Okay, whether it's true or not, there's been a list of books floating around Facebook which apparently claims the BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100. It's a great list of books regardless.
How do your reading habits stack up? How many have you read?
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK 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
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
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
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
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 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
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
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
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 - Kazu 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
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
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
52 of the 100. Although I have to wonder about the list -- if you've read the Complete Works of Shakespeare, you've also read Hamlet. Ditto with the Chronicles of Narnia and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
ReplyDeletei've read a bunch but i stopped counting b/c like Glynn said, Hamlet = All of Shakespeare and Narnia and Lion. Also if you've read all of Shakespeare that's A LOT of books. Harry Potter and Narnia are both 7 books each, LOTR =3. So just between those 3 series alone, that is 17 books. or do they just count each series as 1 books (which i think is wrong, as that means Harry Potter is like a 1000000000 page book then.)
ReplyDelete55
ReplyDeleteI'm a sucker for lists like this.
ReplyDeleteCurrently 1/3 of the way into Les Mis. That will make ... 36.
A pathetic 13 though a bunch of them are sitting on my tbr pile. A few I have no desire to read. Lots of good books on the list though. Let's replace DaVinci Code with Peace Like a River though. :-)
ReplyDeleteI got 13 too, so you're not alone Gina ;-). All the Jane Austen and Shakespeare books are on my list (I've read some of them but not all).
ReplyDeleteThis list is so slanted toward British writers. C'mon. There are a lot of classics not listed here. I think I had read 17 of these, none of Lewis or Tolkein or Dahl. Geez, I can hear the gasps from here. Don't like fantasy or "old English" terminology.
ReplyDeleteHa! Nicole. Personally, I like British novels, although when I was in high school I remember being really confused why sometimes I read different spellings of words.
ReplyDeleteAs far as my tally goes—if you count the books I'm reading (about 6 of them) I've read 40. As far as repeats with Shakespeare and the Narnia Tales, at least it gives those of us who haven't read all of them a fighting chance.
Although if you were only going to read one of Shakespeare's plays, would it be Hamlet? I dunno . . .
31, I think. I was also miffed at the duplications on the list. And good point, that some of them are series so that's more than "one" book. I did think it was an impressive list--some I'd love to read, but a few I wouldn't bother picking up.
ReplyDelete27... not counting series... i didn't think that was too bad - i'm only 23 and i already own a lot of the books that are my list of books to read
ReplyDeleteWahoo! I've read 18 of the titles listed. (Yes, I counted the Harry Potter series as one.) While it may not be as many as some of the other commenters, I'm still better than the BBC average. :)
ReplyDeleteOnly 8 for me. 9 if I can count Peace Like a River.
ReplyDeletePeace Like a River definitely belongs on that list!
ReplyDelete32, counting the series as one each. This was a good exercise for me as I have been reminded to add several more titles to my TBR list. Now, if I could just add several more hours to my day I might get more read!
ReplyDeleteCarol Garvin
Jess: You shouldn't read Shakespeare's scripts. You should see his plays. I'm not a big Hamlet fan. I think if you were going to see just one of Shakespeare's plays, it should be Twelfth Night (comedy). Or Macbeth (trajedy). Or The Winter's Tale (romance). But who sees just one? ;)
ReplyDeleteI've read 22, and 7 others I began and decided never to finish. A few of these I've never heard of.
ReplyDelete