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?
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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...
Posted by: J | March 01, 2009 at 08:49 PM
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. ^.^
Posted by: samulli | March 02, 2009 at 04:42 AM
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).
Posted by: Wylie | March 02, 2009 at 10:34 PM
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!
Posted by: Thorne | March 03, 2009 at 03:29 AM
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.
Posted by: Chameleonsdream | March 03, 2009 at 11:47 AM
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.
Posted by: Matthew James Didier | March 05, 2009 at 06:50 PM
I take it this is NOT a 13 list. I've actually read some of these.
Posted by: colleen | March 05, 2009 at 07:48 PM
I only read 18. "I feel like a functional illiterate," she said, hanging her head in shame.
Posted by: The Gal Herself | March 06, 2009 at 09:09 PM
Excellent List. Thanks for posting.
Posted by: Damien Riley | March 09, 2009 at 12:08 AM
Very good list, I'll have to copy it & bold the one's I've read too.
Posted by: Becky68 | March 12, 2009 at 07:18 PM
I want to know who puts together these lists. I hated The Time Traveler's Wife. How we relate to books is so subjective.
Posted by: Shanna | March 26, 2009 at 09:39 AM