Thursday 19 February 2009

BBC book meme

I've not quite been able to finish my current book for a while now, as life has been intervening in its tiresome way, but was tempted back to complete this, borrowed from Catherine:

BBC Book List

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

Instructions:

1) Look at the list and make those you have read bold.
2) Star (*) the ones you LOVE.
3) Italicize those you plan on reading

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen*

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (my O level novel, so love was extinguished by over-exposure)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (only part has been read, although I have sung in both Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat and Swingin' Samson)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (I've read the first volume)
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 (most of the plays and sonnets have been read)
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 (read the first chapter and remembered why I hate 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 (reading The Red Pony at school put me off 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 (see Bleak House)
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (I had to have the Christian allegory explained to me at the age of 20)
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 * (the Higher Common Sense)
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon (frightful)
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 (half this list is school set texts, isn't it?)
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 (gave up half way through)
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (the only tolerable 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 (Malory Towers is greatly superior)
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

More than half, which is more than I expected, and if I ever get around to reading the italicised texts then my total will be quite respectable. Ulysses ought to get you five points rather than one.