Tackling BBC’s 100 Books List

My friend recently posted the BBC’s 100 books list. I looked at her list and put Xs next to the books I’ve read. I was surprised to learn that I’ve read 48 of the books. (I knew being an English major would pay off someday!) I hope to read them all eventually, though some of the books don’t seem all that appealing to me, like “The Da Vinci Code.” I never had a desire to fall into the craze of that book.

Here’s a reading list a I put together back in October. I may have to add some of the books from the BBC list to it.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen X
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte X
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (Read four of the seven books)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X
6. The Bible (Parts, but not the whole thing.)
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte X
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell X
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens X
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott X
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy X (Love this book, even though it’s sad.)
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier X
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger X
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell X (One of my favorites! Read this tome in seventh grade.)
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald X
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky X
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll X
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy X
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis X
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis X
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden X
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 X
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery X
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood X
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding X
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan X
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel X
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 X
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley X
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez X
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck X
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold X
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 X
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens X
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker X
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett X (One of my favorite books!)
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce X
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath X
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt X
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens X
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker X
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 X
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
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 X
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl X
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo X

Which books would you add to/delete from the list?