The BBC apparently only believes that people have read six of the works from the following list. I've read about a third of the list. The books I've read are in bold.
01 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
02 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
03 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
04 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
05 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
06 The Bible
07 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
08 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
09 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 Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’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 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
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 Grahame
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 Bernieres
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 Nighttime - 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 Stoker73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola (No, but I did read Nana)
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
I'm immediately suspicious when Harry Potter is considered 'Literature'. Da Vinci Code? This is a pretty crappy list of Literature.
ReplyDelete02 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
05 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
06 The Bible
08 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
-- That one brings back memories. Most boring book I ever finished. Highly over-rated.
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
-- Have not made it all the way through.
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
-- On my shelf, not read yet.
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
36 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
-- Apparently the BBC doens't realize that this is the first volume of the chronicles!
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
-- Wouldn't that be covered in the Complete Works?
This list lacks:
1. Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance - Pirsig
2. The Prince and Discourses - Machiavelli
3. The Art of War - Sun Tzu
4. Anything by Mark Twain (How glaring an omission can you get? Mind you, the list here is very Brit-centric... much like the English mindset.)
5. Something from Ralph Waldo Emerson
6. Something from Thoreau
7. Something from W.O. Mitchell (if I'm being Canadian)
8. Something from Pierre Burton (ditto... All Hell For A Basement might count)
9. Anything other than the dystopias from the Science Fiction end of things
10. Anything from a Roman, Greek, etc... apparently all Literature arose in the English speaking world...
I'm not very impressed by their list.
I ttried to respond with my list of read with two brief comments and the reply could not be posted due to the limitations of this system.
ReplyDeleteI'll sum up:
1. Harry Potter? Bridget Jones?
2. Repeat Entries? (Complete Shakespeare/Hamlet, Chronicles/Lion, Witch, & Wardrobe)
3. No Thoreau, Emerson or Clemens?
4. No Sun Tzu or Machiavelli?
5. No Romans, Greeks, or other ancients? All literature is apparently english and Brit-centric at that.
6. My list was about 26 of these, with a few on the shelf half read.
7. No Pirsig? Clear oversight.
8. Many over-rated on this list. Catcher in the Rye? I wish I could excise that book from my brain to free up space for something worthwhile.
I agree that many entries on the list are utter crap. Other things that crapify the list are the translations. I've read two or three translations of The Divine Comedy and they are not created equal. Since they included translations though, where is the Odessy? the Iliad?
ReplyDeleteI've read 24 of them, including, I regret to say, that horrible piece of tripe DaVinci Code. How about Beowulf? Chaucer? The Consolation of Philosophy? Morte d'Arthur? Song of Roland?
ReplyDeleteverification code: scifism.
@Lazerlight - The DaVinci Code is marketing gold. Consider, take a rather pedestrian murder mystery dress it up with a bit of religious controversy and misinterpretation and voila...bestseller. Dan Brown's an _okay_ author, and his books are kinda like John Ringo's Ghost series, I blush to admit I read them.
ReplyDelete@Lux Mental - The Harry Potter books are actually pretty good. They range from kid's books to young adult in scope. My only serious critique is that the magic system has no rules or consistency but then neither does the magic system in many games or books. The Potter books are pretty good adventure tales though.
if this is the Grauniad's list of the 100 Novels you Can't Live Without, I'll point out that neither Shakespeare nor the Bible are novels, and there are quite a few others on the list which I can indeed very happily live without.
ReplyDelete