…And Another Thing [Updated]

by Chet

Back in September I stumbled upon a forum post at Library Thing about a BBC Meme. This particular meme is very similar to the lists of movies we’ve all read through and marked up in our magic way in order to display our theatrical conquerings. However I prefer this list, because a long list of read books is always more impressive than hours logged in front of a television. According to the person who posted this list at Library Thing the BBC believes that most people have only read 6 out of the following 100 books.

I’m not entirely sure how this list came to be, especially since some of the items are sort of duplicates of others, Hamlet and The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

I’ve striked the ones I’ve read, italicized the ones that are incomplete and made bold the ones I want to read.

  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 Hitchhiker’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 Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
  37. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
  38. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
  39. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
  40. Animal Farm – George Orwell
  41. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown****
  42. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  43. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
  44. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
  45. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
  46. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
  47. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
  48. Lord of the Flies – William Golding*****
  49. Atonement – Ian McEwan
  50. Life of Pi – Yann Martel******
  51. Dune – Frank Herbert
  52. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
  53. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
  54. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
  55. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
  56. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
  57. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
  58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
  59. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  60. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
  61. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
  62. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
  63. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
  64. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
  65. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
  66. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
  67. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
  68. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
  69. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
  70. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
  71. Dracula – Bram Stoker
  72. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
  73. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
  74. Ulysses – James Joyce
  75. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
  76. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
  77. Germinal – Emile Zola
  78. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
  79. Possession – AS Byatt
  80. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
  81. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
  82. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
  83. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
  84. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
  85. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
  86. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
  87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
  88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  89. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
  90. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
  91. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
  92. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
  93. Watership Down – Richard Adams
  94. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
  95. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
  96. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
  97. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
  98. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
  99. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Read: 23
Incomplete: 4
To-Read: 15

These numbers don’t really bring me up to the full 100, however it does bring me over the requisite 6, but I don’t mind. I’m not interested in a lot of them at this time, but maybe that will change. Any good reasons I should read the unmarked ones? Leave a comment.

**I started these and stopped. I attempted to read them at the height of my fantasy obsession, and couldn’t get through them. I’ll probably try again.
***This is probably the best series of book ever. I love Douglas Adams’ writing. I just picked up the sixth book in the trilogy. Adams had started it, but passed before finishing. It was written in his stead by Eoin Colfer.
****I don’t know why this is on here, but Angels & Demons isn’t. It was clearly the better book.
*****Probably my favorite book.
******In the top running for Chet’s Favorite Book.