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. . .