Tuesday 6 May 2014

BBC's booklist challenge

It was a while ago that I found this "BBC book list" on Listchallenges.com. It seems that BBC published a list of 100 books that were voted most popular by audiences, and then someone slapped on it the provocative title of "BBC believes you only read six of these". Well, turns out my score is 25 (I bolded the ones I've read). What about you?

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Bible 
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (Have this in my book shelf but unread so far...)
1984 by George Orwell
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (Read the first two books and part of the last one)
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Little Women by L.M. Alcott
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
Complete works of William Shakespeare (I think I'm about halfway through)
Rebecca by Daphe du Maurier
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
Emma by Jane Austen
Persuasion by Jane Austen
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernières
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies by William Golding (Read a few chapters, then got bored)
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Life of Pi by Yann Martel 
Dune by Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
On The Road by Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones' Diary by Helen Fielding
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Dracula by Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson
Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson
Ulysses by James Joyce
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
Germinal by Emile Zola
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession by A.S. Byatt
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte's Web by E.B. White
The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (I just bought this!)
The Folk of the Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
Watership Down by Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy
A Town Like Alice by Neville Shute
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo




3 comments:

  1. 30. I feel obliged to point out, though, that the list has nothing to do with the BBC and in fact originates from a World Book Day reader poll in 2007, listing books people couldn't live without: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/mar/01/topstories3.books

    If the Beeb had been at it, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have both The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the Chronicles of Narnia, or the Complete Works of William Shakespeare plus Hamlet.

    Also, I seriously worry for a person who can't live without The Da Vinci Code.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for the clarification! And I was a bit surprised to see Dan Brown up there too :D

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  2. 25 is a great amount! I'm sure you'll love The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It's full of classic stories :)

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