BBC Book Meme

Single-handedly running the internet has meant that I’ve not had much time for blogging lately.  However, I’m going to take advantage of Kirsty’s BBC Book Meme to break my silence:

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 (and it’s never going to happen)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte *
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible (selected highlights, on account of having been to a church school, for all the good it did me)
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 (tried and failed – life is too short to try again)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (probably half of ‘em)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier (to my shame)
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien (see LOTR)
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger (and never will after Kirsty’s comments)
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 (put me off FSF for life)
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 (it’s on the shelf)
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (it has never appealed)
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 (the first ‘proper’ books I read)
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen (the only Austen novel I haven’t read)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis *
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere (bleurgh)
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 (it was easier just to read it, rather than explain why I hadn’t)
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 (bleurgh)
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel (bleurgh)
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons * (there will be no butter in hell)
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 (Kirsty has also ensured I’ll never read it)
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy *
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville (tried and failed)
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 (I have watched my partner read it – does that count?)
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 (it sat on my bedside table for ages)
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 (bleurgh)
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 (it’s on the shelf, ready for when I have a spare month)

Hmm, I have read a fairly respectable 64 out of 100.  I just need a few more hours in the day (and the corresponding energy) to read some of the others.  I suspect I’ll just end up re-reading Cold Comfort Farm.  I’m clearly just a capsy wennet.

Related posts:

1. 2008 Book Meme
2. Book memories meme
3. Another book meme
4. The Literary Note Meme
5. The Page 56 Meme

Tagged as: books, meme