Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. Put a '-' after ones you've started but not finished.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen +
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien -
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte x
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible -
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens ? maybe?
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott +
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles Thomas Hardy ? I think
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
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 -
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky x
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck x
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
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 X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - 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 X
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 X
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
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker x
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett x
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce X
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
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 X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker x
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 x
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 Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams x
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 X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl +
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
I'm not counting the ones I've started but not finished because I probably won't ever.
So I guess 35. And maybe 37.
Um...six. Yup. Six.
ReplyDeleteString me up right now for having the gall to think I can be a writer...
I've read about 65 of them. Does that make me a nerd lol?? Well, I was an English major maybe that explains it lol.
ReplyDeleteOh boy. ::gulp:: At the risk of being labeled a severe bookworm with no outside life, I have to admit I've read all of these but three. Can you guess which three those are? And those I haven't read are on my to do list.
ReplyDeleteI did this one before--I believe my answer was 42. Not horrible, but I got a bit more reading to do!
ReplyDeleteI think I've read 7 or 8 of those, but that doesn't phase me. I've read 100's of books I've been interested in - those just aren't on this list.
ReplyDeleteI've read about 40 of them. But you didn't include a symbol for the ones I had to read but utterly despised. Watership Down.
ReplyDeleteI'm with Lia. There were some I'm pretty sure I read, but purged with brain bleach. The ones I've read more than once and own number 39. Actually, I own a couple on there I haven't counted since I haven't finished them.
ReplyDeleteI did this on Facebook! Hee hee. Hmm. I haven't read nearly as many as I should, but I cracked up that they threw in books like Bridget Jones and Harry Potter in that last.
ReplyDeleteI ended up at 24 read, 11 started but never finished, and 5 never read but want to. There were a couple places where I read the author, but not the book listed (like Victor Hugo and John Irving). I'm always a little surprised at the missing authors on lists like these - like Hemingway and Rand on this one. *shrug*
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm with Lia. There should be a category for books you wish you could scrub out of your memory. ;o)
I wondered also how Harry and Bridget could be classics already.
ReplyDeleteI read 42 of those. How in the world did they come up with that list? It's so random. And stupid--how is Hamlet not covered under the Complete Works of Shakespeare listing?
ReplyDeleteI've read 52 and I'm not planning on reading a whole lot more from that list :)
ReplyDelete68 and can I just say I'm STUNNED to see Swallows and Amazons on there? Nobody I know has ever even heard of it!
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, I've read the entire works of William Shakespeare, just don't ask me to quote them. LOL.
FWIW, this is not a Best list or a Recommended list...I poked around online after I saw this list on Facebook, and from what I can tell, this is a corruption of a BBC list of the favorite books of modern Brits (that is, those who voted.) That explains the lack of certain major authors -- they're either not loved so much, or not as big on the British curriculum. It also explains the large number of recent books on the list, and of children's books on the list (Swallows and Amazons, indeed!)
ReplyDeleteAnd the "corruption" of the original BBC list explains why it lists the Narnia books, but also lists The Lion The Witch & the Wardrobe separately...and why it lists Complete Shakespeare but also Hamlet...
FWIW, I've read about 38 of these!
Cara
Cara thinks I'm corrupted.
ReplyDeleteI did this on Facebook and had read 52.
ReplyDeleteNot great, but definitely more than 6.
Cara thinks I'm corrupted.
ReplyDeleteThe truth hurts, doesn't it, Gwen? ;-)
Just kidding! You're chock full of integrity. It's Facebook that's an infinitely corrupting (and alluring) creature... :->
I've actually read everything but:
ReplyDeleteBirdsong - Sebastian Faulks,
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute,
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks,
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell,
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome, Germinal - Emile Zola,
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
Does that make me an uber-nerd?
On that list, I had read 43 of the titles. Another dozen or so are either partially complete or on my "To Read" list. Not too bad . . .
ReplyDelete