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
Writing Wrongs 