BBC Booklist

This has been doing the rounds on Facebook, so I thought I should put it here, along with some comments:

The game is like this: The BBC figures most people will have read about 6 of the 100 books here. Instructions: Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. Tally your total below.



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 (Not the whole thing. I will. Some day.)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte ()
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell ()
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman ( )
10 Great Epectations - Charles Dickens (Read an abridged version as a kid)
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 good plays, some of the lesser plays, many of the sonnets
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 ()
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (Couldn't get past a few hundred pages )
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galay - 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 (What can I say? They liked abridging Dickens for Indian kids )
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 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 (Still haven't finished this one )
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 (, and yes, I did read the original)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huley ()
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 - Aleandre 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 (, again, the real thing)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker ()
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett ()
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson ( )
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (No, but did read "Portrait of the Artist." and bits and pieces of "Dubliners")
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 (; so they have the complete Shakespeare, but only "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes?" That's a bit odd. And I have read them all! )
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton ()
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad ()
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Eupery ()
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 - Aleandre Dumas (, unabridged if Librivo counts)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare ()
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl ()
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo ()


My comments on the list:
disclaimer:

1. The BBC apparently thinks people are uneducated gits.
2. The people who concocted this list are pretentious prats. This is why: Yeah, too heavily biased towards Jane Austen, then the presence of Dan Brown is either someone's awful joke or someone's awful joke. Also, Dune. DUNE!!! If you wanted to put in SF in this list (which it lacks by miles, I should say, putting far too much weepy nineteenth century material instead, has the BBC not heard of Asimov/Clarke, or even their homegrown Brian Aldiss? Hmm... other notable omissions would be And Quiet Flows The Don (while we are on depressing Russian authors), and maybe Idiot.
3. And do allow me to suggest John le Carre's 'The Quest for Karla' (3 books about the SIS), also two of the canonical antiwar novels written: The Cruel Sea by Monsarrat and Len Deighton's opus 'Bomber'