A post about books
Alright, so I found this terribly old thing from the BBC which claims that most people have only actually read about 6 of the following 100 books, and so you should see how you measure up by bolding the books you have read, italicising the ones you started but never finished, and leaving the ones you haven't.
I'm an English student; how could I resist?
So, here goes.
§ 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
§ 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
§ 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
§ 4 Harry Potter series
§ 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
§ 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
§ 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
§ 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
§ 18 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
§ 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
§ 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 Bell Jar - Sylvia 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 - David Mitchel
§ 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 and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
§ 100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Whew. That did take a while.
But anyhow, at the end of this list, I have read 66 out of 100 of the titles picked, and started but never finished 9. I'm not really sure how that measures up with everyone else, and to be honest I'm a little disappointed in myself but THANK GOD it's over the BBC's bloody SIX.
I'm also interested in what anyone thinks of the books chosen for the list? I was actually a little disappointed - very WEstern centric (No Mishima? No Murakami? No Achebe?) and the majority of it seemed to be quite condensed into a fairly short framework of writing; for example, I noticed that Paradise Lost is missing from this list, and I wonder if that's because it's considered more 'highbrow' than these selected works, or perhaps I am just a little over obsessed with Milton. We may never know. And so many people were left out and ugh first world problems.
Anyhow, that was amusing. Thank you for bearing with, if you made it this far.