The BBC 100 List

Have YOU read these books?

A couple of months ago, I was tagged on FaceBook to participate in this "experiment".  Earlier this week, my blog-buddy Ticklebear posted the list to his site and challenged others to post as well. 

Below is the list of books from the BBC's "Big Read" - a Top 100 of sorts.  From what I hear, the BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed below.  I'm not sure where this info comes from, but I can attest to the abominably LOW number of books I have heard friends/colleagues say they've read (or not read).  I also found it fun to see how many I could check-off the list.

Here how it goes:
If a title is BOLD, it means I read the book in its entirety.
If a title is ITALICS, it means i started reading, but didn't finish.
If a title is UNDERLINED, it means I saw a movie or other adaptation of the book.
If a title has a plus (+) next to it, I plan to read it soon (in the next year or so).

Here are my results...
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
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 +
14  Complete Works of Shakespeare 
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
25  The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – 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 Graham
31  Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32  David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
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
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
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
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
72  Dracula – Bram Stoker
73  The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74  Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75  Ulysses – James Joyce
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 +
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
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

My totals come to:
Read & Completed:  31
Read & didn't finish: 6
Movie/Adaptations: 21
To-Read List: 6

Not bad!  I've read 5-times as many books as the BBC had expected.  HA!  Take that literary drain on society!  Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to read my book.  :)