Are you well read?
There’s a thing going around on Facebook which purports to be a list of the 100 “best” books rated by the BBC Book Club. I’m a bit confused by this because the list actually published by the BBC Book Club is rather different. Apparently the BBC thinks that most people have read only 6 of them anyway. Anyway, I’ve put the list here and marked the ones I’ve read in bold. I am interested to see how many my discerning readers have read, so please count the ones you have read and answer the quick poll.
In order to count you have to have read the whole book, not just bits!
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 Faulks
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
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
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 – A.A. 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 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 – E.B. 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
Any opinions on great books not on the list welcome through the comments box!
In the Dark 
December 3, 2010 at 9:25 am
Can’t see why The Da Vinci Code is on there, but I have to admit I have read it!
December 3, 2010 at 5:03 pm
If you think Plantard’s masonic hoax is good, have a look at “Taxil hoax” on Wikipedia.
December 3, 2010 at 9:41 am
Why is Harry Potter on there? It’s barely a children’s book
December 3, 2010 at 2:48 pm
Many of these are children’s books – the Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland, Secret Garden and Winnie the Pooh to name a few, but I doubt many would argue that these don’t deserve to be there. That’s not really your point is it?
December 3, 2010 at 9:43 am
And how come TLTWATW is different to the chronicles of Narnia?
December 3, 2010 at 9:59 am
Dunno
I think if you’ve read all the Narnia books that’s different from just reading one of them
December 3, 2010 at 10:34 am
Wow, surprised myself! Thought I’d get about 6 rather than 44!!
December 3, 2010 at 10:37 am
Read Lord of the Flies?
When I was at school our teacher in English chose it as a text for the class to study when I was aged 12 years. He liked it so much he chose it again the following year. Then it was a set text for the O-Level class the year after. I ended up having to study the ******* book formally on three different occasions.
That ******* Piggy.
December 3, 2010 at 11:11 am
Yes, we did that at school too. Wonderful, but very depressing.
December 3, 2010 at 11:20 am
The book has lost all its wonder by the third reading and conveys only despair.
December 4, 2010 at 11:24 pm
I think it is horrifyingly likely. As for despair: that depends on whether the reader believes anything can be done about human nature.
December 3, 2010 at 11:42 am
The list is heavily biased towards books published in the last 5-10 years – currently fashionable but which, I suspect, will be recognized for badly-written claptrap in another decade or two.
In the meantime – no Trollope? No Proust? No Wodehouse? No Mark Twain? No E.M. Forster? No H.G. Wells? No Evelyn Waugh, for God’s sake?
December 3, 2010 at 11:47 am
Also, I bet JK Rowling is behind most of this stuff. Should be illegal to mention her mediocre, clunking, adolescent prose in the same paragraph as most of the novelists listed here. The idea that ploughing through 2000 pages of it could make you ‘well read’ is grotesque and sad.
December 3, 2010 at 12:45 pm
The interesting thing is that some of these books are extremely well known but little read (Moby Dick an example from my guilt list; Gulliver’s Travels would have been another had it been on the list). These are books that every civilized person has to have some knowledge of at a bluffer’s level. Eventually, you might even fool yourself into believing you did actually read them once. The Grauniad’s “digested read” column is dangerously helpful in this regard.
December 3, 2010 at 1:20 pm
I’ll stand up and say I have read Moby Dick – I even remember when (during a conference in Cargese 24 years ago). I bought the cheap Everyman edition. It’s heavy going in places, but a majestic work.
December 3, 2010 at 1:49 pm
I assumed people would think I was lying.
December 3, 2010 at 1:34 pm
I fear it might remind me too much of work.
December 3, 2010 at 2:50 pm
um, #23 and 26 are missing…?
December 3, 2010 at 3:53 pm
Good point! I hadn’t noticed. I just copied the list off facebook and that’s what it was like. I guess it got mangled somewhere down the line.
December 3, 2010 at 9:53 pm
And number 6 is missing the author name – to save you time looking it up, it was of course written by God.
December 3, 2010 at 7:33 pm
All but two of these books (the Bible and Bill Bryson’s Notes From A Small Island) were written by their authors as fiction, so it’s not clear to me what the criteria are.
December 3, 2010 at 8:06 pm
I think it’s just books that have been popular with book clubs. Since I always read books on my own I’m not too familiar with the way these things work.
December 4, 2010 at 10:01 am
Then I’m amazed how much more popular fiction is than non-fiction in general.
December 4, 2010 at 11:34 am
Yes, the list is a list of fiction, primarily novels, reflecting the enthusiasms of the compilers; plus a tiny number of non-fiction books that seem to have been included because of their influence or quality.
