Tuesday, 23 November 2010

tell me what you've read, and I'll tell you...

I got this from Gene at Harry's Place, but apparently it comes from the BBC, who tell us that most people - well give it a go if  you like.  The list is below, and yes I know lists are usually a boy thing, but I have bolded and italicised in accordance with what I have read.

Anyway, here’s an interesting exercise from Gavin Williams, who writes on his Facebook page that the BBC believes most people will have read only six of the 100 books listed here. Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety and italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt. Admittedly it’s quite an Anglocentric list.




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 Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger





20 Middlemarch – George Eliot



21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell






22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald






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 Dostoevsky






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 – A.A. 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






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 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






84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro






85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert




86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry



87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. 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






I have said I have read The Faraway Tree Collection by Enid Blyton, but I cannot be sure.  I certainly read more than one collection of her stories when I was five or six, and I think this was one.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

What a sad, restrictive and unambitious list. BILL BRYSON?!! Pretty perlease!!!!

Mr London Street said...

A Prayer For Owen Meany is one of my very favourite books, I've never read anything else quite like it.

Anonymous said...

Secret History and Cloud Atlas! Excellent. Yes, the list is "Anglocentric", but as I am a monoglot Anglo myself, what else am I expected to have read? I reckon that I have completed at least 36 from this list, and dipped in to many others, so I am feeling a bit smug. There seems to be a bit of double counting - CS Lewis and Shakespeare appear under two headings, one of which includes the other.

Certain about the Enid Blyton, though. My first assay into the minefield of literary criticism, at the age of 8, was trying to persuade my young brother of its virtues. He was not convinced.

Anonymous said...

Well, I was required to read the listed Dickens and Shakespeare at school. In the Fifties. So that's half a dozen for starters.

Anonymous said...

The Faraway Tree is part of a series of four Blyton books, including The Enchanted Wood.

There is a tree that the children climb ( one is called Fanny) and in the tree they meet their friend, MoonFace.
Atr the top of the tree, there are various different worlds that they visit. You never know which world it is going to be - and if the world 'moves on' it will spin away from the Faraway Tree and the children are trapped in the world and can't get back.
The worst world was the one controlled by a terrifying figure called Dame Slap. It was always fantastic if the world happened to be something like The Land of Sweets - but there was absolutely no guarantee.

They were excellent books.

janestheone said...

86, me

Anonymous said...

Conversation not your strong point then.

Jonny said...

76 here. A most peculiar list, though - a mix of what are deemed classics and loads of recent "Oprah" type selections. No poetry though.

janestheone said...

anon 1017 that is for others to judge

Anonymous said...

Poeple who read books are the best conversationalists because their reading informs their thinking.

Anonymous said...

Well Jonny - I guess any list like this has to be subjective and will look odd to somebody. A list of my top 100 books would probably look pretty odd to you and vice versa. (46 of this list btw). Incidentally, a certain Mr W. Shakespeare might have something to say about your 'no poetry' comment....