Here's the list that was making the rounds on Facebook about two years ago. I never did confirm that this list was actually from the BBC. Perhaps I'll do that now. I did make a note at the bottom that this was a "half-baked list", at best, given that it includes Mitch Albom's Five People You Meet in Heaven. Also, that Shakespeare appears a few times on the list, sometimes listing a particular style of play for which he is known and sometimes listing specifics, e.g. Hamlet., is distracting and haphazard. It's that kind of inaccuracy that makes me think it didn't come from the BBC. Why the New Testament and not the whole Bible? No Bagavhad Gita? No Talmud. A Euro-centric list with a random American thrown in, but few other ethnicities. Get my drift? Still, it's a list guaranteed to stir up conversation!
BBC - 100 Books.
Originally Posted
by Mary Alice Holmes on Friday, March 13, 2009 at 2:05pm
The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?
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.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen- x
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien – x
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - I started it.
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling – (shouldn't this count as 7 books :)?X +
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee- X +
6 The Bible (New Testament) - X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte – I tried
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy - X
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - X
14 Shakespeare – X – um, how much?
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk - X
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - (every two years or so) X+
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - X
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot X
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - X+
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald- X ++ (and so we beat on, boats against the current…)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens - *
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - X(and So long and Thanks for all the Fish and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and Long, Dark Teatime of the Soul and Last Chance to See. Should this count as four?)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh - 2012 note: Now that I have seen Downton Abbey on PBS I may have to read this one!
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky And yet The Brothers Karamazov which I have read is not on this list!
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - X
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - X
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - X
3
8 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - X
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 - X
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - X
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 -
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert – oh dear God. Seriously?
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - X
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Set
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 - X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez – X ("It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.")
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - X
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt - X
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold - X
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - X (in French and English)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - X (Consumed whilst on the road in Paris)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy – X+
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X (Although I much preferred "Captain Ahab's WIfe")
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 - X
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 - X
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom (Are they kidding?)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad *
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - X (In French and English)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams - X (Read whilst in England near Watership Down)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole – I tried but couldn’t finish
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare – X (Didn’t we cover this above?)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - X (again, in French and English)
This is a half-baked list at best.
I'm at 61, not including the several that I started but never finished.And I think I should get extra credit for the ones I read in another language! But that's just me.
Comments from Friends:
Kathleen Z: And don't forget all the Ernest Hemmingway you've read that is curiously missing from the list. Brits!
March 13, 2009 at 2:45pm
ElizaBeth C: I think seeing the movies of some of these should count....
March 13, 2009 at 3:49pm
Laurel W: 47 and one half!...never got all the way through les mis! That is better than one per year given that I couldn't read until I was 5!
March 13, 2009 at 4:59pm
Laurel W: It's too much work to copy and repaste!
March 13, 2009 at 5:03pm
Rich B: I thought I read alot. Only read a quarter of these...
March 13, 2009 at 5:33pm
Tricia M: Kind of an odd list...War and Peace AND Bridget Jones Diary?
March 14, 2009 at 9:22am
Jane D: Do we get extra points for having read them multiple times and teaching them? Not surprising, MA, that you and I have read so many of the same titles. My total is 69, but like on your list, there are a few I started, then didn't finish.
March 14, 2009 at 1:36pm
Alexa B: 43, with probably another dozen that I couldn't bear and didn't finish..sketchy list - my father would be appalled to hear that I got points for The Da Vinci Code but not for Ulysses..
March 14, 2009 at 3:33pm
Mary Alice: And my father would've been appalled that I got credit for Bridget Jones' Diary and not for War & Peace. But, seriously, do they really consider "Five People You Meet in Heaven" to be worthy of reading? Who are these people?
March 14, 2009 at 6:56pm