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The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Tally your total at the bottom.
Here's the list:
1 Pride and Prejudice x
2 The Lord of the Rings (attempted, does that count? Hahaha)
3 Jane Eyre x
4 Harry Potter series x (actually, I didn't read all the books)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird x
6 The Bible x (it still amazes me how many people have never read the Bible)
7 Wuthering Heights x (my mostest favoritest bad boy book of all time)
8 1984 x
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations x
11 Little Women x
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles x
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller x
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare x (Well, I was an English major, what do you expect? But this really isn't a fair, to say COMPLETE. Most people hadn't read all the sonnets or plays)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier x
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (argh. No. But I have seen a re-enactment, ahem)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger x
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (x, but I've forgotten most of it)
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell x
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald x
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens x
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy x (okay, did not finish)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy x
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky x
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck x
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll x
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy x
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens x
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (All of them) x
34 Emma - Jane Austen x
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis x
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 - AA Milne x
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell x (my favorite book of all time)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown x (umm. I sped through much of it because I do feel he heavily borrowed from The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which I read 20 years before)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving x
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery x
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy x (sigh, this was a "forced to read" book)
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding x
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert x
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen x
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens x
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley x
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 x
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas x
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 (You'd think they'd pick THAT book. You know, the one that got him in trouble with the Ayatollah. Bet you lots more people picked that book up than this one. Yes, I read it)
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville x (argh. I still suffer from nightmares of the giant dick)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens x
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker x
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce x (Okay, attempted to read. You know Joyce)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath x
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola x (most depressing book evah)
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray x
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens x
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker x
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert x
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom x
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton x (I LOVE THESE BOOKS. I LOVE THESE BOOKS. I LOVE THESE BOOKS)
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad x
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery x (Well, shoot, you know Reed/Joker made me read it)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams x
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas x
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare x (and this is not part of the complete works of William Shakespeare? BBC, thou art weird)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo x
(Ha, more than 6 BBC!)
Ya, I know. I was an English and Philosophy major, so reading heavy books was part of my life for 6 years. But there are some good books in there that came out of my childhood.
What I would have added in that might open up the field:
101) Interview With A Vampire--Ann Rice (the very first of them all!)
102) Atlas Shrugged--Ayn Rand (weren't we all turned into individualists by this book at one point or another in our young adult optimism?)
103) The Joy of Sex--Alex Comfort (come on, everyone peeked back in the "no-no can't have books like that out" days, even teenagers like me)
104) Linda Goodman's Sun Signs--Linda Goodman (this was like the first astrology book that was entertaining and amazingly literate and is a classic to this day. Millions still buy it. I still reread it)
105) The Stand--Stephen King (come on! Everyone always recommend this book to someone)
Okay, how many did y'all cross out on the BBC list and what book would you've added to that list. Pick a title that you feel has a "generational" feel to it. The five I've chosen were obviously biggies during my growing up years. Not that I'm grown up now, you understand. Just a bit wiser, perhaps, ha.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Prove Them Wrong
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24 comments:
Jenn, all I can say is "Whoa" to your list. ;-) You've got some doozies on there GF! I'm impressed!
I think the one book that I've read some oldies that have stuck in my mind. Lord of the Flies; Taming of the Shrew; A Mid Summer Night's Dream; Much Ado About Nothing; Profiles in Courage by JFK; April Morning by Howard Fast; Animal Farm by George Orwell; Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank. Odd but I still love these books. Especially Alas Babylon.
17, bridge to terebithia
ooo or island of the blue dolphins, read that like 30 times (im sure a psychiatrist could write a book on that little fact...)
I went down the list and have read around 31 books off of it. Some I had to read and some I've read on my own. I'm a Charles Dickens fan so a lot of his I've read. Just for the record Jenn, I like some Shakesphere but HATED Hammlett. I read it because it was required reading. So I'm guessing that thou art weird after all!
:-D
Lisa W., Heh, I scared myself too! But I'm confident that all my readers here would have read more than SIX books from the BBC list. I want BBC to be wrong!!!
Lisa W again,
Thou hateth Hamlet? Get thee to a nunnery!
I'm a piker compared to you all. My count was 15.
