BBC Book List

[Thanks to Kate M for this one, which landed on my Facebook page]

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?
Instructions: Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read – even those you’ve read more than once!
Make sure you delete my x’S! When you’ve finished, tag 10 people to do it too, and put your total at the bottom.

1 – Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen – x
2 – The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien – x
3 – Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 – Harry Potter series – JK Rowling – x (all 7….)
5 – To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee – x
6 – The Bible – x
7 – Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – x
8 – Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell – x
9 – His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 – Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – x
11 – Little Women – Louisa M Alcott – x
12 – Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 – Catch 22 – Joseph Heller – x
14 – Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 – Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 – The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien – x
17 – Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
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 – x
22 – The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald – x
23 – Bleak House – Charles Dickens – x
24 – War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy – x
25 – The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams – x
26 – Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 – Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 – Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 – Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll – x
30 – The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame – x
31 – Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 – David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 – Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis – x (all 7…)
34 – Emma – Jane Austen – x
35 – Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 – The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis – x (huh isn’t this part of 33?)
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 – AA Milne – x
41 – Animal Farm – George Orwell – x
42 – The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown – x
43 – One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 – A Prayer for Owen Meany – 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 – x
50 – Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 – Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 – Dune – Frank Herbert – x
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 Zifon
57 – A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens – x
58 – Brave New World – Aldous Huxley – x
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 – x
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 – x
72 – Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 – The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett – x
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 – EB White – x
88 – The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 – Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – x
90 – The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton – x
91 – Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad – x
92 – The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery – x
93 – The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks – x
94 – Watership Down – Richard Adam – x
95 – A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 – A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 – The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas – x
98 – Hamlet – William Shakespeare – x
99 – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl – x
100 – Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I’ve read 41 and now have a bunch of new ones to tackle. There is a particularly strong skew towards a British style of schooling with a great deal of the English “classics” in there. I’d be somewhat impressed if half these books were even heard of by anyone from outside the United Kingdom.

A quick Google of “BBC Book List” returned back a slightly different list on the BBC Website itself, posted in 2003  BBC – The Big Read – Top 100 Books with the pre text

In April 2003 the BBC’s Big Read began the search for the nation’s best-loved novel, and we asked you to nominate your favourite books. Below and on the next page are all the results from number 1 to 100 in numerical order!

Shame there isn’t more:

• Fantasy & Adventure (Eddings, Feist, McCaffrey etc),
• Sci-Fi (Banks, Gibson, Asimov, Heinlein, Scott-Card etc) &
• Espionage (Clancy, Le Carre, Ludlum etc)

4 Comments

• 
  Simon K March 27, 2009 at 14:17

  I’ve only read 29. Actually 30, I had forgotten “The Little Prince.” But how many of the film versions of these books have you seen?
• 
  Colin Yeung March 27, 2009 at 15:24

  Well, ironically enough, that actually wouldn’t entail too many more from the movie side of things – I spend all my time watching, Sci-Fi, Action & Espionage flicks….. Les Miserable, The Colour Purple, Count of Monti Christo, Sense & Sensibility, Bridget Jone’s Diary (a date movie that one).
• 
  Anthony B April 6, 2009 at 21:10

  26 here, altho I have a few more on my bookshelf that are unread..perhaps one day.
  Could do with some worthy ‘non english litt’ additions – plus Arthur C Clarke, Terry Pratchett, Clive Cussler (go on you know you want to), Tim Winton, Marquis De Sade, Machiavelli, Edward de Bono..
• 
  Colin Yeung April 7, 2009 at 08:20

  Ahhhh Greetings Ant! Clive Cussler? Eric Van Lustbader would have to get a run then, and that would be the start of the slide downwards and the introduction of ‘hacks’ breed of authors.

  Read those books, make the time, like I do. It’s worth it.

  I’m curious that Patrick Suskind’s ‘Perfume’ didn’t make it onto the list, nor Salman Rushdie’s ‘Satanic Verses’, which irrespective of religious background is a compelling read. There are so many more books that could be substituted. If I could add/delete books it would look something like:

  Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy = Perfume, Patrick Suskind
  David Copperfield, Charles Dickens = Neuromancer, William Gibson
  Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens = Magician, Raymond E. Feist (interchange that with the entire Riftwar Saga seeing as J.K. Rowling, Shakespeare & C.S. Lewis are allowed their collections)
  Persuasion, Jane Austen = i-Robot, Isaac Asimov
  The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis = The Belgariad Quintet, David Eddings
  The Three Muskateers, Alexandre Dumas = Snowcrash, Neal Stephenson

  How’s life with you? We should catch up soon.