Saturday, December 4, 2010

100 Top Books You Have Read or Not

The Classics are always worth a little extra viewing time.

The Blue Boy

Following on from Sandra's Blog, I am duplicating the list of books of which the BBC reckons most people have only read 6 out of the hundred. If you want to accept the challenge, copy and paste this list into your blog and link back to here.

Instructions:


• Copy this list.
• Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.
• Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The King James Bible - (yes, really!)

Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) – George Orwell

His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The DaVinci Code – Dan Brown

One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies – William Golding

Atonement – Ian McEwan
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Dune – Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

On The Road – Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Dracula – Bram Stoker

The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
Ulysses – James Joyce
The Inferno – Dante
Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
Germinal – Emile Zola
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession – AS Byatt
Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Watership Down – Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo


*Last book is missing. My suggestion for book #100: Holes - Louis Sachar
Book #101 The Cat in the Hat - Dr. Seuss (actually, most of them)
Book #103 Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day - Judith Viorst
Because there should be children's books on the list, too and I would place these three children's books higher on the list than some of the ones above.

What book would you suggest?

So that gives me a total of 59 plus 11 started. If you include various works of Shakespeare, it would jump some more. Hmm...not bad. Better than 6 anyway!

How did you score?

5 comments:

Sandra Patterson said...

That's pretty good, Lyn. Better than my measly 22!

james.pyles said...

I've read 23 of the books. Actually, the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is the first book in the six book Chronicles of Narnia series, so I think the BBC made an error. Also, as popular as the Harry Potter series may be, I can hardly consider these books "a classic", at least in the same manner as Moby Dick and a Tale of Two Cities. For my money, Kurt Vonnegut Jr's Slaughterhouse Five should be on the list. JMHO, though.

Lyndsey Davis said...

Sandra,

I'm ashamed I hadn't done more...given I majored in English literature.

Having homeschooled children who are avid readers increases the likelihood of reading much more.

Some of the texts I haven't touched since high school and college. ***sigh*** validating that as we age, we forget more than we learn. LOL

Lyndsey Davis said...

James,

Well done.

The Magician's Nephew technically comes before The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe although it was never as popular.

Denise Covey said...

Hello Lyndsey, congrats on reading so many! It's good how we all have our opinion of books that should/should not be on the list. Thank you for dropping by and following.:)