Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Meme

I haven't been tagged, I saw it on An Open Letter by a Feminist and decided to do it, it looks interesting.

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
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien x +
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling x +
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee x +
6 The Bible *
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x +
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman x+
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens tried to read, failed.
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott tried to read, failed.
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy tried to read, failed - started at school. hated it with a passion.
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller x
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare i've read some. I love a Midsumemr Nights dream
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier tried to read, failed - started at school. hated it with a passion.
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien x
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
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 x
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (maybe read as a child)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (maybe read as a child)
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 x+ (a duplicate of # 33 surely?)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden x
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (maybe read as a child)
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 x
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding x
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan x
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel x
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 x +
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
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold x
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
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 x
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 (I was a famous 5 kid)
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks x +
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


I've read rather a lot. And appear to have liked/loved most of them. And don't want to read many of the others.

5 comments:

SallyP said...

Well, I've read all the Jane Austin, the Bronte sisters and Dickens and actually liked them. I've read Little Women a dozen times, not to mention the two sequels. But never much of the modern stuff, because I'm just an old fuddy duddy.

Sea-of-Green said...

Nothing wrong with being a fuddy duddy. :-) This is an interesting list. I'm gonna run with it, Saranga, and see how my reading history stacks up.

Baal said...

I've probably read more than one hundred books in the last year and a half and I have to say, I've read precious few of these so called must reads. I find most of the so called classics musty and boring. There also seems to be hardly anything illuminating the non-white viewpoint and zero of the non-straight lifestyle. Apparently I don't give a crap what the person at the BBC thinks because he or she clearly could care less about anything resembling diversity.

googum said...

I wouldn't worry, Baal: I'm a reasonably intelligent straight white guy, and I barely hit 21. Most of the books there I could care less about, honestly. (Confederacy, 5 people, a bunch more.) It's not a hard-and-fast must read, it's an opinion.

Saranga said...

Baal: I agree with you re a lot of classics being musty. I don't think I've comeplted one of the classics (hardy, dickens etc) and to be honest they bore me to tears.

I should really find out why and how this list was composed. I say should, I really mean could.