Friday, November 26, 2010

BBC's 100 Top Books Meme

BBC's 100 Top Books

Instructions:
Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt.

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 (all)
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 Faulks
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
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 Berniere 
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 Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath 
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


TBG- ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒE

6 comments:

Luc said...

Very impressive sir. Happy Thanksgiving.

TheWrongWay said...

Looks like I have a sh@t ton of books to read...

Borepatch said...

Dune? Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Good grief.

And more than a few of the selections appear to me to be on the list because they were a BBC frock coat dramas.

The Academy is turning out half educated cretins these days. It's a shocking decline, even at the BBC.

The Big Guy said...

Luc: Thanks. Happy, uh, November 25th to you too, bloody Canuck. ;)

Zach: You better get on it. Them books ain't gonna read themselves.

BP: Yeah... As I said to Southern Bell, the list is somewhat Brit-centric.
http://bellsaringing.blogspot.com/2010/11/thought-i-would-do-this-here.html

I jus' might have to gin (or is it gen?) something up as a more realistic Uncle Jay's Top 100.

I do love that term "frock coat dramas"... A perfect description.

TBG

Joanna said...

LW&W is part of the Chronicles of Narnia. Hamlet is part of the CWoS. What gives?

The Big Guy said...

Joanna-
I'm a little puzzled by that too, but I'm frankly suspicious of the Brits in general.

In my case, I read LL&W, but I never got into the Prince Caspian or VotDT. Just couldn't do it.

Same-same with Shakespeare...I love Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, 12th Night & Two Gentlemen... but his Histories- the Henrys & Richards... Meh.

Regardless- I didn't make the list, I'm just chasing the meme.

(BTW - Havrith is coming along nicely!)

TBG