I've read 33 and have several more on my to-be-read list.
But I've also never seen anywhere the BBC actually listed the 6 number. Seems to be an urban legend. ;)
In fact, the list isn't a list of top classics, or best books ever, as I've also seen claimed. It's a list that people sent in to the BBC of books they claimed as their favorites, which is why there are duplicates, such as Chronicles of Narnia and Lion, Witch and Wardrobe.
I've read 36 on this list, including The Lovely Bones which was surprisingly good. (Hubby had picked it out for me.) I read Gone With the Wind in less than 24 hours. Believe it or not, I have never read Dracula, though I have downloaded it as an e-book and am planning to read it. I've never heard of the Faraway Tree thing by Blyton, but I like her as an author so I may go look those up.
There are a number of books on this list on my shelf that I either started and then quit because I hated it or I have because it's a classic and I feel I should read it at some point but have never gotten around to it.
I've read 22 from the BBC list and 3 from yours Jenn. Maybe you should be picking out titles for them?
Books I would add include Lucky, by Alice Sebold; Clan of the Cave Bear, by Jean M. Auel; and Shogun, by James Clavell.
I counted 35. But I did not include the ones that I *think* I may have read in H.S. that the brain has since deleted ;-)
Know I've read 40. I love A Town Like Alice - read it after PBS's miniseries starring Bryan Brown(1981).
The Time Trveler's Wife, The Shadow of The Wind and The Curious Incident of Dog in the Night-time are in my TBR pile.
Fan of Amy Tan's - reminds meof family and friends.
I got about 29 in the list, that is if you count all of Shakespeare as 1. Actually I read a few of those in Spanish and also in English, does that count as double? and where are Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Darwin?
BBC you are slipping there.
Ok, I have not read any of these books. I found a few I would like to read does this make me sad person?
Sara, not a sad person, though I think you would enjoy Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre.
Hey, you girls did well! See? I knew you can prove BBC wrong!
Sara, I didn't to make you feel sad. Look at it this way--you have a LOT of great books to try out if you ever want to try something non-romance ;-). Wuthering Heights is also one of my all-tome rereads--it's gothic and incredibly moving. It all depends on your reading taste, though, whether you like humor (Dickens) or dark (Bronte).
Firecat,
I'm going to make a list then, eh?
*blinks* Okay, what's it say about me that I've read them all except the Harry Potter books? And I'm including those mentioned in the comments and the extras at the end of the post. o_0 I've even reread most of the classics multiple times. (War and Peace was one of the rereads.) And I wasn't an English major. Just a garden variety Comp Sci geek.
What would I add? How about some Twain (Huck Finn, anyone?), Baum (Wizard of Oz and the sequels), Faulkner (Sound and the Fury), and the collected works of Poe and Lovecraft?
Heather,
Awesome thumbs up! I'm always in awe of a well-read person. Of the books you tagged on, in my opinion, the Twain would be the most "universal" to most readers. Not sure about Faulkner or I'd have added "As I Lay Dying" because that's one amazing book that changed American novel writing. As for Poe, yeah, I can see his books recognized by most people too.
One way to recognize universal in my mind is, if I said to someone "I was up all night reading Mark Twain," it wouldn't generate a blank look like it'd if I'd said, "I was up all night reading Milton. (dead pause) You know Milton, Paradise Lost? (another dead pause)"
*snorts* Now that just reminds me of the conversation that killed my desire to discuss books with most of my friends. I told my best friend that I was re-reading Homer. I kid you not, her response was "I didn't know Homer Simpson had his own book out." *headdesk* D'oh!!
What a fun list. I'm at 35 books, but some I read maybe 20 years ago, so I hope they still count! I'm surprised the BBC didn't include classics like Chaucer and Mallory. Oooh, that's just me showing off that I remember some English Lit classes I took...cough...17 years ago...cough. :)
I'd read a miserly 21 of the books on the BBC list.
But I do have quite a few on my TBR pile.
I've read 20 from this list and I'd add Flowers In The Attic. Everyone surely has heard of the book one time or another. It was the must-read controversial book of my crowd.
I've read 39 of the original list.
I'd add: Isaac Asimov's Foundation; Maya Angelou's I Know WHy The Caged Bird Sings; William Gibson's Neuromancer
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