Reading List

[aviv_b_artwork]

Nabbed from Sqyd who got it from Treacle Tartlet who yanked it from fancypantsdylan who got it from...

"Bold the ones you’ve read COMPLETELY, italicize the ones you’ve read part of, and no cheating. Watching the movie or the cartoon doesn’t count. Abridged versions don’t count either. BTW, according to the BBC if you’ve read 7 of these, you are above the average."

But what exactly was the BBC trying to show? How did they pick these books?
________
Sqyd pointed out that Graham Green is missing and I'd add Wallace Stegner, Willa Cather, Naguib Mahfouz, Isabel Allende, Amos Oz, Homer, Sappho or Socrates to name a few if we are talking about 'classic' works.

Who else is missing from this list...no offense but JK Rowling, Douglas Adams & Dan Brown but no ancient Greek literature or philosophy? 3 Jane Austen's and no Bronte sisters? You're kiddng right? Or did I totally miss the point?

47 and 1 partial - yeah I'm a book nerd.  I'm also old and went to school at a time when you had to read the classics.

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
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
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
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 - 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
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB 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

Comments

[sqyd.livejournal.com]

Have you noticed that there are not a single German writer on the list? I'm sure the Germans produced at least one classic piece of literature.
About half of the contemporary titles are under suspicion.

[aviv-b.livejournal.com]

You're right! No Goethe, no Hesse, no Brecht! And I just thought of another Kafka (thought I think he might be thought of as a Czech writer who wrote in German).

The list is weighted toward Brit/American lit. But considering that the average was 7(!!), they probably didn't want it to be any lower.

[shahar-amar.livejournal.com]

Oh, that looks familiar, I think I played with it last year. And had some things to say about the selection as well.
http://shahar-amar.livejournal.com/24465.html

[aviv-b.livejournal.com]

YOu did!

[shahar-amar.livejournal.com]

Well, these things tend to bounce around teh internet and come back to you in unexpected places. :o)

I still find it a very strange list. The strong emphasis on texts originally published in English is understandable for the source, but they still exclude quite a few good writers and include some questionable choices.

Makes me curious, how a similar list from another countries upscale media outlet would look like.

[aviv-b.livejournal.com]

I think the US list would be quite similar - but I think you'd see the addition of some midwestern/western writers like Cather and Stegner.

There are three writers I am totally unfamiliar with - Enid Blyton, Rohinton Mistry, and Lain Banks. Are they British or more regional UK writers?

A few others I've read, just not the works listed (Bryson - A walk in the woods & Seth - Two Lives which is really non-fiction).

The others I'm at least familiar with the book or the author.

[shahar-amar.livejournal.com]

Er, no idea about the others, but Blyton used to be a popular author of childrens books. My friends and I read German translations of the Adventure series or the Famous Five series. If I remember correctly, a lot of her books took place in boarding schools, which was a bit excotic for us. I always took her as classic childrens lit and wiki says she was translated into alomost 90 languages. definitely not a local phenomenon. ;o)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enid_blyton

[aviv-b.livejournal.com]

I obviously had a deprived childhood!!

[shahar-amar.livejournal.com]

Or you grew up with books I never saw in shops and libraries. For example, I only heard of Nancy Drew and some other North American childrens classics as an adult and Little House on the Prairie was just a tv series for me, never new about the books.

[aviv-b.livejournal.com]

Oh you also had a deprived childhood! Little House on the Prairie Books were my favorites! For some reason Nancy Drew never got read in my house (probably because I had an older brother, so a lot of stuff was his).

And poetry - my mom would read us poetry many mornings (I could recite The Spider and the Fly by Mary Howitt from memory as a pre-schooler:
http://www.love-poems.me.uk/howitt_the_spider_and_the_fly_funny.htm

Now I'm lucky if I can remember something I was told about yesterday.

Oh - thank you! This has brought back a lot of good memories, LOL.

[rootesie.livejournal.com]

There were a couple of Bronte sisters there!

I'm amazed the average was so low, as the BBC and the Radio Times are at the highbrow end of televisual entertainment, and are meant to have a more discerning audience. And I had to read at least seven of them at school, so you'd have thought others might have to (or maybe they just read the York Notes summaries and winged it)

[aviv-b.livejournal.com]

You're right - Wuthering H's duh! York notes - I'm pretty sure that's the same as Cliff Notes.

Yeah, I thought the avg number would be a lot higher expecially since a lot of its Brit Lit. That's why I wonder about the demographics. Age, Educational Level, occupation etc.

[teamrodent.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it's also a list of books that have been on some part of the Beeb.

[aviv-b.livejournal.com]

Good point - stuff they've serialized or had on a radio show.

[hanag.livejournal.com]

I got 10 and 11 halves, 3 of these I had to read for school. I'm yound as well, It seems like a mix of popular stuff and classics, or maybe it's what's popular to each age group all together.

[aviv-b.livejournal.com]

Well you have lots of time to read these then. I pretty sure that anything on the list I haven't read by now, isn't going to ever get read.