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!
