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:
What a sad, restrictive and unambitious list. BILL BRYSON?!! Pretty perlease!!!!
A Prayer For Owen Meany is one of my very favourite books, I've never read anything else quite like it.
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.
Well, I was required to read the listed Dickens and Shakespeare at school. In the Fifties. So that's half a dozen for starters.
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.
86, me
Conversation not your strong point then.
76 here. A most peculiar list, though - a mix of what are deemed classics and loads of recent "Oprah" type selections. No poetry though.
anon 1017 that is for others to judge
Poeple who read books are the best conversationalists because their reading informs their thinking.
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....
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