, it has been my nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the twentieth century. The bad dream has materialised."

Analysis of the list certainly showed up some interesting choices. Childrens books feature, including The Hobbit, Winnie the Pooh, Wind in the Willows, The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe and of course four Roald Dahl titles. Fiction makes up the bulk of the list, the non-fiction that does appear is mostly autobiography (a form of non-fiction more fictitious than most according to Greer), although Stephen Hawkings´ A Brief History of Time and Richard Dawkins´, The Selfish Gene represent science and Delia Smith´s Complete Cookery Course appears at number 83.

The list is obviously slanted towards British writers and great American writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner and John Updike don´t feature. So, having said all that, and as we know, one man's list is another's nightmare, here's the top 100.

So, how many have you read?

1. The lord of the rings. J.R.R. Tolkien
2. 1984. George Orwell
3. Animal farm. George Orwell
4. Ulysses. James Joyce
5. Catch-22. Joseph Heller
6. The catcher in the rye. J.D. Salinger
7. To kill a mockingbird. Harper Lee
8. One hundred years of solitude. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9. The grapes of wrath. John Steinbeck
10. Trainspotting. Irvine Welsh
11. Wild swans. Jung Chang
12. The great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald
13. The lord of the flies. William Golding
14. On the road. Jack Kerouac
15. Brave new world. Aldous Huxley
16. The wind in the willows. Kenneth Grahame
17. Winnie the Pooh. A.A. Milne
18. The colour purple. Alice Walker
19. The hobbit. J.R.R. Tolkien
20. The outsider. Albert Camus
21. The lion, the witch and the wardrobe. C.S. Lewis
22. The trial. Franz Kafka
23. Gone with the wind. Margaret Mitchell
24. The hitchhiker´s guide to the galaxy. Douglas Adams
25. Midnight´s children. Salman Rushdie
26. The diary of Anne Frank. Anne Frank
27. A clockwork orange. Anthony Burgess
28. Sons and lovers. D.H. Lawrence
29. To the lighthouse. Virginia Woolf
30. If this is a man. Primo Levi
31. Lolita. Vladimir Nabokov
32. The wasp factory. Iain Banks
33. A la recherche du temps perdu. Marcel Proust
34. Charlie and the chocolate factory. Roald Dahl
35. Of mice and men. John Steinbeck
36. Beloved. Toni Morrison
37. Possession. A.S. Byatt
38. The heart of darkness. Joseph Conrad
39. A passage to India. E.M. Forster
40. Watership down. Richard Adams
41. Sophie´s world. Jostein Gaarder
42. The name of the rose. Umberto Eco
43. Love in a time of cholera. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. Rebecca. Daphne du Maurier
45. The remains of the day. Kazuo Ishiguro
46. The unbearable lightness of being. Milan Kundera
47. Birdsong. Sebastian Faulks
48. Howard´s End. E.M. Forster
49. Brideshead revisited. Evelyn Waugh
50. A suitable boy. Vikram Seth
51. Dune. Frank Herbert
52. A prayer for Owen Meany. John Irvine
53. Perfume. Patrick Süskind
54. Doctor Zhivago. Boris Pasternak
55. Gormenghast. Mervyn Peake
56. Cider with Rosie. Laurie Lee
57. The bell jar. Sylvia Plath
58. The handmaid´s tale. Margaret Atwood
59. Testament of youth. Vera Brittain
60. The Magus. John Fowles
61. Brighton Rock. Graham Greene
62. The ragged-trousered philanthropists. Robert Tressell
63. The master and Margarita. Mikhail Bulgakov
64. Tales from the city. Armistead Maupin
65. The French Lieutenant´s woman. John Fowles
66. Captain Corelli´s Mandolin. Louis de Bernières
67. Slaughterhouse 5. Kurt Vonnegut
68. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. Robert Pirsig
69. A room with a view. E.M. Forster
70. Lucky Jim. Kingsley Amis
71. It. Stephen King
72. The power and the glory. Graham Greene
73. The stand. Stephen King
74. All quiet on the western front. Erich Maria Remarque
75. Paddy Clarke ha ha ha. Roddy Doyle
76. Matilda. Roald Dahl
77. American psycho. Bret Easton Ellis
78. Fear and loathing in Las Vegas. Hunter S. Thompson
79. A brief history of time. Stephen Hawking
80. James and the Giant Peach. Roald Dahl
81. Lady Chatterley´s Lover. D.H. Lawrence
82. The bonfire of the vanities. Tom Wolfe
83. Complete cookery course. Delia Smith
84. An evil cradling. Brian Keenan
85. The rainbow. D.H. Lawrence
86. Down and out in Paris and London. George Orwell
87. 2001 - a space odyssey. Arthur C. Clarke
88. The tin drum. Günter Grass
89. A day in the life of Ivan Denisovich. Alexander Solzhenitsyn
90. Long walk to freedom. Nelson Mandela
91. The selfish gene. Richard Dawkins
92. Jurassic Park. Michael Crichton
93. The Alexandria quartet. Lawrence Durrell
94. Cry the beloved country. Alan Paton
95. High fidelity. Nick Hornby
96. The van. Roddy Doyle
97. The BFG. Roald Dahl
98. Earthly powers. Anthony Burgess
99. I, Claudius. Robert Graves
100. The horse whisperer. Nicholas Evans