The BBC Book List...

[fajrdrako]

I got this from Librarything, where the poster wrote: aquascum of the German language LT loosed this list on the English threads, and I
can't resist passing it on. Please copy and paste your bolded books read, italicized books not completed, and then sum up with a head count, so to speak. What does the list say about your reading habits?

I'm really not sure. Perhaps... that these are rather famous books? And that I have, or used to have, a penchant for reading famous books? That I spent way too much of my youth with my nose in a book?

I've certainly read the first thing on the list: 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen. I'll go down the list, bolding what I've read, striking out what I haven't, and making comments if I feel moved to.

The BBC apparently believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

It took me three running starts to get into this, starting when I was about 14. Finally read it and finished it at twenty or so. Liked it well enough, but I find Jane Austen a little too clever and a little too cool for my tastes. This has not stopped me from reading it at least twice, and seeing the movies.

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

One of my favourite books, ever. I read it at 15, and immediately became obsessed with the Dark Ages.

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

Another favourite. I read it at twelve, fell in love, and read it several times per year until I discovered The Lord of the Rings. I still often reread bits, and I'm currently slowly reading this in French. I can and do quote vast
passages.

4 Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling

I'm not a great Harry Potter fan, but the books were basically fun to read. I am a Slytherin lover, mad over Snape (who should have had more scenes). In fact I'd rather like the whole series rewritten from Snape's point of view.

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Another wonderful, brilliant book. They are listing many of my favourites. I read this in a period when I thought I didn't like American writers. It changed my mind - or at least was a glorious exception. (Raymond Chandler was the writ

6 The Bible

Italics and bolding together will be an indication that I've read a book partway through. Yes, I've read some of the Bible. I started once to read the whole thing, and soon discovered that it was having a bad influence on my personality: I was becoming a misanthropic and bitter hater of religion. So I stopped. Not wanting to offend my Christian friends, I will say little more. Yes, there is good poetry in it, and it is one of the foundations of western civilization. Yes, there is some wonderful imagery. Some translations are more euphonious than others. King James has good bits, and I'm rather partial to the Whole Booke of Psalmes of 1549, quoted by Dorothy Dunnett in Checkmate: And from the hornes of unicornes,
Lord safety me deliver.

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

Read it and disliked it intensely. What horrible people! Liked the movie with Timothy Dalton as Heathcliffe, though. No, actually, I liked Dalton in that movie... nothing would make me like Heathcliffe.

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

I disliked the main character exceedingly, so after a while, I stopped reading. Rather liked the bear.

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

Dickens is one of my favourite authors, ever. This is not one of my favourite Dickens novel, but I like it well enough - loved Joe Gargery.

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

My mother's favourite novel. She used to read it to me, quote it to me, talk about it to me... I'm not sure I've ever read the whole thing. Didn't quite feel the need, given that I knew it so well, second-hand. But I feel a great sentimental fondness for it, for my mother's sake.

12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

An oversight, I know.

3 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

The phrase that sticks with me: "Ou sont les Neigedens d'autan" - Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

I've read a lot of Shakespeare, maybe 80%. I have not read Venus and Adonis (except in bits) or King John or most of the stuff he wrote with Fletcher. My favourites: Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing and The Merchant of Venice.

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

Another writer I love.

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

I read The Hobbit right after The Return of the King, in my first flush of passion for his wonderful world, and a love of all that high-flown heroism. This was a mistake: I disliked The Hobbit intenselfy the first time through. Didn't like Bilbo at all. On second reading, there were two chapters I loved: "Riddles in the Dark" and the conversation with Smaug. The drunken Elves amuse me, and Legolas' father. I still don't like The Hobbit, and I avoid rereading it for fear I'll hate it even more, but I am really looking forward to the movie. With Martin Freeman as Bilbo, I'm likely to come to love the character at last. Or at least to like him.

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

Loved this, because I loved Salinger's style, but I loved Franny and Zooey even more.

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

Here is where I fell in love with Dickens. It was the first of his novels that I read after A Tale of Two Cities, and I thought it was wonderful.

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

I started this tree times, and never got through to the end of the Battle of Borodino. Some day I might try again. Or maybe not.

25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

Well, of course I've read it.

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

I read this right after seeing the marvellous miniseries with Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons. Liked the book less than the TV show.

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Another huge favourite. It had me gripped by the throat. I was about eighteen, read it at a friend's cottage. And the last paragraph - shivers up the back. I also loved the protagonist's name, too: Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov. Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov. Trips off the tongue.

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

Never liked it much, though. It hints at two things I have mild phobias about: dreams and mirrors.

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

There are a number of well-respected classic novels that I haven't read because they strike me as being of the same ilk: abuse of women. This is one. Madame Bovary would be another, as would Tess of the D'Ubervilles. Too
depressing.

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

Dickens. 'Nuff said.

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

I don't like C.S. Lewis' style at all, though I did like Till We Have Faces.

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

My favourite Austen novel, by far. I loved Wentworth, and the whole theme.

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

Started it, found it boring and pretentious, and stopped.

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

Another favourite. I've read it many times, along with The House at Pooh Corner, When We Were Very Young, and Now We
are Six.

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

I dislike Irving's writing.

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

Chilling. Maybe the scariest book I ever
read.

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

Oh, yes. Sydney Carton is one of my favourite characters ever.

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

Another book that convinced me how good American authors could be.

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

Absolutely brilliant.

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

Loved it. Of course I loved it. My kind of plot: historical, dramatic, heroic.

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

Not my kind of book, though this is one I feel guilty about not having read.

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

I read the first page once, but that's not enough to qualify as a partial reading.

68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding

Didn't read it because I saw and hated the movie.

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

In January, I resolved to read this book this year. I haven't started it yet. Looks as if it may have to be next year's book.

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

This too made a big impression on me, at twenty or so.

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 Alboms

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

I've read this many times, in English and in French. Studied it in French lit class at least once. Even once wrote a Little Prince/Torchwood crossover story.

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

We already had "The Complete Shakespeare". This overlap wastes a number.

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Though I have read the chapter about the Bishop and the Candlesticks many times, and it's one of my favourite musicals.

- - -

A few comments on this:

• Most of the books I've read on this list, I read before I was twenty.
  
• It reads like the list of books my high school teachers wanted me to read. On the whole, that was fine, because they were the same books I wanted to read - the famous books, the ones on the best seller lists, the books other people talked about. At some point, that ceased to be my
  motivation for reading.
  
• Many of the books on the list that I haven't read are on my TBR list and have been for a long time. (Ulysses, for example.) Others, I haven't read just because they don't look interesting to me.
  
• I am so glad Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was on the list. It made the compilers seem a little more like real people and a little less like headmaster's planning the final exam.
  
• When I'd read a good portion of a novel before stopping (like War and Peace) I noted
  it. There are other cases where I read a few paragraphs or pages, and stopped. That's not enough to count.
  
• As might be expected from the BBC, it's a very British list. A few things in translation. Only two Canadian authors, more American, one or two Indian, but mostly British books. Fair enough.
  
• There are books I think should be there that aren't, books that should be classics, but aren't. Things like A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell, The Vintner's Luck by
  Elizabeth Knox, anything by Dorothy Dunnett. E. Nesbit should be htere. Mostly mainstream books, a bit of fantasy, almost no mysteries or SF or other genre fiction.