But I know it's more, cuz I'm rabid. So I'm going to go down this list and highlight what I've read, no cheating, Scouts Honor. I have no idea what the BBC based their criteria or point on for this list, or the estimation of Six books out of this One Hundred. It makes me want to read the ones I haven't read, just on principle. What about you?
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 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 Bernieres
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 (my beloved Irving made the list!)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (one of the most important books of my life)
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 - Kazu 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
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so i read 55, a little over half. the weird nerdy competitor in me feels that is not 'good enough'. now i will hermit myself in bed for a month reading. if i lose my job, so be it. some things are just too damn important. (but do i have to read Love in a Time of Cholera? cuz i tried, i really did, and i just couldn't fall in love.)
I've only read 17! And i thought I was a bookworm. I am going to book store right now.
I've only read 46 of them,which made me suddenly want to throw myself in a lake.
I was going to get all upset about what wasn't included on the list (Hemmingway, Chandler) but then I realized I need a nap.
Also, Vonnegut and Robbins. I came back to leave this second comment because I was so annoyed. I may be a dork, but at least I'm obsessive. Mom says I'm a prize.
I can't even get through reading the list, so bravo to you for reading more than half the books on it!!
i've seen this list before. isn't it rather arbitrary? i don't really get how they came up with the titles on it. i mean seriously, do the complete works of shakespeare, tolstoy and the curious incident of a dog in night time really belong on the same list?
Strange list. I mean, Helen Fielding right up there with Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy?
Read a Confederacy of Dunces. It's, well- read it and see.
26.
I thought I'd have read more for sure. I read a ton of classics in high school/college.
I've seen this list floating around, and everytime I do, I think I should print it out and take it the library next visit and start revisiting some classics.
I'm competitive like that too. ;>
wow.. i must say i only read like 20 of them, is it a good or a bad??? lol
I'm up to 46, but more if you count books that I tried and didn't like enough to continue (Time Traveler's Wife, ugh, I forced myself to go halfway and thought, no more!) I counted the Bible, even though I haven't read the entire thing. I have read most of Shakespeare, not all, so didn't count that?
Possession, I tried. It was a writing style I found hard to engage but I suspect if I try it another time it will be worthwhile.
I've tried both G.G.Marquez and couldn't get into it. I wish I could, because so many rave about these two.
29. What a great list. I loved so many of those, my favorites were Cold Comfort Farm and Little Women and A Prayer For Owen Meany and and and......I am going to type out that list and take it to the bookstore.
Fun!
Hmm, I'll have to try this one, though I have a feeling I already have... maybe I should check my older posts first.
Why the complete works of Shakespeare and then Hamlet by itself?
I knew I'd done this before.
http://richmondzoo.blogspot.com/2008/09/100-books.html
If you're bored, if not, no worries. After skimming through mine again I realize I missed some that I've actually read. Oh well.
Counting seems a bit over my head this morning, but my highly scientific glancing method made me feel like I'd read about 2/3 of the books.
But us nerds are more well-read than the American public at large, or so I've heard.
45, although I think I should get credit for Les Miserables because I got 3/4 of the way through it and suddenly realized I was reading a short version (only 600 or so pages), which left me too depressed to start again.
That's it. I'm going to start working the list, so the next time someone posts it, I can say, airily, "Oh, yes, I've read all those."
I've only read Hamlet, Animal Farm and Oliver Twist - I started readin Tess of the D'Ubervilles but never finished
Oh Maggie - Love in the time of Cholera is so good - at the END. Same with one hundred years of solitude. I picked them up and put them down for years, and when I finally finished One Hundred Years I cried like a baby all over the place. They are lovely. I've got 44 of these down.. as much as I tried, I cannot for the life of me read little women. Save me.
Forty five...it's a weird list. If not for some childhood favorites, my number would be much lower!
I must be competitive too, because I want to run out and buy some books, just to feel well-read. According to who??
I have the Kite Runner and The Five People You Meet When You Go To Heaven if you would like to borrow them some time.
amanda- that was my reaction too= going to the bookstore!
kurt- yup, any list is bound to inspire what was left off the list to leap to your mind.
julochka- it does seem random- i'm not sure what the criteria were.
ms. moon- i will.
rachael- i'll run you to the finish!:)
agnes- it's good! they said average is six.
phd- i read some of Possession and had the same reaction. it might be a book you are halfway through before you like it.
danette- i adore prayer for owen meany, just adore it.
captain dumbass- i have no idea why this list was set up where some books are in the series as one, and some not. weird.
miss grace-= i use that highly scientific method for testing. hmm.
jeanne- you made me laugh with the 'airily'!!
girl on a journey- i want to read Hamlet again, it's been so freaking long! i barely remember.
miel- ok...i'm gonna trust you..i have it on my bookshelf and i'm gonna try it. i'll let you know:)
anymommy= this seems to be the consensus= weird list!
kristi= ok, i'm always up for borrowing books:)
thanks for stopping by my blog.feel free to roam around in my archives. my blog hopes when it grows up it will be as cool as your blog!
I share your love of Anne Shirley, thyroid issues and staggering medical bills, our new president, the cute rocker dude on American Idol and wanting to work in a kick-ass nursing home (I have a background in elder care and Hospice).
The Time Traveller's Wife...couldn't get into it. It was giving me anxiety.
I have read 96. Now I feel virtuous :P.
I was tickled by the fact that they listed 'Hamlet' as separate from 'The complete works of Shakespeare.' :)
12? I feel like such a loser now. Thanks.
36. However, its quite a western lit list. Wish it had more international authors. I loved Love in the Time of Cholera :P
My son is named after this author. I was forced to read many of the classics for class. Esp. the Austen, hehe. I was repremanded by a lit teahcer for my lack of interest.
Time Traveler's Wife is one of my fav's.
oh, and Vonnegut and Burroughs.
ding ding ding we have a winner!
I only read 51. I thought it would be more. I did err on the side of caution, but still....
I did this on facebook and figured out I'd read 19 and was about to read one more. Not too bad I suppose.
34 is my number, funnily enough, there are very few on that I haven't read that I really want to now. Glad to see lots of Canadian content from L. M. Montgomery to Yann Martel and Margaret Atwood. But why is The Chronicles of Narnia (7 books in all) separate from The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe (the first of the series)?
I've read 40.
I just checked out the BBC's "Big Read" website and the list is a little different. I only scored 24 on that one!
I've read 81 of these -- although I'm slightly exaggerating by including the Bible and the Harry Potter series. (I've read large chunks; not all.)
Unlike most of the world, I've never read The Da Vinci Code.
I've been meaning to read Midnight's Children for the past year. Also, The Secret History.
I would recommend the Haddon, Niffenegger (loved it), Byatt (hard to get into, but great; I think you would love it, though), Toole, Gibbons and you HAVE TO READ Little Women. How did you get through your childhood without reading this one!! A Children's Lit prof told me that it is considered to be the first YA novel.
I've read 17, but does it count to have INTENTIONS on, like 50 more?
i read 25 that i remember pretty vividly. a few more that i've just completely forgotten. and i was an english major so that's kind of pathetic. a few left deep lasting impressions on me though, like lolita and ian bank's wasp factory which led me to read all of his fiction. some books are like keys in life though no one else can give you. understanding something privately by reading. so maybe quantity is over rated. that said, i would gladly shuck my career to read most of the day.
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