The BBC Book List – Which Ones Have you Read?

Saw this meme floating around on other blogs, and just had to see how I stack up. This book list is made up by the BBC folks, and they believe that most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. I guess I am not most people 🙂

Instructions: To do this meme, copy this into Notepad. Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read. Post on your blog and then leave a comment here with the link to your post.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X
6 The Bible – X (this is all the more impressive because I am not a Christian)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte X
8 1984 – George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (Read only 2 of the books, so I am not counting it)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (did not complete, so I am not counting it)

Total: 8

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott X (did not like it though)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy (no, Thomas Hardy is too depressing for me)
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (not all, so I am not including this)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier X
16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien X
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger X (so over-rated though)
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger X
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot X

Total: 7

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens X
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (too many characters, I ended up getting so confused. I had to go back and forward so much that I eventually just gave up.)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams X
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky X
28 The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck X (I am a big John Steinbeck fan)
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame X

Total: 8

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens X
33 The Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen (somehow could not get interested in the story, it’s just not as light-hearted and witty as her other novels)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis X
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 – A.A. Milne X

Total: 6

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell X
42 The DaVinci Code – Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez X
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins X (The Moonstone is also an excellent novel)
46 Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy (nope and not planning to read either)
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood X (Yay! Read it and loved it. A book to read, remember, and reread. One of my favorites from this list.)
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding X (one of my favorites)
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan X (love)

Total: 8

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel X
52 Dune – Frank Herbert X (my introduction to the wonders of science-fiction and fantasy)
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
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 (can’t believe I’ve never read this) X Read it now and enjoyed it immensely. Read my review here.
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez X

Total: 6

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov (no, the concept just does not appeal to me)
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold (somehow cannot digest a story about a murdered child. Although I am sure this book is very good, I don’t think I will read this)
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas X
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy (more Thomas Hardy…groan… The BBC must really love him)
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie (working on it). Done, My review here X
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville X (struggled to finish it though)

Total: 5

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens (don’t remember whether I read this or not. I only remember the wonderful musical)
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker X (ooh…the original vampire, how could I not read this)
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett X
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 X

Total: 3

80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro X (although this is his most famous work, I think Never Let me Go is my personal favorite)
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White X (what a sweet story!)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom (nope, just not into sentimental BS).
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (read most but not all of them)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton X (my childhood escape)

Total: 5

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad X
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 (am pretty sure I have read it but don’t remember it at all. There was a depressing phase in my life when I read a lot of Nevil Shute. His books are always guaranteed to wring out a bucket-load of tears)
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas X
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Total: 4

Grand Total : 60. Yay, I am actually making a dent in this list 🙂

Oops, that makes it 58%. A bit shaming for me as I consider myself quite a bookworm. Well, this just means I have a whole new set of books on my TBR (to be read) list. Will remember this list next time I go to Eloor library.

Although, I am noticing that as I grow older and have a lot more responsibilities, I have taken to much lighter reading. Most of these books, I read before marriage and the snubnose’s arrival.

Now, I just don’t think I have the time to do any serious reading at all!