Victoria B.C. (Book Club) discussion

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message 1: by Dorothy (new)

Dorothy  (vilette) | 248 comments This isthe BBC's list of 100 books you must read in your lifetime. I'm not sure on what criteria it is based but some of them are surprising (The Da Vinci Code??) and where are the classical texts like Beowulf or the Odyssey? I've read about 87 of these though not the whole of the Bible and Shakespeare. I'd be interested in your comments

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
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
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
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
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 White Fang/The Call of the Wild - Jack London
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
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 - A.A. 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
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 - E.B. 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


message 2: by John (new)

John | 259 comments Mod
You are way ahead of me Dot, I have only managed 36 and some of those would never have come close to my top 100.


message 3: by Dorothy (new)

Dorothy  (vilette) | 248 comments John wrote: "You are way ahead of me Dot, I have only managed 36 and some of those would never have come close to my top 100."

Many of the classics mentioned were on our high school syllabus ...and the Enid Blyton series on the list was my favourite of hers. You can tell I've had my nose in a book for most of my life!


message 4: by John (new)

John | 259 comments Mod
My sister is a huge Enid Blyton fan and still buys the Adventure series for all her various grandchildren.


message 5: by Dorothy (new)

Dorothy  (vilette) | 248 comments John wrote: "My sister is a huge Enid Blyton fan and still buys the Adventure series for all her various grandchildren."

Enid Blyton was unpopular with educators for a while but I think she may now be thought to be OK again. She is likely not very politically correct ;-)


message 6: by Roberta (new)

Roberta | 193 comments Dot wrote: "John wrote: "My sister is a huge Enid Blyton fan and still buys the Adventure series for all her various grandchildren."

Enid Blyton was unpopular with educators for a while but I think she may no..."


I've read 84 of them but haven't completed The Bible, all of Shakespeare or War and Peace. I did start Moby Dick once but bogged down.

I was also suprised at some of the selections. The Time Traveler's Wifeis a good enough read but I'm not sure I would call it a classic. I was glad to see some of my favoritie children's chassics on the list. I hadn't read the Enid Blyton listed but I did read all her Adventure series when I was about 10. I reread them as an adult and was surprised to find them racist, sexist and classist by today's standards but didn't notice that at the time.


message 7: by Dorothy (last edited Nov 28, 2010 04:45PM) (new)

Dorothy  (vilette) | 248 comments Glen wrote: "I've read 52 novels on this list.Like most lists, you wonder what criteria they used. I would diaagree with many books picked for this list. The Davinci Code? "Crime and Punishment" but not "Brothe..."

Welcome to the group, Glen. I like the questions you propose....I'll need to think about the school curriculum one but for my favourite Canadian historical novel it would be a toss up between Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden and Galore by Michael Crummey


message 8: by Dorothy (new)

Dorothy  (vilette) | 248 comments Glen wrote: "I've read 52 novels on this list.Like most lists, you wonder what criteria they used. I would diaagree with many books picked for this list. The Davinci Code? "Crime and Punishment" but not "Brothe..."

I think the only criteria were that people voted for their favourite book...so not very discriminating...


message 9: by Roberta (new)

Roberta | 193 comments Hard to pick favorites but these came to mind immediately and I think any one of them would be suitable for Grade 10 and up: The Wars, The Stone Angel, As for Me and My House, Who Has Seen The Wind and Fall on Your Knees


message 10: by Roberta (new)

Roberta | 193 comments In that case though it's very heartening that books such as Ulysses and some of the other classics made it on. But you're right hardlyvalid criteria.


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