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A list of teachers’ favourite books compiled by the Times Educational Supplement (TES) has declared Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as number one. Harper Lee’s popular school text, To Kill a Mockingbird, came in second, while JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series came in third.
500 teachers responded to an online survey to name their favourite books, to create a list which TES editor Gerard Kelly called: “a masterpiece of erudition and entertainment” which “could be one of the few things that Michaels Gove and Rosen agree on”.
In the magazine’s leader column, he wrote: “Strip out the children's books, the inclusion of which is only to be expected from people whose job it is to engage children, and what you are left with is a pretty canonical list. There's enough Dickens, Steinbeck, Hardy, Wilde, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hugo and Eliot to satisfy even the most conservative of politicians, and of course, plenty of modern greats: Kerouac, Ishiguro, Roy and Plath, to please the modernists.”
He added: "As a list, I think it's a pretty healthy reflection of a profession that really knows what makes a great book.”
A number of picture books made it into the list, including Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s The Gruffalo, and Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
The top 20 books are:
1. Pride and Prejudice: Jane Austen
2. To Kill a Mockingbird: Harper Lee
3. Harry Potter series: JK Rowling
4. Wuthering Heights: Emily Bronte
5. Jane Eyre: Charlotte Bronte
6. Nineteen Eighty-Four: George Orwell
7. The Lord of the Rings series: JRR Tolkien
8. The Book Thief: Markus Zusak
9. The Hobbit: JRR Tolkien
10. The Great Gatsby: F Scott Fitzgerald
11.. The Kite Runner: Khaled Hosseini
12. The Hunger Games series: Suzanne Collins
13. The Time Traveler's Wife: Audrey Niffenegger
14. The Chronicles of Narnia series CS Lewis
15. Of Mice and Men: John Steinbeck
16. Birdsong: Sebastian Faulks
17. His Dark Materials series: Philip Pullman
18. The Gruffalo: Julia Donaldson+ Axel Scheffler
19. The Catcher in the Rye: JD Salinger
20. Life of Pi: Yann Martel