Monthly Archives: February 2009

I searched around to see if I could find the source of this BBC list. Its origins, like much on the Internet, are murky and mysterious. I found a list that was almost, but not quite, the same. Anyway, apparently the BBC assumes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books on the list. This seems odd to me. “Most people” as in “most people who don’t read?” “Most people who live under a rock?”

Clarity, BBC. Clarity.

Instructions:

1) Bold those you have read.
2) Star the ones you loved.*
3) Italicize those you plan on reading.
4) (my addition) Underline those you have partially read (series) or gave the OCT (Old College Try)

001 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen*

002 The Lord of the Rings– JRR Tolkien

003 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte*

004 Harry Potter series– JK Rowling

005 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee*

006 The Bible

007 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

008 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell*

009 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

010 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

011 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott*

012 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

013 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

014 Complete Works of Shakespeare (How about the incomplete works of Shakespeare?)

015 Rebecca– Daphne Du Maurier*

016 The Hobbit– JRR Tolkien

017 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

018 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

019 The Time Traveller’s Wife– Audrey Niffenegger*

020 Middlemarch – George Eliot

021 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

022 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald*

023 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

024 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

025 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams*

026 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

027 Crime and Punishment– Fyodor Dostoyevsky OTC-I tried, and tried to read this

028 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

029 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll*

030 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

031 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

032 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

033 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis*

034 Emma – Jane Austen

035 Persuasion – Jane Austen

036 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis* (Didn’t we cover Narnia? Never mind.)

037 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

038 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere

039 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

040 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

041 Animal Farm – George Orwell

042 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown up to page 79, then I stopped.

043 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

044 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

045 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

046 Anne of Green Gables– LM Montgomery*

047 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

048 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

049 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

050 Atonement – Ian McEwan

051 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

052 Dune – Frank Herbert

053 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons I made it halfway through.

054 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

055 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

056 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

057 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

058 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

059 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

060 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

061 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

062 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

063 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

064 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

065 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

066 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

067 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

068 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

069 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

070 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

071 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

072 Dracula – Bram Stoker

073 The Secret Garden– Frances Hodgson Burnett*

074 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

075 Ulysses – James Joyce

076 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

077 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

078 Germinal – Emile Zola

079 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

080 Possession– AS Byatt I have this book, somewhere.

081 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

082 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

083 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

084 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

085 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

086 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

087 Charlotte’s Web – EB White

088 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

089 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

090 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

091 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

092 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

093 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

094 Watership Down – Richard Adams

095 A Confederacy of Dunces– John Kennedy Toole

096 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

097 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

098 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

099 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo