Wednesday 18 February 2009

"Everyone's an idiot," says the BBC


Underestimating the literary abilities and inclinations of Brittons, the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the following 100 books.

I swiped this from facebook as I thought it would be more fun to post it here first.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.

3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.

4) Tally your total at the bottom.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible X

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman x (started reading, didn't finish)

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare X

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger x (started reading it, got 20 pages in a decided the annoying little wanker wasn't worth it)

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (why is this on here, but Hemingway isn't?)

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X+

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens (not read enough Dickens in general)

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy x (read about half so far)

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyvsky X

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X+

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy *

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X

34 Emma - Jane Austen X+

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X (is this not part of the Narnia series? - this list maker is daft!)

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X+

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (why is this even on this list?!)

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 X

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X (why isn't there a sign like "-" [clever] for books you really thought were a waste of time?)

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan X

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X

52 Dune - Frank Herbert X

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons (sounds like a Mills and Boone)
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X+

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X (great title; shame about the book)

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 X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X+

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas X

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac X

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X (though I'm ashamed to admit I've actually read this book)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie *

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X+

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson x (didn't finish - thought it was boring)
75 Ulysses - James Joyce X+
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath X

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray X (Becky Sharp is my hero)

80 Possession - AS Byatt X (whoo hoo for the London Library)
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 X++++++++ (love, love, love this book)

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X

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 X+++++++
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole X

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute (never even heard of this...)

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas X

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X (what makes Hamlet separate from the Complete Works?)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (seen the stage version - does that count?)


TOTAL 58.5 I'm a sad, sad, sad person. That's a Humanities student for you... And funnily enough, I've only starred two books, which means that I haven't read these so-called "classics" because I haven't wanted to, not because I can't be bothered!

1 comment:

Peter said...

Hi, I see you are a big fan of Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Me too. Have you read Sentimental Education? It is one of my favourite books.