From Theocoid ... here we go.
P.S. About half of these are NOT really classics but just popular modern books. Give me a list of 100 that have already stood the test of time and I'll be much more interested. Mitch Albom? Really?
UPDATE: Melanie Bettanelli commented on the Facebook version of this that she had actually seen it loosely linked originally with a list from the Guardian when she did a vain attempt to track it back to the BBC. Either way, it is still rather a fun list to look at.
P.S. About half of these are NOT really classics but just popular modern books. Give me a list of 100 that have already stood the test of time and I'll be much more interested. Mitch Albom? Really?
UPDATE: Melanie Bettanelli commented on the Facebook version of this that she had actually seen it loosely linked originally with a list from the Guardian when she did a vain attempt to track it back to the BBC. Either way, it is still rather a fun list to look at.
Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here...
Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, underline the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!
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 (but I"m working on it)
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 (This is NOT a classic and is mean spirited enough to make it never become one in my book ... stick to his history-ish books, not the travel guides)
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
Dr. Boli (from whom I am honored to have received a comment) shows us a different way.
The fundamental flaw of the list is that there seems to be no way to construe the word "classic" so that it includes Dan Brown. However, we may find another use for the list. Copy it again, and this time bold all the titles that nothing short of a substantial payment, cash on the barrel, would ever induce you to read. Give reasons.
Definitely some non-classics there. 32 that I'm sure of, plus a few partials, like most of the Bible & most of the Narnia books--does it count double if I read the Spanish ones in the original language? = super nerd.
ReplyDelete34...but not as many I thought I had, after all. Gotta load up my kindle I guess!
ReplyDeleteI've read 28 titles on this list. How is it that Shakespeare's complete works are listed (deservedly), but Hamlet gets its own entry? Also, FWIW, I agree with you that Bill Bryson and Mitch Albom don't belong on this list. Philip Pullman? Gimme a break! Neither does "The Lovely Bones" (Alice Sebold did alright with that, but Leif Enger's "Peace Like a River" was much better -- and where are Morris West and Edwin O'Connor? Their signature novels could wipe the floor with most of these titles)
ReplyDeleteThe fundamental flaw of the list is that there seems to be no way to construe the word "classic" so that it includes Dan Brown. However, we may find another use for the list. Copy it again, and this time bold all the titles that nothing short of a substantial payment, cash on the barrel, would ever induce you to read. Give reasons.
ReplyDeleteNow THERE'S an idea!
ReplyDeleteI'm so close to you. 37. 37 and a half if you count spark noting Tess of the D'Urbervilles. They had to choose that instead of Return of the Native, didn't they?
ReplyDeleteYou've read Return of the Native? Wow!
ReplyDeleteI've only read 14....
ReplyDeleteI have to say, I'm shocked that you haven't read Catcher in the Rye!
Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series is anti-Catholic. I read the series, concerned the titles were in the local Catholic schools. Please consider removing this from your Happy Catholic list.
ReplyDeleteOTOH - as to the Narnia series, I have read aloud this series to several children, and it was agreed the most edifying book was The Magician's Nephew.
How is it that Augustine's Confessions didn't make the cut? All faiths and atheists have read it... On another note, I've always found The Bridge Over San Luis Rey (Thornton Wilder), which I had to read in high school and I'm now 57, for such a small book, is a real gem even after so many re-reads. I'm not a big reader, but this list left a lot to be desired IMHO.
ReplyDeleteOne I would have added was Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
ReplyDeleteDonna ... please read carefully the introduction to see where the list came from, where the books were generated from ... and why this is not a list of my recommendations. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteOnly about ten of these, and where Jonathan Livingston Seagull? Skipped Dan Brown, but does reading virtually all of Thomas Merton, plus Thomas aKempis,and Thomas Aquinas make up for the lack? Hmmm, must be hooked on Thomases (including "Tom Sawyer").
ReplyDeleteAs you mention in the update above, contrary to the ongoing meme about how the BBC claims that only 6 people have read these books, this list doesn't even come from the BBC. Their equivalent list may be found here:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml
The list you posted above comes from the World Book Day poll asking reader to name 10 books they can't live without. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/mar/01/topstories3.books
In other words, this isn't a list of classics, or great books, or anything like that. Instead, it's a list of books compiled from the "top 10" lists of 2000 random people participating in a poll.
20 or so. but I'll not consider the Oprah Book Club Wal-mart selections at all.
ReplyDeleteBelloc, Chesterton, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Lewis, Waugh, and Wodehouse for me!
(What, no football books?)
22 that I read completely; and several others (Crime & Punishment, e.g.) that I started, but gave up part way through.
ReplyDeleteTeaPot562
Along the same lines as Patrick O'Hannigan:
ReplyDeleteThe Lord of the Rings is one title, but Chronicles of Naria and The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe are separated?!
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy gets a listing, but the other four books of the trilogy are left out?! (I haven't read And Another Thing.... Should I?)
Plus, other sundry problems with the list. Oh, well.
With that off my chest: 22 substantially or completely read. 12 I plan on never reading.