Lists, lists and more lists

[Jenny, honorary mod - inactive]

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
How do your reading habits stack up?



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- Some of it
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 – Most of them!
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier-
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien -
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk -
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 Bernieres -
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 Meany - 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 - Watched it?
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 Inferno - Dante -
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 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 -
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 Factoy - Roald Dahl -
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo –

[Jenny, honorary mod - inactive]

Unlucky 13 for me!

[Emma]

16! Is that good or bad?! Well it's better than 6!

[Jenny, honorary mod - inactive]

I feel like I should have read a lot more than I have. I own a lot of them :S

[Beth]

I've read 24 of them

[Cecily]

Is there any significance in the numbering/sequence?

Handmaid’s Tale and Lord of the Flies are consecutive! The one after that is Atonement, but I don’t think that would fit into any of the categories for April (unless it could be squeezed into an Easter theme... sin, forgiveness and redemption?).

Anyway, I’ve read the first 10 (it does say “some of it” for the Bible) and 48 in total - but it does have Chronicles of Narnia as a separate entry from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, so that gave me an extra one.

[Sam]

I've managed to get through 30 of them but there are a few that I want to read so hopefully that number'll go up :-)

[Heather]

I've read 39 of them. And I have 8 of them on my TBR shelf right now.

[becca]

I've read 24 and i must admit that i probably will not read many of the others.

[Susan]

I've read 39, but I feel guilty about counting some of them that I read so many years ago, I can't even remember the plot (I read Thomas Hardy, and some of the great Russian novels my junior/senior year in high school, which would have been 1967-68 - no wonder I can't remember!!!) Also, the Harry Potter books are counted as 1 instead of 7, as are some other series. There are some on the list though, that I want to read, and some that, even while I recognize they are great books, have no appeal for me.

[Wanda]

I made it to 28. I will have to add some of these -to my To-Be-Read list. Thank you. This was fun.

[Brenda]

I've read 34, but like Susan can't even remember some because it was so long ago. I agree with Wanda, this was fun to do.

[Katie]

I've read 13, and I have 11 more downloaded to my Sony Reader for future reading.

[Dgold]

I own some of them and i will get the rest.

[Cecily]

ALL of the rest?!

[Tracey]

Only 7 for me. What a poor show!

[Donna]

23 for me, almost a quarter - not bad.

[Melanie]

42! Which is coincidentally the answer to life, the universe and everything in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy!!! (Number 25 on the list!)
Probably should be higher though, as I do work in a Library! ;)

[Jaime]

I've read 35 and in the process of reading one right now. To be fair, there are some on here that I haven't completely finished. And, what do you know, Notes from a Small Island is on here and it's one of our reads for next month. It happens to be sitting unread on my bookshelf!

One of my friends posted this list on Facebook a while back and it started quite a discussion about what an odd list it was. Any thoughts?

[Cecily]

Jaime wrote: "a discussion about what an odd list it was. Any thoughts? ..."

Very odd. A mix of traditional classics, recent hits that in some cases are unlikely to be thought of as classics in 50 years' time (Bridget Jones’s Diary!? Fun, but not a must read long term) and #86 where I have never heard of the title or the author. And 4% of the list is Jane Austen and 6% Dickens; whilst they should be mentioned, I think they're overrepresented; it might have been better to be A N Other novel by Jane Austen and A N Other novel by Dickens as one entry per author. Similarly, Complete Shakespeare is a pretty tall order, but to have at least one/two Shakespeare plays would be reasonable.

I presume it was drawn up by some sort of ballot, hence it has Chronicles of Narnia AND The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, then Complete Works of Shakespeare AND Hamlet. Anyone drawing up such a list themselves ought to have avoided such double counting. A ballot might also account for the order of the list, which isn't alphabetical, chronological or thematic.

Does anyone know how the BBC compiled it?

Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island will take me to 49, so I think I'll have to pick another from the list to make a nice round number.

[Jaime]

C F S R wrote: "Jaime wrote: "a discussion about what an odd list it was. Any thoughts? ..."

Very odd. A mix of traditional classics, recent hits that in some cases are unlikely to be thought of as classics in ..."


I was wondering how the BBC compiled it too.

[Lindsay]

Oh, just saw this topic and always find these lists of "books you should read so interesting." Like the rest of you, would be very curious to see the reasoning behind these. Is it in any particular order? I don't want to get in a fight over Tolkien v. Rowling, but if I have to . . . :)

I've read 48 on the list without any of the double counting that CFSR mentioned, but Notes From a Small Island will take me to 49!

[Heather]

ooh I'm at 43 now & 6 on my tbr.

[Liz]

26

Jenny wrote: "The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
How do your reading habits stack up?



1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen-
2 The Lord of the Rings - J..."

[Emma]

48 is my magic number.

I've read most of Les Mis, and will get back to it one of these days, I can't tolerate Dickins so I doubt I'll ever manage any of them. Despite trying for years I have never got past page 80 of Love in the time of Cholera (same goes for one hundred years of solitude... yawn!) and Birdsong seems to fox me for reasons unknown. I never managed to finish a Prayer for Owen Meany, it just bored the arse off me.

I'll get to the rest one day, right now I'm rather enjoying reading cheap inferior fiction :)

[Cecily]

Wahay - just realised this month's read, Little Women, is on the list. That'll be my 50th. :-)

[[deleted user]]

I've read seventeen of them, but a lot are marked as to read :)

[Cecily]

Not that it detracts from the fun, but the inconsistencies in this list (that I referred to above) were niggling. So I looked into it and found this:
http://kriswager.blogspot.com/2009/02...

[Kristjan]

I'm the author of that blogpost. Thanks for the link.

As C F S R said, it doesn't detract from the fun - rather it just gives people two lists instead of just one.

What triggered my skepticism was the claim that people would only have read six of these rather popular books.

[Pollyanna]

I've read 11 of them and a couple are on my to read list.

[Chrissie]

I have read 38! But as I just mentioned under the 5 star thread - I read alot. I have not added all the above books which I have read to my GR shelves b/c deciding how many stars to give a book that you read ages ago is so very difficult. Some old reads I have added b/c I simply cannot forget them.

[Afsana]

have read 17 but have 5 of them on those on my bookshelf to read

[Stuart]

I have read 23 of them.

[John]

I have read 27 of them and have a few more on my to read list.