Have you read any of these books?Where do you fall in the list? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here.
Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. Tag other book nerds.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible (The entire thing!)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
Total: 7
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot X
Total: 5
Total so far: 12
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens X
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
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
Total: 6
Total so far: 18
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy X
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens X
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma- Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
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 X
Total: 6
Total so far: 24
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X
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 X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
Total: 4
Total so far: 28
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons X
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X
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
Total: 5
Total so far: 33
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt X
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 X
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X
Total: 5
Total so far: 38
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce X
76 The Inferno – Dante X
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray X
80 Possession - AS Byatt X
Total: 6
Total so far: 44
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 X
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 X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
Total: 5
Total so far: 49
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole X
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 X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Total: 6
Total totalled: 55
(On Facebook where this appeared, Carrie appended, and I agree about the bias: "Obviously this was put together by the BBC, very British biased in its choices." She also hoped, and I agree if I am that "John"-- "I expect Sheila & John to have the highest score!" And, by the way, there's a lot of middlebrow airport-reading beach paperback dreck here-- People You Meet in Heaven, Dune, Time Traveller's Wife, Bridget Jones's Diary, DaVinci Code, Life of Pi, Kite Runner, John Irving, Alice Sebold, Douglas Adams-- that hardly deserves to share space with Shakespeare. But who on the other hand has read ALL of his works, let alone ALL of the Bible? C'mon...I started a few more I didn't check as finished, by the way.)Photo via "Chalkdust 101" blog by Patrick Higgins, Jr.; credited by him dutifully as originally from: “summer-reading-533.jpg.” Online Image. New York Times. August 7, 2008. May 13, 2009
5 comments:
Odd list, is it not? Strange to find the Bible on the same list as Helen Fielding, when she is so much more entertaining... I ticked very few of them - mostly ones you hadn't!
I ticked such a small number of these---though I can honestly say I have read the whole Bible and the entire Shax canon--that I'm embarrassed to give the number. As often with academic types (I hope you concur with this) I found I could make a reasonable stab at discussing the significance and import of a lot of the books on here I've never actually sat down and read.
At a dinner at Trinity Oxford last xmas I asked a friend's colleague if he had read [insert name of very famous book]. 'Read it?!' he replied, incredulous. 'I've not even taught it!!'
Bo, even "Sir Thomas More"? I'm impressed; but I'm not surprised given your Oxbridge credentials and Renaissance specialty. Good to see standards are enforced. And, I know that certain profs (schooled at the same schools as you) in my own doctoral program insisted that the whole of Holy Writ be read. Strangely, as a medievalist-cum-modernist, they weren't my profs! I'm pretty close with Scripture, but as with "War & Peace," I had to be honest with what I'd started and not finished on the 100 List. I mean, Leviticus, those minor letters by Timothy, Amos, Habbakuk?
VS, it is passing strange to see the Bridget Jones way higher than "Ulysses" there; my Irish American friend on FB who sent me this list commented on its severely British bias and I responded about its chainstore tilt towards such as who bought maybe two "classics" a year. She and I agree the list's skewed by the Beeb to favor mass-market consumers needing beach blanket companions, if any Brits read on Ibiza's shores! Mass transit here shows me how few of L.A.'s hoi polloi read anything at all; but there's oft a Beckettian tramp with a worn KJV in his grimy grip.
Yes, really---I went through a very pious stage as a teenager and read a few chapters everyday for years and years, sequentially. Gah. A lot of stuff about fat cleaving unto the little kidneys, I recall.
Thomas More--you've caught me out. No, I haven't. But the Shax element therein is disputed, as far as I know. I have read things like Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII.
I only made nine on list although Sinead managed 36. There are quite a lot that I have dipped into and never got through... Gatsby, 1984 etc... but as you say it seems to be a very British list, no Beckett... never mind O'Flaherty or Stuart, or even Flann O'Brien for that matter... but then again no DH Lawrence, Kafka or Borges... I'll justify my poor scoring by telling myself that I like edgier writers than those which seem to be read at the Beeb
Post a Comment