100 books

I often drop in at  Thinking About…  where Julie puts up interesting and entertaining posts.  Not so very long ago she reproduced a list of books that the BBC website had shown some months ago.  There are 100 titles in all and the BBC, or whoever is in charge of this sort of thing at the BBC, reckon that most people (maybe they meant British people, as opposed to people in the English speaking word.  Anyway, I am eligible in either case) will have read only six of them.  Here is the list, and I have used bold print for the ones I have actually read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen   One of those books I was forced to read at school.

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien   I managed 12 chapters before giving up.

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible -  I haven’t read all of it; just bits of it here and there when I was at school 30+ years ago.  Haven't looked at it since.

7 Wuthering Heights -Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell   I read this with little enjoyment, but out of a sense that I ought to read it sooner or later.

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens  My fave Dickens book.

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare  Obviously I haven’t read every play, poem and sonnet.  Just some.

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams    Absolutely brilliant!

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown   How on earth does this ridiculous book make the list?

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men- John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie   I find Rushdie all very worthy, but quite unreadable.

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Bank

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare   I’m not sure why this is mentioned, since Shakespeare’s Complete Works are already on the list.

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So, there you are.  I make my total 29.  Out of the books I haven’t read there are a few I would like to read, some I think I ought to but probably never will, and several that I have no plans ever to read (Les Miserables and Moby Dick, for example, and the children’s books).  And then there are some I have never even heard of.  How many have you read?
.

Comments

[J]

I think I came in at 44...there aren't many on the list that I haven't read that I would like to read, but there are a few. I'd be interested to know what yours are.

Regarding the Da Vinci Code, I couldn't agree more. I wonder if they're just citing popular books, not necessarily good ones...

[samulli]

If I counted correctly I have read 47 of those, though a couple of them I didn't finish and 2 or 3 of them I wish I never even started. *blech*
Just like with the Shakespeare Complete Works + Hamlet, they also list C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia and also The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (which is the first part of the Narnia Chronicles).
And I agree about the preposterousness of The Da Vinci Code. A bit of a random list, if you ask me. ^.^

[Wylie]

I'm at 30 1/2 (I couldn't, for the life of me, finish Moby Dick). There were 3 more I picked up and couldn't get past chapter one so I didn't count them, and I've seen the movie versions of about 10 more (yes, I know, not good enough, which is why I didn't count them).

[Thorne]

Hahaha! The DaVinci code was tossed in simply because it's a contemporary bestseller, not to mention controversial. Yes, Brown's writing skill pretty much sux, but he sure understood marketability! I'm up at my place with the list. I count 63, but there are a few that sound pretty familiar. I didn't count them if I couldn't remember at least vaguely what they were about. Haha! Fun stuff!

[Chameleonsdream]

I've read 68 of them - my list is up at http://www.notmymothersblog.com. I agree that it is a pretty random list - heavy on the "classics", but the newer stuff seems to have been plucked off someone's bookshelf.

[Matthew James Didier]

I saw that list... and immediately felt a tiny bit of my intellectual ego take wind thanks to a significant lacking of literary endeavours... well, according to The Beeb... and I agree, The DaVinci Code was just something to allow the masses to POSSIBLY say, "Ooo! I gots one!" (or at least say, "I saw the Tom Hanks flick, does that count?")

If they HAD to include that, they might as well included "The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail"... but only the pop-up version.

[colleen]

I take it this is NOT a 13 list. I've actually read some of these.

[The Gal Herself]

I only read 18. "I feel like a functional illiterate," she said, hanging her head in shame.

[Damien Riley]

Excellent List. Thanks for posting.

[Becky68]

Very good list, I'll have to copy it & bold the one's I've read too.

[Shanna]

I want to know who puts together these lists. I hated The Time Traveler's Wife. How we relate to books is so subjective.