Saturday, February 21, 2009

BBC's Big Read!

In 2003, the BBC asked British citizens to name a favorite novel. Here are the top 100 (updated a couple of times since 2003)

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. I've read slightly more than that (54), but I bet not as many as my dad.
Instructions:
1) Bold those you have read.
2) *Star the ones you loved.
3) Italicise those you plan on reading.
  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 (major plays, sonnets, but not everything!)
  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 Berniere
  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. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
  47. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
  48. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
  49. Atonement - Ian McEwan
  50. *Life of Pi - Yann Martel
  51. Dune - Frank Herbert
  52. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
  53. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
  54. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
  55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
  56. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
  57. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
  58.  The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
  59. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  60. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
  61. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
  62. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
  63. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
  64. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
  65. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
  66. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
  67. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
  68. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
  69. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
  70. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
  71. Dracula - Bram Stoker
  72. *The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
  73. *Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
  74. Ulysses - James Joyce
  75. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
  76. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
  77. Germinal - Emile Zola
  78. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
  79. Possession - AS Byatt
  80. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
  81. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
  82. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
  83. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
  84. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
  85. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
  86. *Charlotte’s Web - EB White
  87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
  88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  89. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
  90. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
  91. *The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
  92. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
  93. Watership Down - Richard Adams
  94. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
  95. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
  96. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
  97. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
  98. *Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
  99. *Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Oh, dear. I seem to have lost #100. Please fill in with the book you think should be on this list.

1 comment:

Linda Judd said...

Hmmm, that's a tough assignment, Patty! Not meaning to re-write the list, but some that come to mind would be East of Eden (Steinbeck), The Source (James Michener), Shogun (James Clavell) and The Good Earth (Pearl Buck).