The Red Route

BBC’s 100 Books February 19, 2009

Stolen off of Facebook:

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

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+ (Thank you for encouraging me to read this, Lindsey)
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte X+ (Completed October 1, 2009.  Excellent.)
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X+
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte X+
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell X+
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman X (how did this make the list?  I mean, seriously)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens X+ (I didn’t like this book in high school, but loved it when I read it again in college)
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy X
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare X+  (Okay, so I’ve only read most of the works, but I’m counting it anyway)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien X  (I loathe and detest this book.  It’s the reason that Lord of the Rings–which, apparently, is amazing according to this list, is unchecked.  This book makes me thankful that Tolkien is dead.)
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald X+
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 X+
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 X+
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hossein
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 X+
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown X
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 X+
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding X+
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 X+
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon (So, funny story on this one.  I picked it up in the bookstore and flipped through it without reading the dust cover, and some of the comments reminded me of John’s neuroses.  So I showed him the book, and he got all huffy.  I couldn’t figure out why–turns out he DID read the summary, and the book is about autism.  Oops.)
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 X+
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 X (One of those that I’m sad to put an X by)
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker X+ (Despite writing my thesis on this book, I still love it)
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 – AS Byatt (Has anyone ever heard of this?)
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker X
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 X+
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom X+
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X+
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad X (I liked this the first time I read it, but having read it a subsequent 7 times in college has taken the shine off)
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 X+ (How is this separate from the Complete Works of Shakespeare again?)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo X+ (Long read, should be higher on the list)

Total: 30.  Not bad, considering!  Really, though, some of the titles on this list I haven’t even heard of, much less considered reading.  And really?  Phillip Pullman?  In the top 10?  Makes me doubt the validity of this list entirely.