I have read only a smallish minority of the works because I’m not particularly enthusiastic about fiction.
Compiling a similar list of non-fiction works would be very difficult because of the breadth of subjects that would have to be included, though such lists have probably been compiled.
December 3, 2010 at 7:33 pm
Peter,
As I enjoy your Opera blogs, can I suggest a follow-up list? Something along the lines of Top 100 operas/’classical music’ pieces that people couldn’t identify?
This is inspired by the fact that I was spending Thanksgiving with about a dozen astro-postgraduate students at a well known Northern California university, and when the Overture to Die Zauberflöte come on over dinner, no one recognised it!!
(Though, I have a feeling that with Radio 3 and Classic FM, this may be more a UK – US thing per se…)
Yours,
Nic
P.S. Only 19 of the books for me, and most of these were from my school days!
December 4, 2010 at 1:17 am
Of your unread I can only recommend Swallows and Amazons
AEg
December 6, 2010 at 9:23 pm
The faraway tree by Enid blyton- now that makes Harry Potter seem like literature! Have you really read Ulysses, from start to finish? I have started it several times, and never managed to get past the first 30 or so pages. But then, I enjoyed HP, so maybe I’m simply a philistine. Shadow of the wind is definitely worth reading, but skip captain Corelli.
December 6, 2010 at 9:36 pm
Yes, I have read all of Ulysses…it’s not as difficult to read as Finnegans Wake! In fact I remember buying it when I returned from a trip to Trieste many years ago where I’d been in a cafe that Joyce used to frequent; he lived in Trieste for 11 years, in fact.
December 7, 2010 at 9:03 pm
An Irish friend told me to read Finnegan’s Wake as if it were spoken and it helped; but this good advice still did not make me to want to finish it. As for Ulysses, one critic contemporary to it spoke of its great energy and its great pessimism, and memorably described it as “like an explosion in a cesspit”.
December 7, 2010 at 12:20 pm
> the Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland, Secret Garden and Winnie the Pooh
Those are good children’s books – HP is (and, of course, IMHO) terrible. I know that there are those that would disagree.
December 7, 2010 at 9:37 pm
Any list which does not include Kurt Vonnegut is no good.
December 8, 2010 at 8:49 pm
I scored 41 probably due to my great age. Having been ‘schooled’ in Classic literature (as opposed to educated) I much prefer to read and enjoy contemporary fiction. I can just about accept the Brontes with their deprivation coming through and Dickens for his perception of working class life (maybe), Shakespeare I can fully appreciate when performed, but NOT as literature, the works were never meant to be ‘read’. Jane Austen and her ilk, even as a student came across as nothing more than middle class twaddle, written for the er.. middle class. On an annual basis I re-read LOTR, the Pliocene novels of Julian May and the Steven Donaldson.s ‘ Thomas Coventant Chronicles’. So Sci-fi is my thing. But Margaret Atwood – I have read every word she has written – likewise Jeannete Winterson, Margaret Drabble and her sister AS Byatt. Tag on Iain Banks (in SF mode and otherwise) Will Self and Ben Elton. These latter address real life in our world as it is today. Throw away your primers!
December 14, 2010 at 5:55 pm
I really recommend reading number 39, Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden. It’s very beautifully written and stirring. Interestingly, I think the author posted on this blog once. I was browsing through it, and an Arthur Golden left a comment on your About Me page, saying he was a writer fascinated by cosmology. Maybe it’s not him, but it caught my eye.
December 14, 2010 at 6:18 pm
Oooh. I wonder if it’s him?
April 1, 2011 at 10:52 am
I unfortunatley only got 26 out of 100, but I’m still young 🙂
I would disagree in certain areas. I would certainly say that ‘Farenheit 451’ by Ray Bradbury is on a par with ‘A brave New World’, or ‘Catch 22’. I think that they also missed a trick on ignoring Rudyard Kiplings ‘Just so Stories’
The inclusion of Dan Brown’s ‘Da Vinci Code’ is a let down. The book is okay, but the format and plot is essentially a photocopy of every other Dan Brown book.
Chapter 1 – Death that sets the scene
Chapters 2 onwards – Following meaningless clues
Final Chapter – Oh look the baddie is the mentor of the hero/heroine
I am also to be said more of a science fiction fan (even if once in awhile my physicist brain refuses to be switched off) or fantasy fan, and thus a lot of books on the list are not quite my cup of tea. But I still have another 60 odd years left in me, so I book a year will be fine.