Monday 30 March 2009

100 Books

My Uncle posted this on facebook and I am rather fascinated by it. There are so many books on it I would like to read... 28 definates for me...

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here – I’m not sure how they came up with this strange list – does anyone know?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible - I reckon we probably got through a very high percentage at school
7 Wuthering Heights
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X (well two of the three anyway)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – we did a few at school Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Nights Dream
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (why have I never read the Hobbit?)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (started it many moons ago but got bored)
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
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X
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
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 15
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
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
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X (oh how I hated this at school)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert X
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 - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
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 X
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 X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (I am reading his one on Oz right now - care of a work mate and we were discussing the loan of this one only yesterday...)
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
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 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
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 X
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 X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute X
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo



23 books doesn't seem to bad until you consider that I have read the ones that appeal to me most already.... I have however bought Cloud Atlas and Atonement and they are waiting in my book reading wings....

I have just placed an amazon order for the lovely bones, the kite runner and the time traveller's wife. They had been grouped together to give lots of lovely discount and cost just over £4 each, including postage!

Some of the others I will look for secondhand as I am sure they are old enough to be about. I would like to read Alice through the looking glass, the Hobbit and Little Women. I already have a bible, a complete works of Shakespeare, a complete works of Jane Austen, the great gatsby and Oliver Twist so I think I have plenty to be getting on with...

4 comments:

  1. Ooooh, I'm doing quite well after a quick scan of the list....I shall copy and paste and check off!!

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  2. Me again. How they came up with the list, I don't know, but how they came up with people having only read 6 I REALLY wonder about?!?! Surely at least 10 of them are school-required reading at some point.....it doesn't show much faith in the literacy level of folk....:(

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  3. We did four in school but we did a lot of Shakespeare too... I guess they are drawing attention to the fact that there are a lot of people who have learnt to read for pleasure. I have to say I work with a few people who would never pick up a book (and some that read a lot). There are also many who didn't leave school fully literate.... Who wouldn't have fully there when the class read Shakespeare...

    My Mum got similarly antsy about the list but I can't imagine the BBC just making it up... I am reserving judgement but 6 is very sadly low...

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  4. Not much poetry either... Just Shakespeare..

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