Inspired by Jane
Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your blog. Bold those books you've read in their entirety Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!
1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte loved this one so much I dragged my little cousin to see the play at Wellesley College one summer
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 Faulks
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 Ugh but I hat these. Read against my will, thank you Miss Phillips
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 - on my must read list very soon
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 Also excellent
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 I read every third page for the whole book. Does that count?
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 Ha! I only read this like 100 times.
100
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
At first I thought the BBC must massively underestimate us. But on second thought, I think they need to clarify. Do they mean most people in the whole world? If so, they are spot on - since many of these probably aren't translated into multiple languages and since so many people in third world countries are fighting for clean water, not good literature - then yeah, it probably averages out to less than six a person. But if they mean most people in the industrialized English-speaking world...then I sure hope it is an underestimation. Or we seriously need to up the ante on English Lit classes.
