I saw this before on Librarything and then it turned up on facebook (what is this facebook people speak of?) and felt I had to do it because I know I will triumph as I always finish everything.
The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. I’ve read 62. Ha. I knew, one day, I would be glad that I had read all of “A Hundred Years of Solitude”. I have bolded the ones I have read. Should you wish to do likewise, don’t let me stop you.
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 [I heard the audiobook – does that count?]
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 (TWICE, I read it twice and I didn’t like it the first time – long story)
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 Hitchhiker’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 – AA 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 [I’ve read “Such a Long Journey” – that must count for something, it nearly killed me.]
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom [Please note, this may be one of the worst books I have ever read. I bought it in an airport; it was recommended by the bookshop staff.]
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
I don’t want to be pernickity – but I make that 27. Which, I agree is much better than 6.
And I also agree about the 5 People You Meet in Heaven.
Oooooops, so sorry. i read the post in Google Reader and there only 27 of the titles are in bold HONEST!
12. And at least as many I’ve started reading and stopped after 15 pages. But as I’m not Anglo-Saxon, consider 12 as not bad.
Also, it seems it can be persnickety or pernickety but not pernickity. I obviously haven’t read enough (36/100).
And we should both get extra points for not having read The Da Vinci Code.
I have been reading your blog for 5-ish years (maybe longer) and never commented until now because I am shy. But for the sake of yourself and your children, you should read #87, Charlotte’s Web. The story is wonderful and memorable and timeless. Garth Williams’s illustrations are beautiful too.
My count was over 30, but I got too preoccupied with wanting to comment to keep track of the exact number.
Bit of a half arsed list if you ask me. Surely ‘The Complete Works of Shakespeare’ includes ‘Hamlet’ and doesn’t ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’ include ‘The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe’?
Plus things like ‘The Complete works of Shakespeare’, ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’, ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’, ‘The Harry Potter series’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings’ count as several books taking the total to well over 100.
I’ll have to mooch through the list and see how many I’ve read. Can I count hearing a Radio 4 adaptation? 🙂
There are some that you haven’t read that you can use your children as an excuse to read. Either by reading to them or *ahem* checking that they’re suitable for them to read 😉 e.g. ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’, ‘The little Prince’ ‘Winnie The Pooh’ and ‘Swallows and Amazons’
The biggies missing from that list as far as Children’s reading are concerned (IMHO) are ‘Stig of the Dump’, ‘The Moomins series’ and I’d suggest ‘When we were very young’ rather than ‘Winnie the Pooh’
Oh yeah. Read ‘The Wasp Factory’. As far as I’m concerned that’s the biggest hole in your list. It’s one of my favourite books of all time.
Oh, you are so well-read. I only come to 36 on that list. Although if you count those that were heavily excerpted (like, at least a third of the book) in anthologies that I read in college, then that adds another 15. So even if I grant myself a working knowledge of 51, it still pales in comparison to your 62. Maybe if I spent all the time I spend reading blogs on reading actual books, I’d be closer to where you are!
I cannot believe that you haven’t read Winnie the Pooh!
Never mind the width, feel the quality – or, in this case, it isn’t the volume(s) of reading you’ve done it’s the the perceptiveness of your own reading. Whether this holds true or not, it offers some consolation for slow (but not necessarily perceptive)readers like me.
34, not too bad for a French girl. You really really should read Winnie the Pooh, Le Petit Prince, The Wind in the Willows, and Gone with the Wind (keep this one for long vacations). Anyhow, I wonder who made up this list…
I wouldn’t read Charlotte’s Web to your kids if I were you. Had to read it in school when I was about 9 but found out before the end that the spider dies. Put me off reading for years.
Glad you’re well. (42/100)
agree with cha0tic about the list. Although I’m not going to be too picky because I seem to have clocked up 69, mainly due to ploughing my way through the entire works of Dickens when they came out in those £1 paperback editions and I was taking a lot of long train journeys.
79. Blimey.
(Though my degree is in Eng Lang and Lit – so I was basically paid to go away and read many classics for 3 years … and working for a publishing company – free books – didn’t hurt either).
49. That list differs slightly to the last one I saw, by two in my favour.
It does rather look like I’m going to have to try Austen and the Brontes again, to plug the obvious gap in my list.
It looks like I’ve read 80 of them. These are the ones I haven’t read (or never finished)
7. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte – never finished it as far as I recall.
17. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulk.
20. Middlemarch, George Eliot
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell.
24. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy.
42. The DaVinci Code, Dan Brown.
47. Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy.
48. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood.
53. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons.
72. Dracula, Bram Stoker.
75. Ulysses, James Joyce.
76. The Inferno, Dante.
77. Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal, Emile Zola
84. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
42 here.
You are a delightfully competitive bunch. Eimear wins with 80. Warm congratulations and a slightly smug enfolding glow go out to her. I might try Charlotte’s Web.
Snap! Also 62, if you count Middlemarch which I am half way through (if rather slowly). I know it must be annoying to hear “I can’t believe you haven’t read….” – but you should definitely put The Little Prince at the top of your list, with Tess of the d’Urbervilles a close second. And for me reading The Da Vinci Code (and enjoying it) is far less ignominious than The Time Traveller’s Wife!!! Cha0tic – thanks for the tip on The Wasp Factory.
I’m on 59 and I’d echo the above – Tess of the d’Urbevilles is a wonderful read, but then I’m a massive Hardy fan. I’m sure the Princess would love Charlotte’s Web – O read it last year and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Oooh, maybe the Little Prince and Charlotte’s web but couldn’t face Tess people.