Thursday, March 5, 2009

Found this floating around on the internet

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions: [I've altered these, the old ones made it messy]
1) Bold those you have read.
2) *Star the ones you loved.
3) Italicise those you plan on reading.

*1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (I've read this God knows how many times)
*2
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (love this too)
3
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (not fond of this one)
*4
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (I was eleven when I discovered this, and i loved it. it got less good as it went on, though).
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (I know a few of the stories, through my grandmother's stories and stuff, read some in prose, but we don't have copies of the Bible lying around-I grew up in an atheist household)
7
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (never been very interested in this one)
8
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (a good book, it's just that I don't intend to read it for fun)
*9
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (This is fucking brilliant)
10
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (I started it, and forgot about it)
11
Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (one of the books that rythmed my childhood)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (started this, got bored, forgot about it)
*13
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (this is nuts)
14
Complete Works of Shakespeare* (you can't count all of them as one book, i have the complete works but haven't read all of them)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
*16
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (lighter than the Lord of the Rings series, since it's meant for kids, and very, very good)
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 (I liked the movie, what can I say)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens (I read quite a bit of Dickens when i was a kid, the adventures of Mr pickwick and the like, but I'm not that interested anymore)
*24
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (This is a fantastic book, I tend to like stuff that has to do with history, and it's set during Napoleon's wars, which I had to see as part of my education, blabla. It's great)
*25
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (one of my favourites)
26
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh (i've heard a lot about this)
27
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (I have this, but I've never felt like reading it)
28
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
*29
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (another childhood book of mine)
30
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (read this when i was a kid, too)
31
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (don't like)
*33
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (love this too)
34
Emma - Jane Austen (another great Austen)
35
Persuasion - Jane Austen
*36
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (this is part of the Chronicles of Narnia)
37
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
39
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (I quite liked this, but the movie is too long)
40
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (another childhood book)
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 (I think they might have gone through the drawers under my bed)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49
Lord of the Flies - William Golding (read it for school when I was a kid...forgot just about all of it)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51
Life of Pi - Yann Martel (and I have this, I suck)
*52
Dune - Frank Herbert (excellent SF)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
*54
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (I love Jane Austen)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth (I think my mother has this, there're a good few Vikram Seths lying around the house)
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (read it for high school, interesting book)
59
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (I read his second book, "A spot of Bother" and liked it very much)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (So much hate)
62
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt (not intending to read this-I was traumatised by the Little friend (is that the translation in English? We borrowed it from a french library when i was a kid) )
64
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (sad,sad, sad, but good)
*65
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (I love 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 (I always have this book where I live, it's like a lucky charm)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75
Ulysses - James Joyce
76
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
*77
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome (Another kid's book, actually I have the whole series)
78 Germinal - Emile Zola (ugh, no way, I can't stand Zola since I had to read Le ventre de Paris for school)
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 (I think I was fifteen when I read this. It's powerful.)
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 (read every single one of them, and i'm surprised there're no Agatha Christies on this list)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton (funny, I don't know this, and I've read a LOT of Enid blyton)
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
*92
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (this is a book just about every kid in France reads at some point. It's lovely)
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 (I also grew up reading Roald Dahl, including his adult books, like the collection of short stories Kiss Kiss)
100
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


That comes up to 36, i'm pretty pleased with myself :) Funny thing is I read most of these when i was a kid. I'll see if i ever get around to reading more of this list.

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