Over at Facebook, my old friend John Sundman displayed his results for this BBC-initiated meme….

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read ENTIRELY
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

Here’s my response:
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien X+
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X
6 The Bible X (yes, all of it)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell X+
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman X+
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy X+
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller X+
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Not all, but most)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien X+
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger X
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 *
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams X+
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh X
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky *
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll X+
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame X+
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens X+
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis (Not all, but this is silly…)
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis X (… because this is one of the “Chronicles of Narnia”)
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 – AA Milne X+
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell X+
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 X
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy X+
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood X+
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding X
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert X
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons X+
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley X+
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov X+
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 X+
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville X+
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson X
75 Ulysses – James Joyce X+
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome X+
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert X
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X+
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 X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute X
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare (As John wrote “Well I haven’t read all of Shakespeare but this gets…) X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Total: 50
This is obviously a “pretentious fiction” list, but there are some puzzling omissions. Where’s Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses”, for example? And I’d be curious to do the same thing for non-fiction. “A Brief History of Time”. Bill Clinton’s autobiography. “Civilization”. That kind of thing….
UPDATE:joined in.