I saw this list over a
Dead End Follies and
Too Many Books, Too Little Time and thought I'd play along. Supposedly the BBC put together a list of 100 books and claim that people will only have read 6 of these books on average. I'll bold the books I've read, italicize the books I've read a part of.
I say "supposedly" because I noticed these 2 blogs have 2 different lists of books. So I tried searching for the list the BBC put together. And I can't find it. I found a list of the
top 100 nation's best beloved books but this didn't say anything about how only 6 of these books are read on average.
I then found the list Too Many Books was using over at
LibraryThing, but again, nothing about the BBC or 6 reads.
Kristjan Wagner over at
Pro-Science noticed the same thing I noticed, namely that this BBC list isn't around.
So from all I can see the BBC doesn't think people will only read 6 books on the list below, but I still want to see how many I've read so here we go. I'm using the list off of LibraryThing only because that's the list I've seen repeated a couple times. If someone can find an actual list by the BBC please let me know!
Let's see how I stack up:
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien -- I read the first two books of the series but just couldn't make it through Return of the King. I tried but couldn't do it.
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 -- I've read a lot of Shakespeare but I can't say I've made it through all of the works (
Timon of Athens, A Winter's Tale)
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 (at least twice)
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 -- So the Chronicles of Narnia was just mentioned at number 33. Does this not count as part of it?
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 -- read it in English and French! Don't ask me to do that again, I don't remember enough French to do it.
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 -- This list is repetitive. It already asked if I'd read the complete works. Come on people!
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
I have 30 bolded and 7 italicized. How do you stack up to this completely arbitrary list?
Update! My good friend Paolo is far better at internet research than I (and probably doesn't give up after 5 whole minutes of looking) and found what looks to be the original list on the Guardian. No mention of the BBC or 6 books but if you want to check it out, here you go! http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/mar/01/news
