The Top 10 novels on Abebooks since 2000

1. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

3. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

4. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

5. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

6. Night by Elie Wiesel

7. Lord of the Flies by William Golding

8. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

9. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

10. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling

 (Next come Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury)

I've read 1, 2, 7, 9 and 10 plus Fahrenheit 451, all worth the effort, and would like to read the other non-Potter ones. I've missed out three non-novels from the original list of 100 here)

To kill a mockingbird Harper Lee

In my ongoing project of catching up on books I've missed I have just read Harper Lee's To kill a mockingbird. I was on the Southbank the other week and just over the millennium bridge a man was selling battered paperbacks and a picked up a copy for £2.50. I started reading it the other week and since my unforeseen circumstances kicked in have been able to complete it already. Its reputation as a fine novel is deserved. Because it is written through a child's eyes it is understandably a GCSE favourite. Set in the thirties in the southern states it first appeared in 1963. I had assumed it would be tackling the whole race question head on but is much more powerful for being very oblique. Perhaps the most powerful moment is when a racist woman denounces Hitler. The mockingbird theme is done very lightly and the Boo Radley theme keeps interest while at the same time giving the treatment of the subject breadth. A Shakespeare moment indeed.