Thursday, December 2, 2010

What have you read? A compilation of 100 titles

 I came across this post on As The Crowe Flies (And Reads!) and thought it was too interesting to not pass along!!

Apparently the BBC posted a list of 100 books (compiled by viewers and listeners) and believe that most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

So in accordance with the rules set out by Ms Crowe I shall share the books that i've read. Because of the length of this post I've added a break so as not to overwhelm visitors!! So if it interests you to see what I've read (and perhaps how many you have yourself) read on past the break!


First things first, these are the instructions:

• Copy this list.
• Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety. (I underlined them, bold wasn't obvious enough)
• Italicise the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.
• Tag other book nerds.


And now for the main event!! Here we go then...

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The King James Bible
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte  
Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) – George Orwell
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 
Little Women – Louisa M Alcott 
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger 
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby- F. Scott Fitzgerald
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll 
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (currently reading)
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens 
Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

Emma -Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis 
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
 
Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The DaVinci Code – Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving 
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery  
Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies – William Golding

Atonement – Ian McEwan (painful, oh so painful!)
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Dune – Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
On The Road – Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett 
Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
Ulysses – James Joyce
The Inferno – Dante
Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
Germinal – Emile Zola
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession – AS Byatt
A Christmas Carol- Charles Dickens  
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte's Web- E.B. White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 
The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Watership Down – Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

So I've read 40 (if I've counted correctly) and attempted  a further 8 (or in the case of Shakespeare read about 15 plays, but not his entire collection), which i'm feeling a little so-so about. Some of the titles are on my 'to read' list and are already in my bookcase waiting to be cracked open, some I refuse to attempt (namely anything by the Brontes or Austen - they pain me so) and a few I hate to admit I've never heard of. 

Is it just me or is this a bizarre list? I'm not sure of the details under which it was compiled so I'm not sure exactly what they were aiming for; is it must-read fiction (if so why is Bridget Jones on it?) or perhaps a list of popular fiction (old and new) or maybe it is a list of the most purchased books (which would explain Dan Brown and Helen Fielding and why it is the Complete Works of Shakespeare on the list and not individual plays). I really don't know, but it was a bit of fun, and reminded me of a similar one that circled around my friends on Facebook for awhile, although that one was films. 

So now it is your turn, if you use it on your blog leave a comment with a link so I can check out your results, or simply leave your result in the comments. I'm interested in hearing your take on the compilation of the list (do you know exactly how it was made?) and what you think should have been omited or included!


1 comment:

  1. Since I posted this one on my blog (and followed it on Facebook a few months back), I've had somebody tell me that the general public submitted titles to the BBC, but it was unclear to me whether they were submitting their favorites, what they had read, or what they thought other people should read, or some combination of all three. I haven't verified it either way. But I agree--totally bizarre list!

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