This list is the BBC Book Challenge. The BBC believes that most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books below. How many have you read?
I will type in bold the books and authors I’ve read. As I often do, if I have read an author, but not the work listed, I will highlight the author's name in bold. Any additional snark is mine.
The list then:
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 (all)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible [Yea, I have read this cover to cover, and as I have mentioned before, I read a Catholic edition, meaning I get extra books Protestants choose to ignore]
7 Wuthering Heights
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens [Read it when I had to teach to high school freshmen.]
11 Little Women – Louisa May 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 Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger [As I have said before, Salinger owes me for me reading this overrated piece of tripe. What appeal people see in its whiny loser protagonist is beyond me]
19 The Time Travellers Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby — F Scott Fitzgerald [Read it in graduate school of all places. I don't give a crap about it. Curiously enough, our daughter does like it, which is fine by us]
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams [I keep meaning to read this]
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck [I have read other stuff by 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 [I have read some of it, not the whole series, and it was when I was a kid]
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis [Here is one of those duplications. Why the list maker does this is beyond me]
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Willaim Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown [I tried reading it. Dropped it. Talk about a really bad piece of shit writing. I know librarians are all about every book its reader, but honestly, if this is your favorite, I will have second thoughts about you, even if I don't express them]
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabrial Garcia Marquez [My all time favorite. I have reread this a few times]
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 Handmaids Tale – Margaret Atwood [Prophetic as hell, but it is not exactly riveting reading. Actually, I found it pretty boring in terms of narrative pace]
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martell
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 [Another one I tried and dropped. This is way overhyped. Plus, in Spanish, it is pretty much a "cursi" book, which is not a good thing]
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 [Graduate school reading. I do remember it being one of the few books of that time I actually liked]
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson
74 Notes from a Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylivia 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 – Charles Mitchell
83 The Colour 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 – 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 & the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
29 out of 100. Not a whole lot, but to be honest, a few of these are books I just could not care less about. Anyhow, there you have it, try not to think too deeply of what this may or not reveal about me as a reader.
How about you folks? Which have you read or not? Why or why not? Comments are open.
No comments:
Post a Comment