Gacked from Ebonlock

[ellid]

Evidently the BBC believes that the average person has read only five or six of the following hundred books. I've read 43, as indicated by the X's next to certain titles, almost all of them written prior to 1980, which is when I stopped reading modern fiction because most of what was being published (at least in America) was so clearly influenced by writers' workshops and MFA programs that I found it unreadable.

1 Pride and Prejudice - X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee -X
6 The Bible - X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott -
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare X
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier -
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger -
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot -
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - X
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy X
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - X
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky X
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - X
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - X
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - X
34 Emma - Jane Austen -
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen -
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - X
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 - X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - X
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 X
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood - X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding -
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert - X
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 - X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - 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 X
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding -
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - X
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce X
76 The Inferno – Dante - X
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 - X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X
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 - X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
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 - X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - X
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo -

Comments

[orphandani.livejournal.com]

I've read 60 of them. Wouldn't mind reading them again. And again. :)

[mad_maudlin]

Who made up this list? And did they notice the two hyponyms that pad it out? ("Hamlet" and "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" are already included, respectively, under "The Complete Works of Shakespeare" and "The Chronicles of Narnia.")

I haven't read many of these, but they're certainly part of my cultural vocabulary; and I've read many other books that I would say belong here and aren't included. (Top nominees: The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester and At Swim, Two Boys by Jaime O'Neill.)

[ladypeyton.livejournal.com]

I've read 53 that I can remember but I think I may have read a few more than I can't.

[varianor.livejournal.com]

Will have to get a tally later. I'm afraid that while I may use this as a reading list, no list of books that eliminates Mark Twain in favor of Iain Banks (who is an excellent SF author by the way) can be considered definitive. I do like the inclusion of Winnie the Pooh. I can see the list eventually dropping Dan Brown. He's not exactly what I think of as "Top 100" material.

[prince-hring.livejournal.com]

So, you still have this one ahead of you:

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

It is possibly the only book that I've ever read that would not be re-readable. It changed me, and I can never read it for the first time, again.

[valis2.livejournal.com]

because most of what was being published (at least in America) was so clearly influenced by writers' workshops and MFA programs that I found it unreadable.

Ooh, how interesting! I've often wondered about that--whether those things actually homogenize writing, in a way. Would you consider writing an entry about that? I'd be so interested.

[fitzw.livejournal.com]

I've read more than three of them. ;-)

(Do I get bonus points for having read "The Three Musketeers" in French?)