As seen at Anastasia's.
BBC Book List
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.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X+
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X+
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - Well, I've read parts... and I've heard parts, being raised Catholic and all... but not the whole thing, no.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X+
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X+
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - I've read all of the sonnets, Venus and Adonis, most of the tragedies, a fair number of the histories, and most of the comedies. I think I'm happy with that amount 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 X
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot - I've always meant to read it... but I've never been able to make myself. I suspect it will remain a book that I own that I do not read. Because I'm lazy.
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - This is another one I own, because a boyfriend bought it for me, and it's one that subsequent boy-types have insisted that I read. I suspect I will never read it just because I'm contrary.
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh X+
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy X
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis Not all of them, but some... as an adult, because I felt lame for not having read them.
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
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 X
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - X+ Not only did I read this one, but I read the whole series. Rilla of Ingleside, anyone? Yeah, that's right. I doubted you shared my commitment :)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X+
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan- Another I own, and really should read.... but having seen the movie... well, we'll see.
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert -
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
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
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 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 X+
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy X+
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X+
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie X+
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - X+ Indeed, I loved it so much that it was my first casualty in the world of library fines.
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce X+ Though I love it not just for itself, and think most people who would claim that they do are big fat liars.
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath X - I don't love it now, but I did when I was 18.
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt X+
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 X It is a GORGEOUS book, but it takes more than gorgeousness for me to love something.
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - X
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 Some of them
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
1 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
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 - X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Total read: 44 (if I counted correctly)
Total I plan to read: I think I only asterisked one... and even that I'm not terribly committed to.
I may not be the best audience for this meme though, as a) I'm an English professor, and b) a large number of the books are in my wheelhouse of specialization or right next door to it.
12 years ago
8 comments:
It's weird to have the collected Shakespeare AND then also Hamlet. People like me get a freebie or something. Same with the Chronicles of Narnia and the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe (which is the first book).
I'm guessing if we English prof types read so much, there are folks who don't read many at all. But they're probably not reading this blog, I'm guessing?
I kept tracing it back because I was looking for an uncluttered list. What I found was the original list at http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml which was simply a list of favorites submitted by BBC fans. There's no reckoning how many people might or might not have read. As it happens, I have read 23 of the original list.
I posted the original on my blog at http://www.killer-reads.blogspot.com but can't change who I'm posting as to reflect that.
I read 42, which isn't bad for someone on the other side of the academy from English. Some of the authors aren't represented by their strongest books. While Iain Banks' The Bridge and Consider Phlebas are great, The Wasp Factory was his first novel and one of his worst.
I read more than I expected, given it's a list from the hoity toity BBC, which is good I guess. But I had to leave a comment because I TOTALLY read the whole Anne of Green Gables series, all the way through Rilla. They currently reside on a shelf in La Dudarina's room so she can read them one day too :).
Awesome, awesome, awesome Kate! I love that I have a fellow AGG devotee (who's really committed, as opposed to those people who think three books is the whole thing) person! And yay for La Dudarina! She will think that they are so awesome, when the time comes, of course....
I was surprised by how many I had read (about 40). The undergrad degree is in German so my reading background is always a bit off, even though I am in English, albeit comp/rhet, now. My literary points of reference just don't match up. However, I could have had more if different novels were listed for some of those authors.
And go AGG readers! I am happy to hear of people outside of the children's lit world who know the later books, especially in the US; I suspect they are more widely read in Canada. We must spread the love!
They probably are more widely read in Canada, and even in the children's lit world. BUT -- dude if you're in, you're in, at 10 or 11 years old. That was me. I was totally in with the Anne of Green Gables. Not because I watched the mini-series on PBS (though I have, later) but because my grandma bought me those first three and I was hooked. How could I stop with the first 3? Lucy Maude Montgomery RULES!!!
Ack - I feel like an uneducated slacker. I am embarrassed to admit I have read only 26. This list pointed out what I had casually observed about my English courses in high school - they were sorely lacking across the board in exploring works by female authors (neither of the Brontes, no Austen). When I started seeking our female writers in my early undergrad years, I gravitated to nonfiction feminist works. I actually still lean overwhelmingly in the direction of nonfiction.
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