11/24 UPDATE: The more I look at the list below, the more it annoys me.
First, not only is all the formatting totally apesh*t, but it doesn’t even accurately capture the ones I put in blue. What I see as I compose this is not what happens when I publish this post, so you really won’t know which 35 I have read. My sense of tidiness and order is hugely offended by the mishmash that follows. I suppose I could learn something about HTML and fix it, but ye gods, I can’t know everything.
Second, Steve and Simon and others are right about the oddness of this list. It isn’t the first time I have seen it around the interwebs. In my excitement about a book list (any book list) I didn’t really think critically about what was on it. Although I did notice the Shakespeare duplication and the absolute dubiosity (I think I just made that word up, and I like it.) of Mitch Albom being on the list, I really didn’t think about what a crap list it is for the reasons that some of you noted in the comments and for others.
Most reading lists are bound to elicit praise and criticism in varying doses, it kind of goes with the territory. A vast world of books and a vast world of readers with different tastes and points of view, could there be any other result. I will say, however, that for all its faults the Modern Library Top 100 of the 20th century does a much better job than the “BBC list” of capturing some sense of great books that literate English speakers might consider canon-worthy.
Plus on the Modern Library list, I have read 61 out of 100 so I look a whole lot better. (Of course I have been purposefully reading from that list since it first came out in the late 1990s.) You may already have noticed I have a permanent page up top devoted to my intermittent devotion to that list. You can also look at it here.
And many thanks to dpv at The Hogpath Bugle who gives us a great link that deals with the provenance of this FB meme.
My friend Staci posted this on FB, but FB wouldn’t let me paste this into a note. So I am posting it here. [And now Blogger is doing funny things to the font. Sorry it ain’t pretty.]
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.
Staci thought I would have read about 90% of these. She was wrong, but with 35 read, I certainly did better than 6.
I am putting the ones I have read in blue.
The ones in italics I have partially read.
The ones with the strike through are the ones I am VERY unlikely to even want to read.
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
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 – 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
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 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
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I was chuffed that I did well myself. So many of the books were text books for me!!! Hardy and Dickens and Austen and Shakespeare and Dumas!!! Thank God for my literature teacher. I think she did a good job with me as she inculcated a love of literature very early on.
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Fifty-seven. Many of them were required at some point in my life, though. There were a few I have never heard of, and one that I abandoned. Like you, there are also some that I will never read. Interesting list.
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52, much to my surprise. Happy Thanksgiving, Thomas.
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61 read counting the duplicates and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare – I haven't read them all but am so close to it that it is a feat in itself!
This has done the rounds on FB several times but I remember when The Big Read first aired (who knows who they actually surveyed but everyone I know has read way more than 6). Around 2003/4 my book group chose a few we hadn't read to read & A Prayer for Owen Meany became one of my favourite books.
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42 for me… some very odd choices on there, as well as some duplications (Hamlet and The Complete Works of Shakespeare – is someone not telling me something?)
Can't BELIEVE you haven't read Winnie the Pooh – do it! The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe also brilliant. And the Faraway Tree books… this isn't making me look as erudite as I'd hoped, just picking out the children's books…
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Oh, and I loved The Big Read when it was on – although this list isn't the same as the one they had. Lots of similarities, though.
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Oooo, this is great. I must copy it and do it on my own.
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I've read about 29. Here's the note that I've been leaving on FB when friends post this. It's long so will probably take a few posts.
My total is around 29 or so. There a two or three that I can't honestly remember whether I've read. Does it count double if you've read them twice? (I may be one of the few who has read both Ulysses and the Bible.) Odd list in many ways; very Anglo-centric and predominantly prose, but even so, why no Twain, no Cather, no epics (Milton, Homer), no Hemingway, no Faulkner, no Qur'an, and even among the big Brits, no Trollope, no Graham Greene?
I'm embarrassed to admit there are several I've never heard of. And I hereby announce that I have no intention of ever reading a word of Mitch Albom.
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This list comes by every so often from one friend or another, and I'm always just as mystified by it as I am now. WHAT is the common denominator? — certainly not literary merit, certainly not popularity (though this comes close, I think)…, certainly not “the books one SHOULD have read” — maybe it's “books that sometimes come up in conversation with reasonably literate middle class Brits” [?] (explaining, also, the nostalgic dose of books from the British nursery and adolescence). Seems a bit heavy on books that were later adapted as films, which sort of fits my “conversation” theory (and explains the presence of relatively minor authors like Stella Gibbons, but making the absence of Forster even more peculiar.)
But, golly, Bill Bryson on the same list as Jane Austen!? And the COMPLETE works of Shakespeare??? Wouldn't, say, “any six complete plays,” be a little more realistic? And why does Hamlet get an independent listing of its own? The Tolkien Rings AND the Hobbit on a list that includes only a hundred works!!!
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Interesting. I've read 28 with several others unfinished so not bad really.
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I’ve read “The Little Prince” in English and French, and parts of it in Italian. Does that count as one book or two and a half?
Thomas, for your readers who are interested in the source and/or validity of this meme, refer them to http://tinyurl.com/23z4ga8
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54 for me. Our FB group decided it was a list for middle-aged women…which most of us are!!
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I haven't seen this before so was surprised to find that I score 65! Some were read a long, long time ago and I don't remember much about them but they still count don't they?
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I've read 44. You can read which ones at my blog today. No wonder I'm having a hard time choosing my next classic. I desperately need some recommendations before the end of the year.
