Blog friend, artist and generally wonderful person Ampersand Duck alerted me to the BBC's list of 100 books, and because I'm sitting here trying to avoid going off and doing any more bloody boring financial thingummies I'm allowing myself to be diverted by the exercise! I've already cleaned the toilet and both cars so things must be really bad...
Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.
Instructions:
Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.
Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. Lord of the Rings – JR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible (yes, as a child I read the entire thing, cover to cover. Yawn)
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (absolutely HATED it)
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell ('A' level set text) - in 1984!)
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
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 ('O' level set text in 1982)
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
28. 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 (not in a million years, thank you)
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
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 (I just can't get into Dickens somehow...)
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 (read it at school, to the great consternation of my teachers!)
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 (god that was hard going)
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 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
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazu 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 (hmm, I've read the back cover - does that count?)
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton (nope, not going to happen)
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
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 ('A' level set text in 1984)
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
So where does that leave me? If I counted correctly I've read 67 of the 100 books listed and excerpts from a further 3. I think that leaves me with a BIG reading list! Talking of the BBC, I was just looking on their website and found notice of an upcoming programme called "The Beauty of Old Books". I'll have to look out for the podcast...
3 comments:
Hmm ... they have low standards if they think people will have read just 6 of them! I've read 80% of them - must be a bookworm too!
67!!! That's amazing! Congratulations! I was surprised (& actually rather pleased) to find that I've read 32 (I think) and started another 7. That's not bad considering its a BBC list - I think I'd do better with one that included some Aussie authors!! And I'd be interested to know how they got their figure of 6.
Mind you, you just have to read the whole Narnia series to crack the 6 books...
You definitely have to read Birdsong by S Faulks. It's a ripper of a read.
And try some of the Australian list too... good reads abounding, all good distractions from accounts (which is why I haven't done mine for AGES).
WV= imonal (which is a direct result of being hormonal)
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