List :: The Big Read by BBC

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  #21

  Gone with the Wind

  by Margaret Mitchell

  (22 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 16

  606 points

  "Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm, as the Tarleton twins were."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
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  #22

  Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

  by J. K. Rowling

  (45 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 69

  252 points

  "Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
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  #23

  Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

  by J. K. Rowling

  (27 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 270

  78 points

  "Not for the first time, an argument had broken out over breakfast at number four, Privet Drive."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
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  #24

  Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

  by J. K. Rowling

  (26 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 276

  77 points

  "Harry Potter was a highly unusual boy in many ways."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
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  #25

  The Hobbit

  by J. R. R. Tolkien

  (29 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 47

  322 points

  "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to..."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
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  #26

  Tess of the D'Urbervilles

  by Thomas Hardy

  (13 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 51

  315 points

  "On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
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  #27

  Middlemarch

  by George Eliot

  (12 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 21

  519 points

  "Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not..."

  

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  #28

  A Prayer for Owen Meany

  by John Irving

  (8 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 53

  311 points

  "I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but..."

  

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  #29

  The Grapes of Wrath

  by John Steinbeck

  (35 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 2

  963 points

  "To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth."

  

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  #30

  Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass

  by Lewis Carroll

  (24 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 45

  327 points

  "Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do; once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or..."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It