The book meme

[dimity_blue]

Blaired from gillyp.

The BBC allegedly believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. Gilly added: underline those that are defo on your 'to read' list.

Like Gilly, I find it hard to believe the BBC think people will only have read 6 of these. Maybe they polled people who just don't read?



1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
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 - had to read this for English literature. Not one I'll be reading again.
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 - I found the film boring. Way too long and overblown.
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
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 - This must be the only Jane Austen book I haven't read yet.
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - Why isn't this covered by the Chronicles of Narnia? It's the second book in the series!
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
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - Another I won't be reading again. Had to read it for English, and hated it.
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
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
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 - I liked the film enough, but not enough to read the book.
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
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
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
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - I love the Holmes stories.
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
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 - Another I won't re-read. I saw the film and had nightmares.
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
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Comments

And once again

[gillyp.livejournal.com]

Please read The Secret History! It's a gorgeous, fabulous, glory of a book.

Re: And once again

[dimity-blue.livejournal.com]

I hadn't even heard of it before. I've checked Amazon, and I can get it for £1.76 - 1p plus postage. :oD I'll check it out.

Thanks, Gilly

Re: And once again

[gillyp.livejournal.com]

I really hope you enjoy it. It blew me away.

[tx-cronopio.livejournal.com]

I'm at 59 -- I'd be higher if they hadn't front-loaded it with so much Dickens.

And what an odd list, anyway. Dune? Bridget Jones Diary? These are hardly the classics of the ages.

[dimity-blue.livejournal.com]

I only got 30 - I was surprised. I've read a few Dickens, but not that many. A lot of the books listed just aren't my style though.

I agree with it being an odd list though. Was Bridget Jones's Diary that good? I've only seen the film, and while I enjoyed it, I'd never call it a classic.

And what puzzles me is that they have the Chronicles of Narnia, then list The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe separately. What's the point of that??

[tx-cronopio.livejournal.com]

Hee! Yeah, I noticed that about the Narnia books. This list has all the trappings of a list compiled by a committee.

I read BJD sitting in a bar at O'Hare Airport, waiting for a seriously delayed flight. It was the perfect book for that, and I enjoyed it immensely. Still doesn't make it a classic!

[aerianya.livejournal.com]

"what puzzles me is that they have the Chronicles of Narnia, then list The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe separately."

Maybe because many only read the first book(L,W&W),some all seven and some like me stopped at six.
Why is The Iliad or The Odyssey not on this list of classics?
And why The Secret Garden but not Little Lord Fauntleroy or The Little Princess? Why no Mark Twain, Jack London,Ernest Hemingway or H.G.Wells? Bridget Jones Diary instead?
Interesting list though. I have read more than six of these, and a few I actually enjoyed.*g*
Maybe they just picked some sales statistics or something to compile this list.

[dimity-blue.livejournal.com]

Heck, there are a dozen authors who are far more qualified to be on that list but were left off. It could be they went with sales statistics, or just what some unknown guy or committee decided people should have read.

As for TL,TW&TW, I see your point. I just think that if you're listing the single book, there's no point in including the rest as a group.

I love The Little Princess though. I think that was a far better book than The Secret Garden.

[izzie7.livejournal.com]

These lists are just weird. I've read 64 on this list, but what were the criteria they used for selecting these rather than others? Very odd.

[dimity-blue.livejournal.com]

I do not have a clue! I think someone needs to track them down and demand an explanation. :oD

[vamysteryfan.livejournal.com]

After a quick look, I've read about 44 or 45 of them.

It looks like they were trying to include books that weren't just required reading in school, so that it wasn't age limited. Like teenagers would have read Harry Potter, Wind in the Willows, Narnia etc. But I'd love to know how they picked the ones for inclusion.

It did remind me of a few I've been meaning to read.

[dimity-blue.livejournal.com]

But I'd love to know how they picked the ones for inclusion.

So would I! It's such a bizarre collection of books.

Congratulations on the amount of books. I feel like such a slacker for only getting 30 of them!

[tetshira.livejournal.com]

Putting on my guess what I do for a job hat here...

Most of the titles here are whats known as "back lists". These are the books that are year round best sellers through word of mouth, book groups and those people who aren't looking for something in a promo. They are "back" as they don't usually go at the front of the shop in the 3 for 2 promos.
But there are a few that make you go hmmm never sell that one!!

[dimity-blue.livejournal.com]

Now that's interesting. It wonder if that's why most of them were chosen? I wonder how the "non-sellers" got in there though?

Thanks for the info. :oD