Fun With Lists
The BBC has come up with a list of 100 books people should read nd believes that people have read only 6 on the list. How many have you read? I’ve read 38 of these (some are more than one book).
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
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
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
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 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
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
100-98, 91 (many times), 89, 87, 78, 76,73-70, 58, 57, 49, 46, 41, 40, 33 (all of them) 29, 28, 25 (the whole series) 22, 18, 13, 9, 6 (the first half) 2 (all of them) .
never even read the back cover of a Harry Potter book.
101 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dosteyevsky
102 (All of His Short Stories) – Guy deMaupassant
103 Assholes Finish First – Tucker Max
104 I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell – Tucker Max
105 Common Sense on Mutual Funds – John Bogle
I call bullshit. If Mitch Ablom, why not “Chicken Soup for the Soul?”
22,but I’m going to the library.
82 of them — but why would you have The Complete Works of Shakespeare (14), then include Hamlet on the list (98)?
And the Da Vinci Code as a book that everyone should read? Really?
I think most. Recently discovered Iain Banks, who also uses Ian Banks. Pretty good escape stuff for the beach.
Saw every one of the movies.
haha delbert’s a Tucker Max fan, that totally makes sense.
I’ve read 20 (but I’ve read #3 at least three times)
I’d like to humbly also suggest:
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (if you like true crime and you haven’t read this, go out and get it. now)
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (GREAT old book about the american dream gone wrong)
No Vonnegut?
List incomplete.
Im a little annoyed Fahrenheit 451 isnt on the list. I also think Phantom Tollbooth is one everyone should read.
“Under The Volcano” by Malcom Lowry. Great book.
But not all books are novels. What about poetry? Non-fiction? The Iliad and the Odyssey? Paradise Lost?
I’ve read maybe half the list. As an English speaker my most influential books are poetry – Blake, Wordsworth, Yeats, Wallace Stevens… and all sorts of random poets of the English Renaissance. Herrick, Wyatt, Skelton.
Why is “Hamlet” separate from Shakespeare’s complete works? I have read almost all of Shakespeare, but I’m about five plays short of having read them all.
The list is actually a mess; was it assembled by readers? Because it reads like a list of the top 100 vote-getters, with all of Jane Austen and nearly half of Dickens sprinkled throughout rather than grouped together, and several lightweight titles among mostly classic works. The list would read much differently if the survey were conducted in the US instead of Britain.
I’ve read 36, 37 if I get credit for Shakespeare.
I have read almost all of Shakespeare, but I’m about five plays short of having read them all.
Depending on which ones, you can probably stop right there.
Chronologically, I stopped at “The Tempest,” and I skipped a couple of histories.
I have read the entire Bible, though.
Thirty nine. But I was an English major, so I was forced to read a lot of those.
However, I have a few specific questions and one recommendation:
1. The Bible–the whole thing, cover to cover? Then probably not.
2. The complete works of Shakespeare — Does that mean everything he wrote? Then the answer is no. I mean, he wrote a lot. “The Merry Wives of Windsor?” “The Rape of Lucrece?” And all of the sonnets?
Be sure to read “A Confederacy of Dunces,” by John Kennedy Toole this summer. Put it on your to-do list. Then thank me later.
One thing every person should do in their lifetime is attend an outdoor evening performance of “Midsummer Night’s Dream” in mid-June. It is magical. A traditional performance that is, not some reinterpreted abomination. The Tempest too.
“A Confederacy of Dunces,” by John Kennedy Toole is a great book to read in your 20’s. I doubt it would hold up.
The wikipedia synopsis of ‘Middlemarch’ makes it sound like a British Emile Zola novel. Can anyone confirm that? I love me some Zola.
Sheesh. Puck pimping some outdoor MSND. This blog is in deep trouble.
Aw c’mon–that’s more than 100–when you talk series and complete works. And where’s “Poor Richard’s Almanac”?
Come to the woods, if you dare 🙂
I saw MSND in Central Park with William Hurt of all people as Oberon. It worked.
Later I saw the Tempest on Broadway with Captain Picard as Prospero – he tore up the scenery. I think there is a movie with that cast.
Eliot is way better at vivid characters than Zola, IMO. But less operatic than Zola.
We can all go round and round.
The important fact is that WE read unlike the Sarah Palin fans and their ILK who do most of their reading from cereal boxes and TWITTER tweets.
Missing from the list – The Gulag Archipelago. I read this in 10th grade.
Nonfiction:
“Secrets Of The Temple” by William Greider
“The Power Broker” by Robert Caro
Thanks Cassandra. I’ll have to check out Middlemarch.
For the record I’m only at about 28 for this list and I was an English major. As for Shakespeare, I take “The complete works” to mean: Hamlet, R&J, Henry V, MSND, MacB, Richard III, JC, 12th Night, TotS, Othello, King Lear, The Tempest, Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado, and maybe Measure for Measure.
No link?
Not really a Tucker Max “fan”, V. I just like to read his stories for their entertainment value. Where’s Oprah Winfrey when we need her?
This British list is way too…British. In other words, way too much Jane Austen.
Plus, while I enjoyed ‘Atonement’, it wouldn’t make my list of 100 essential books. Besides, any list without Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’ is a phony list. I want an Amurrican list! Don DeLillo, Eudora Welty, James Ellroy, Flannery O’Connor and some William Bleeping Faulkner.
Thanks for the ILK reference, Skippertee. Someone has to satisfy the Weekly Ilk Quotient, and I’ve fallen short there.
BTW, I’ve read exactly 20, not counting the parts of the Bible I read when I was young, indiscreet, and didn’t know any better.
14….but some of these are questionable as has already been said. Will be 15 after i finish my summer leisure reading – the Bible, cover to cover. Just because I realized about a year ago they only tell you the good parts in church when you are young. lol.
Without doing more than a quick mental checklist while I scrolled through, I’d say around half of them. But in a few cases, I have to ask why they are included because they certainly don’t merit classic status.
Then again, on mature reflection, do some of the so-called classics really deserve classic status?