Yes, I am late to the game, but nonetheless, I wanted to find out how many of these books I've read. According to the BBC, from this list of 100 novels, most people have only read 6. Hmmm. Seems like The Beebs doesn't have much faith in us as readers. Well, let me just say that I'm pretty sure I've read more than 6 of the books on this list. Here goes:
Bold = I've read it
Italicized = I've started the book, but never finished
And the rest are the books I have not even picked up to read.
The Reading List
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
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
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
Total books read from this list: 40. Hmmm. That's not too bad, but I'm a bit disappointed that I didn't at least reach 50. Oh well, I suppose I'll be adding some new titles to my TBR list in 2011.
Happy Reading!!
.
11 comments:
I've come across this list before and was similarly dismayed at the BBC's lack of faith in readers... I guess I'd be classified as an avid reader so I don't have the greatest sense of how well-read the average person is, but I'd still like to hope that people have read more than 6 of these works! Looks like you've made quite a dent - good work and happy reading!
Laura, its pretty crazy how little the Beebs assumes we read. I would think that most people have definitely read more than 6 of these books - especially with all the required reading in school. Either way it does give one pause to think about not only the types of books that are listed (and left out), but also how much reading is too much and too little. Thanks for the encouragement - I'm thinking of crossing a few more of those titles in the upcoming year. Cheers!
I was pretty shocked that most people had only read 6 of these books but then I know a lot of people that really don't read and may not have read any. Of course the list is varied enough that you'd think most people would have read 2 or 3 of them.
I'm 28, and I've read 35 of these books so far. It helps that one of my "life goals" is to read 100 of the most influential novels of all time (I have a few different lists that I'm working from), but I often get distracted by the non-fiction section (science, art, politics, finance...yeah, I have a book problem. I honestly don't think most people have ready any of these outside of what they had to in school. Very sad.
Not to bad at all! I thought about doing this but was an English major and grad student, and don't want to take credit for some of these books that I was "forced" to read. :) Seems like cheating, right?
I think my number was 44 when I did it on FB last month. Not too shabby but like you, I expected to have read more.
I consider myself a fairly avid reader, but I've only read 17! I'm posting this list tomorrow on my blog which will hopefully motivate me to read more of them.
I've read 36 . Some of them sounds a little odd - the complete works of Shakespeare for example! Or the Harry Potter series rather than one book. Its a good list however and certainly separates the readers from the non-readers
Posted my list of 47-out-of-100 here. Thanks for the idea!
Lisa, I was surprised, too. But as you noted, its true, not everyone enjoys to read. Its definitely a varied list and does yield some surprising thoughts. Hmmm.
Elani, that's great! What a cool goal! And I totally agree that its pretty sad that the only reason some people read any of these books was because of required reading at school. Of course, at least it did get them to read, so perhaps its not that bad. Hmmm.
Frances, thanks! And I know what you mean :)
Ti, right? It seems like with all the reading we do, we'd have crossed off a lot more books from that list. Of course its subjective isn't it? That list doesn't include a lot of the books I have read, as I'm sure its the same for you.
Katie, great idea! I want to use this list to motivate me to read more next year. And 17 isn't bad - after all I'm sure the list doesn't include loads of the titles you've read.
Tom C, congrats! 36 is a good number.And I do agree with you that some of the titles written are rather odd, because the complete works of Shakespeare as 1 title does not make sense. Hmmm. All the same it is a rather varied list which I appreciate and it definitely does separate the readers from the non-readers. Interesting, eh?
pagesofjulia, 47 is fantastic! And I think that would be cool to form your own list of 100. Cheers!
Oh I love this, I hadn't seen this list yet. I'm going to go through and count my books too. However, it says Chronicles of Narnia and then The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. If I'm not mistaken, isn't L, W, and W a book in the Chronicles of Narnia?
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