Tuesday, October 21, 2008

The BBC's Top 100 Books

According to the BBC, the average adult has only read 6 of the books on their Top 100 list.

Blog meme:
Look at the list and bold those you have read.
Italicize those you intend to read.
Underline the books you love.
Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
  1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
  2. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R Tolkien
  3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
  4. The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
  5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
  6. The Bible (Some of it – for college!)
  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 - J.R.R Tolkien
  17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
  18. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger (Read it for high school English. Hated it.)
  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 - C.S. Lewis
  34. Emma - Jane Austen
  35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
  36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. 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 (WTF is this doing here???)
  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 - L.M. 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 (And this??? Who the hell made this list?)
  69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
  70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
  71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (Saw the play.)
  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 Thackeray
  80. Possession - A.S. 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 - Ronald Dahl (Had it read TO me in elementary school.)
  100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (Saw the movie with Liam Nelson and Claire Danes.)
I've read a total of twenty-two of the books. I have loved eight of them. There are fifteen books there (mostly Jane Austen) that I have either read and hated or do not intend to read at all.

Honestly though, I think this list sucks. Yes, yes, I know it's a "best-loved books" compilation determined by voters, but still! WAY too many modern bestsellers, INCLUDING The Da Vinci Code and Bridget Jones's Diary (hey, why not add the Shopaholic series too?). Also: why did they list The Complete Works of Shakespeare and Hamlet separately? Do we really need the same author multiple times? Why not just say, "Jane Austen – any book"?

Now where the heck were:
  • The Bacchae – Euripides
  • The Aeneid – Virgil
  • The Divine Comedy – Dante
  • The Decameron - Giovanni Boccaccio
  • Gulliver's Travels – Jonathan Swift
  • Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
  • The Awakening – Kate Chopin
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
  • The 42nd Parallel – John Dos Passos
  • A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith
  • Johnny Got His Gun – Dalton Trumbo
  • ANYTHING by Faulkner???
  • ANYTHING by Hemingway???
  • ANYTHING by Woolf???
  • The Sheltering Sky – Paul Bowles
  • The Chosen – Chaim Potok
  • Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
  • Interview with the Vampire – Anne Rice (If they can list vapid bestsellers. . .)
  • White Noise – Don DeLillo
  • Beloved – Toni Morrision
  • Austerlitz – W.G. Sebald
*Sigh* I did ALL the HTML for this post by hand. That was very tiresome. . .

1 comments:

Mrs. C said...

Hi, E. Go on back over to my page for a full(er) discussion on Comedy as a form now that my babes had compketed their test...let me know if you see stuff you hadn't considered before. I tell students that tragedy as an authentic form is dead; only after "getting" comedy can they begin to see how that might be true...

Yeah, for a second time I am posting beneath a post I have not yet had the opp to read, but this is a good one, I can tell--maybe before the crack of dawn tomorrow I'll be able to skip-to-my-Lou through it (I always approach text I enjoy at full-on skip speed!).

Related Posts with Thumbnails