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Ooh ooh, I did this a while ago, and scored well, but interestingly more than a year later I have only read one more! Might have to add some to the TBR pile. 35 is definitely waaaay above the average, but then I suspect that we are not the average reader!!
http://novelinsights.wordpress.com/2009/08/08/bbc-100-books-challenge-a-fabulous-51/
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Mystica: The list certainly makes me want to go pick up my unread copy of The Count of Monte Cristo.
Susan: Do you ever have the urge to go back and read those old required books just for fun?
Ted: Thanks. I hope you havea great Thanksgiving as well.
Claire: I avoided Owen Meany for years. Finally, after three very different friends all independently told me I needed to read it, I did. And I too loved it. In fact it helped me focus my life at the time in a really positive way.
Simon: I will read Winnie the Pooh, I defeinitely want to check out the Faraway Tree books, but The Lion…may be asking too much.
Emily: On second thought, check out the Modern Library list instead.
Steve: As you will notice from the update I posted, your comments got me riled up. I could say ditto to everything you said. Although I have to say I think Bill Bryson is the kind of guy Jane Austen would marry.
Sandra: Do you want to go back and finish any of the unfinished titles?
dpv: Thanks so much for that link. I am usually quite the doubting Thomas, but it never occurred to me to take a Snopsian approach to this meme.
Mary: Middle age. Sigh. I guess I should be happy if I get 41 more years.
Lizzy: Oh yeah, they count. I had to stop myself in a few cases because I realized that I only thought I had read them or in one case I had only seen the movie.
Mrs B: I will look at your list and see if I can think of anything to recommend.
Polly: We readers do enjoy a list don't we?
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I got a 67 myself. Has anyone seen the original source? I have a hard time believing this came from the BBC. The BBC has several “World Book Club” type programs. They're well aware of English language literature throughout the world.
And there really are not that many “English” titles on the list.
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I have read almost half the list – 49 books. Some of the books that I read were very good, but some were crap (The Da Vinci Code, anyone?). I have no idea how this hodgepodge of a list was compiled, but I certainly wouldn't be using it as a guide to future books I ought to read. Still, it was fun to see how many of them I could check off!
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I've read 50 of them although a couple of those (Life of Pi, 5 people you meet in heaven, the da Vinci code) I really wish I hadn't, and several I quite desperately wish I had. As has been said, it is rather a peculiar list – although notable omissions in such a short list are more excusable than including any of the above 3 novels. It is also rather peculiar to include the Bible and leave out other holy texts, others of which (especially the Bhagavad Gita) have a lot more to offer non-believers than the Bible does.
The Modern Library list is one I would love to work through though, and the Time Magazine list is promising too (it is described as the 'all time 100 novels' but actually only chooses from those published from 1923 onwards:
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1951793,00.html Also amusing is the article linked to in which the two responsible for the list describe how they came up with it, and its intended purpose. I quote:
One is to instruct. The other of course is to enrage. We're bracing ourselves for the e-mails that start out: “You moron! You pathetic bourgeoise insect! How could you have left off…(insert title here).” We say Mrs. Dalloway. You say Mrs. Bridge. We say Naked Lunch. You say Breakfast at Tiffanys. Let's call the whole thing off? Just the opposite—bring it on. Sometimes judgment is best formed under fire. But please, no e-mails about Ulysses. Rules are rules.
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How wonderful to see Swallows and Amazons on the list! My whole family loves Ransome's entire series, but the main title is our very favorite, followed by Winter Holiday. I think you might love these–very cosy and wonderful.
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Just back to say that I'm getting some great ideas of what to read next from both lists and people's comments. I see you haven't read any Hardy (start with Tess) or the Woman in White. You simply must!
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Actually, yes, to your question. I've been re-reading some of those required books with my kids and enjoying them so much more the second time around — and I think helping their “first” taste of them to be a little more palatable than my own were. :)
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I have read 28. I am using the fact that I'm not-English (an excuse Stu helped me come up with) and that the list is very weird, as an excuse for why I have read so little of the books on there.
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Do try Winnie the Pooh, I think it's best as an adult… thinking about it, I'm not sure the same could be said for the Faraway Tree books – might only be enjoyable for children. On The Lion etc.. ok, probably for the same reasons that I wouldn't read Philip Pullman…(!)
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It transpires that I actually read 72…
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like dpv, when this came around on Facebook, I poked around to find the origin of the list. I ended up putting the original list up on my Facebook profile instead of the meme's list, and remarked that the only thing it shows is how close my reading experience is to the taste of the British public. :)
But we readers do love a book list!
– Christy
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CB: The BBC list has about 30 books that are different than this one.
Steph: The Da Vinci Code was crap on so many levels, but I still enjoyed reading it. (blushing)
Jane: I must go look at that Time list.
Lifetime: I don't know anything about those books. I should look into them.
Mrs. B: I have read The Mayor of Casterbridge and have started Tess a few times.
Susan: That sounds like fun.
Iris: It is very weird.
Simon: Now I need to find out who Philip Pullman is.
Claire: So when are your going to finish the final 28?
Christy: I haven't taken a close enough look at the BBC list. I will have to do then when I look at the Time list.
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Hm, over the next few years? ;) The majority of them are books I won but I've heard The Shadow of the Wind is woeful so I doubt I'll complete the list… Some of the other dreadful additions I have already read (and wish I hadn't).
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I've read 30, and I'm only twenty so I'd say that's pretty good.
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