How many of the Top 100 have you read?
There's this meme going around Facebook at the moment, so I thought I'd drag it out of the social network and onto my blog. It's pretty flawed, as these things always are, but interesting nonetheless. (Although I am confused by 14 and 98 – bit of a cock up there). Anyway, it goes like this:
Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.
Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!
So yeah, the usual chain letter nature of these things applies here. I'll bold and italicise as instructed. If you're reading this, consider yourself tagged.
1) Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (Does And Zombies count?)
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 – This could be a bold one, but I'm not sure I've read everything.
15) Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier – not sure if I finished it ornot, was quite young
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 – I don't think I've read all seven, or whatever it is.
34) Emma – Jane Austen
35) Persuasion – Jane Austen
36) The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis – Isn't this part of the Chronicles of Narnia? It's the 14/98 situation all over again. This really isn't a very well thought out list…
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) 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 – Yep, I'm one of those people that's actually read this whole book. I now know far too much about whales.
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 Thackera
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 I've read a lot of Sherlock Holmes, so I assume this is one of them. Is this an omnibus edition or something?
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
That's not a bad result, I suppose. Certainly more than six. But I do question the list. Including "complete works" or series, then adding another item which is a book from that series is a bit redundant and shows quite a lack of thought and planning in the list. But there you go. The list did at least make me notice a couple of things that I've been meaning to read but still haven't, so it wasn't a complete waste of time.
Tag!
EDIT: Thanks to Trudi Canavan in the comments for pointing out that the list from Facebook is not, in fact, the same as the original list from the BBC, which you can read here. Which is also out of date, having been last updated in August 2004. Ah, the internet is a minefield of "almost".
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