I copied this meme from Worthwhile Books who got it here.
Here are the instructions. I'm not going to tag anyone though.
BBC Meme on the Classics
The BBC claims that most people haven't read more than six on the list
How many of these have you read?
Instructions: Bold those books you've read in their entirety. Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!
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 (maybe not complete - but more than half?)
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. The 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 (repetitive see 33)
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere (saw the (bad acting by Nicholas Cage) Movie ...)
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
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 (again, saw the movie...)
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 Melville71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson (Walk in the Woods, Short History)
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola (Red and the Black)
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 (I own this...time to take up....)
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
Nearly 80%... but don't ask me for details about them.
4 comments:
I'm the same way. I love book lists. I've seen this one bobbing around on Facebook and have been tempted to do it. The introduction bugs me, though, "The BBC claims that most people haven't read more than six on the list." It's so absurd. Who could take it seriously? I keep getting so distracted by it that I never actually check the list to mark off what I've read.
I tried to track it down because I'm fascinated by how such urban legends develop. The list looks a little like a BBC list of top 100 novels that was also circulating as a blog meme a few years ago and which I remember doing. (This is the original BBC list I remembered, generated when they asked readers to nominate their favorite book.) So I poked around a bit on google and found that this is not that list. Instead the list seems to come from a different British news outlet, The Guardian. I have no idea where the claim that no one has read six books on the list comes from and how it got attached to the BBC. I've fond people debunking it; but no one who has managed to trace it to the source.
Somehow it's the weird urban legend that actually intrigues me more than the book list, as much as I usually find those irresistible.
I'm interested to hear what you'll think of A Fine Balance, since I hated reading it and couldn't figure out what Oprah liked about it. It was a book club pick and I was the only one in the group to complete it. I think "Classic" is an optimistic judgment by the list editors, although I'm curious to see what I missed in my reading of it.
Melanie, I wondered what the books had in common - I'm sure it wouldn't be that hard to come up with a list of books that no one had read! I have a couple different lists saved in a document created about 10 years ago of the best books of the 20th century - about half the books are the same, but most of the list vary. I should try to find the list for Reading for Believers - one was from Image of the best religious books of the century.
Kate - if A Fine Balance was so awful, maybe I won't read it. I picked it up for 50cents at the library, so I don't have a lot invested in it.
Wherever this list came from, you have read more of them than anyone else that I've encountered.
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