Seen all over the blogosphere...
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.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
(my addition - by the ones I detested)
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X+
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X+
6 The Bible X+
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X -
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X
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 X+
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
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens X
33 Chronicles of Narnia X
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
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 - X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
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 X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X
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
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - X
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 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 X (in French!)
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 -
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (but I saw it on Broadway...guess that doesn't count)
I've read 32--not great but better than the BBC expected...I always wonder what criteria they use in making lists like these. It is true that I haven't read a lot of books that I'm "supposed" to have read. Some of the admissions are a bit embarrassing....like I've never read any Jane Austen. But I've also read lots of stuff that's not on here.
6 comments:
I'll bite. See the results at my place.
I've read 38. My list is also totally Austen-free... Go figure.
I've also never read Austen. I've tried. I can't get through it.
I LOVE A Prayer for Owen Meany. One of my top 5 books ever. (The other 4 change from time to time, but I've loved that since I was 16.)
There are many books on this list that I *wish* to read, but just haven't. I, too, am Austen-less. I think the language is a big put off. I also read The Confederacy of Dunces, which I thought was just awful. I read it for a book club and had to reward myself for each chapter read in order to complete it.
I've been reading short stories by Nobokov lately so I'm sure I'll hit Lolita soon.
I've read 73 of the works listed, haven't placed the pluses next to those I loved, though I'd say it would be close to have of them. It breaks my heart to hear that "most people" haven't read them.. but then again, I had to compensate for the lack of interest in the schools my daughter attended, by making up reading lists for her, and discussing them with her. I am thankful for the English Lit teachers I had in junior and senior high.
I should have read the comments prior to posting. I have loved Jane Austen's novels since I was a teenager, she's still among my favorites. The only suggestion I can make is to dive right in and give her characters and stories a chance. I'll lay odds that you'll be pulled in. Love Thomas Hardy as well.
My least favorite read was On the Road, by Kerouac. I found him to be a thoroughly immature, selfish and shallow person.. nothing worthwhile about the man or his writing.
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