BBC booklist - how many have you read?

JEK

Senior Insider
BBC booklist - how many have you read?
by James Daltrey on Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 9:48pm
Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

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 Faulks
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 Berniere
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 – Kazuo 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
?
 
What a list. I have read all BUT six, and will try to figure out the process to report. Unread? Numbers 38, 41, 45, 50, 80 and 82. The irony? My all time favorites, 95, "A Confederacy of Dunces," by John Kennedy Toole, and 96, "A Town Like Alice." Neville Shute,
 
Rosemary, those two were recently recommended to me. I will play with the list, but I am guessing I read about 60.
 
OK, I actually read 68-which surprised even me. Plus a lot of 6 and a lot of 14.

Since the complete works of the Bard is listed, I would take out HAMLET, a dupe after all, and add a favorite of mine, Pat Conroy's PRINCE OF TIDES.
What one book would you add?

3 that I truly loved and thought only I would have on my own personal to read list would be A FINE BALANCE, A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANEY and THE SHADOW OF THE WIND.

I really liked this list and it was a fun thing to work on this morning.
 
Very funny. So many times I start a book and then realize I read it already. Especially true when I solve a mystery and know I am just not that smart at all.

Phil gets fooled when they change the color of the book covers. (A publishing trick that does him in quite often).
 
Amy, I recently tried to find "A Town Like Alice" for a present, and had a hard time. I would be happy to send you mine if you have the same problem.
All the best.
 
60 for me, plus most of Shakespeare (but not all), some of Ulysses, but none of the Bible (hmmm, what does that say about me?). My favorites on this list are Le Petit Prince, Rebecca (although I think House on the Strand is DuMaurier's best book and possibly my all time favorite), and A Prayer for Owen Meany. I would add to this list: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig), A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Eggers), Sons & Lovers or Women in Love by DH Lawrence, more from John Irving, anything by Tom Stoppard, Contact by Carl Sagan... I could probably add 20 more. Of the ones I've read I'd knock The Lovely Bones and The 5 People You Meet in Heaven off the list. But THANK YOU for this list, JEK! This gives me great ideas of what to buy for the trip next month.
 
Very impressive list. I'm embarrassed to say my number is quite low. Does it count that I've read #6 multiple times and still read bits and pieces of it daily?

I see a resolution in my near future! Read more books!
 
I enjoyed your comments, Lynn. I too agree with your two deletes. Owen Meany was a GREAT read and a good alternate to add.
 
read most of them...#6 is clearly the best in the fiction category..

#66 is my overall favorite of that group
 
This was going around Facebook with some people bolding the ones they read and putting it in their notes. I agree with other comments on some surprising choices on the list and some omissions. I guess that's what makes it fun!
 
As I packed boxes of books to take to our new beach house, I found several that belong on this list... first and foremost, "Remembrance of Things Past" by Proust (à la recherche du temps perdus). Now that's a major omission!

Thanks again, JEK, I'm loading several of these onto my iPhone Kindle as we speak, ready for our trip.
 
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