BBC's made up a list of books; it is largely bland.

[kitewithfish]

Honestly, reading this list, I wonder if they just fed a bunch of prior "best book" lists into a computer algorithm and sent the resulting list out to the public for us to be snide over. It's not great on women or people of color, really, and frankly not great on non Brits. 

I think, based on a quick count, I have read about 45 of the listed books, which makes me feel smug for myself and then annoyed at the smugness.  About halfway thru I stopped giving myself partial credit - I really know that I should get back to Watership Down, at some point, but the world is vast and full of books so I'm going to let it fade from my set of cares. 

Well, here's the thing itself: 

The BBC estimates that most people will only read 6 books out of the 100 listed below. Repost this and bold the titles you’ve read.

 

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien -partially 

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling - bailed 

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 - oh, come the actual fuck on, BBC, this is a huge work and you don't need to read the whole corpus to get a good lump of Shakespeare. 

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffeneger

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 – C.S. Lewis

34 Emma – Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden - For the record, this book is awfully racist and deeply gross. Read Geisha, A Life by  Mineko Iwasaki for an actual first person account. Arthur Golden should not be allowed to publish books at all. 

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 -This, also, was very good, and even reading it in school could not destroy its charm. 

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 Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro - This book was wonderful, and the film was also wonderful. 

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 

 

Comments

[elaiel]

I've read 57 of them ave bailed on about 3 (can't stand Gabriel Garcia Marquez style), but thought it was a pretty insipid list. I know 100 books is quite a short list really, when you're talking about classics, but still, even their SF choices are disappointing.

[thenewbuzwuzz]

I can't tell if it's a new list or not... I don't think they even tried at all. :D

(34-ish for me)

[phi]

25 but do I get extra smugness points for reading Saint-Exupery and Dumas en francais?

[kitewithfish]

Yup!

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Wild Bill himself wouldn't say you 'have to' read all his plays to know his work. He might remind one to go see a show as available. However he'd be very interested that Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is not on here. Very intrigued about paddle boats as a theatrical platform.