Monday 22 November 2010

100 Books by the BBC

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total.
5) Add movies (M) you watched, if you like
(MM means more than one version)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (x)+ [MM]
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë (x)+ [MM]
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (x, just the first one: "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone") [M]
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (*) [M]
6 The Bible (x)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë (x) [MM]
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell (x)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (x)+ [MM]
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (x)+ [MM]
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (x)+ [M]
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (x) 
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (not the complete works, only parts) [M, a few movies, several plays, Romeo and Juliet] (x)+ [MM]
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (*) [M]
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (x)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks (x)+ 
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (x)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (x)---
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (x)+ [M]
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (x)+ [M, about a hundred times]
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (x)+ [MM]
23 Bleak House Charles Dickens (x)+ 
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (x)+[MM]
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (x)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh (x)
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky (x)+
28 The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (x) [M]
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (x) [M, well, animated]
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (x)+ [MM]
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (x)+
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen (x)+ [MM]
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (x)+ [MM]
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (x) [play]
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (x)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (x)+ [M]
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (x) [M]
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (x)+
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (x)+
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (x) [M]
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Marquez (x)+
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins (x)+ [M]
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (x) [M]
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (*)
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (x)+
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (x)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan (x)-
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons (x)
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (x)+ [MM]
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth (x)+
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruíz Zafón (x)+
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (x) [MM]
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (x) +
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (x)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel García Marquez (x)+ [M]
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (x)+
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 (x)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy (*)
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (x) [M]
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (x)
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (x)+ [M]
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (x)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (x)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (x)+
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (x)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (x)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray [M]
80 Possession - AS Byatt (x)+ [M]
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (x) [MM]
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell (x)
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker (x)+ [M]
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (x)
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry (x)+
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (x)+
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (x)+
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [M]
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (x)
92 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
93 Watership Down - Richard Adam (x) [M]
94 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
95 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute (x)+
96 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas [M]
97 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (x)
98 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (x)
99 Les Misérables - Victor Hugo (x)+ [M]
100 The Once and Future King - T.H. White

Total: 80 books, 38 movies

Not bad, I guess. Belonging to a book club seems to pay off. ;-) Anyway, can you tell that I love classics and books with a loooot of pages?

I did this last year and now added five more that I read this year, so I should be done with this list in about ten years. ;-)
(Never going to happen since there are some that I'm really not interested in.)

Also check out the list "The 100 Greatest Fiction Books" from the Guardian.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2021.

5 comments:

  1. At the rate I'm reading... It could take to my retirement. lol

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Well, Suzanne, we're there and I still haven't reached it. But I'm sure you have read more than the six books the average person will have read.

      Delete
    2. Î just noticed that you wrote this ten years ago and I have no idea why I didn't respond. I guess I must not have seen it, I usually answer when someone comments.

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  2. Well done, I believe I have read only 57, and I have a few on my plan for next year

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm not surprised there, Emma. You always have some interesting books on your list. And 57 is way, ways more than six. I bet in a couple of years, you will have reached my number, probably before you reach my present age.

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