Books

I found this on Erica's blog

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen ()

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (X)

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte ( )

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling ( )

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee () I've seen the movie a million times, does that count?

6 The Bible - ()

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (X)

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell ()

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 ( )

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller ( )

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare ( )

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier ( X )

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (X )

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk ( )

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger(X ) Twice!

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger ( )

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot ( )

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell ( X )

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (X)

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens (X )

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 (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 ( )

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens ( X )

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 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 (X )

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( )

44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - 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 ( )

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 (X )

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 ( X) Three times!

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (X)

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 ) Most boring book ever written. Watch the movie with Gregory Peck and Richard Basehart instead.

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (X )

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (X )

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (X)

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson ( )

75 Ulysses - James Joyce ( X) Second most boring book ever written

76 The Inferno - Dante (X )

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 (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 ( )

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry ( )

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White ( X )

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (X )

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 (X )

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole ( )

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute ( )

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas ( X)

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare ( X )

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (X )

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo ( )

I've read 35. Which may not be an impressive number for an English major. I think the list is lacking and should include Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, Sir Gawaine and the Grene Knight by the Pearl Poet, Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott and Le Morte D'Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory. Some works of Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne should be included also.

What about you? How many have you read? What other books/authors do you think should be included?