Which of the BBC 100 ‘classic’ books have I read? As blogged by Thaeydiddlediddle. If you want the book list and instructions in clean html format, grab it here.
Instructions:
- Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
- Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
- Star ‘*’ those you plan on reading.
- Tally your total at the bottom.
- Tag your bookish friends including the person whose list you saw!
The List:
- Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen x
- The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien x+
- Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte x
- Harry Potter series – JK Rowling x+
- To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee x
- The Bible – Various Artists x (some)
- Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
- Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell x+
- His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman x+
- Great Expectations – Charles Dickens x
- Little Women – Louisa M Alcott x
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
- Catch 22 – Joseph Heller x
- Complete Works of Shakespeare x (some)
- Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
- The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien x+
- Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
- Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger x+
- The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
- Middlemarch – George Eliot
- Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell x+
- The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald x
- Bleak House – Charles Dickens
- War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy x (some)
- The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams x+ (should refer to entire series)
- Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
- Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck x
- Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll x
- The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame x+
- Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
- David Copperfield – Charles Dickens x
- Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis x+
- Emma – Jane Austen x
- Persuasion – Jane Austen
- The LionThe Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis ? Referred to above, no? Anyway x+
- The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
- Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
- Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
- Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne x
- Animal Farm – George Orwell x+
- The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown x
- One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
- The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
- Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery x
- Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
- The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood x+
- Lord of the Flies – William Golding x+
- Atonement – Ian McEwan
- Life of Pi – Yann Martel
- Dune – Frank Herbert x+
- Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
- Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
- A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
- The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon x+
- A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens x+
- Brave New World – Aldous Huxley x+
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon x+
- Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
- Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
- The Secret History – Donna Tartt
- The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
- Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas x
- On The Road – Jack Kerouac
- Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
- Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding x (should I admit to this?!)
- Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
- Moby Dick – Herman Melville x
- Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens x
- Dracula – Bram Stoker x+
- The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett x
- Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson x
- Ulysses – James Joyce
- The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
- Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
- Germinal – Emile Zola
- Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
- Possession – AS Byatt
- A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens x
- Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell x
- The Color Purple – Alice Walker
- The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
- Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
- A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
- Charlotte’s Web – EB White x
- The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Alborn x
- Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle x
- The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton x (don’t remember but probably, read tonnes of hers when I was a kid)
- Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
- The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
- The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks x
- Watership Down – Richard Adams x
- A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
- A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
- The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas x
- Hamlet – William Shakespeare x
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl x
- Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Think that’s around 53, though it could be less since I haven’t read 100% of the Bible, and they duplicate CS Lewis Narnia, or more, since they list lots of series. Also some of the classics I’ve read only because of school.
Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. I’m sceptical about this claim, particularly because averages lie. I’d say it’s more likely that there are people who don’t read books, who’ve read ~none, and people who read books, who’ve read probably 20+ of these.
Still, an interesting list.