BBC Believes You Only Read 6 of These Books

Discussion Open Forum
1

listchallenges.com/kaunismin … ?ref=share

List includes:

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 (all)
5 - To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 - The Bible
7 - Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
8 - Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 - His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 - Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 - Little Women - Louisa May 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 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
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 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 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 Meany – 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 Handmaids 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
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 Colour 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 & the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 - Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I’ve unfortunately only read 26, and 7 of those I read as school assignments…

2

I’m at 18 or 19 depending on how you count. Why is Hamlet separate from the complete works of Shakespeare?

3

Read 93. Most of those before I even left high school. Half of these are ‘shit’: middle-brow borefests such as ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’.

Brits are illeterate uckheads.

4

14…

5

20-odd. A half-dozen more I lost interest in after an hour or two. Is this supposed to be a “must read” list? I agree with Ermintrude - there’s a lot of pretentious rubbish (or just rubbish) in there.

6

There does seem a certain randomness to the list, but I admit I see an arbitrariness to all such lists.

At least they left off Babbitt and Winesberg. Loser porn never did it for me. No Vonnegut? So it goes. No Pynchon? Eh. And I guess Babbitt is redundant if you’ve got Madame Bovine. But no Twain or Hawthorne? What’s up with that?

The only book the world needs to read is The King In Yellow.

7

[quote=“rowland”]There does seem a certain randomness to the list, but I admit I see an arbitrariness to all such lists.

At least they left off Babbitt and Winesberg. Loser porn never did it for me. No Vonnegut? So it goes. No Pynchon? Eh. And I guess Babbitt is redundant if you’ve got Madame Bovine. But no Twain or Hawthorne? What’s up with that?

The only book the world needs to read is The King In Yellow.[/quote]

It’s a Brit list ‘from the BBC’. Not much American stuff ever gets on lit lists. I did English lit at Uni, and we only read Scots and English stuff, with bits of Irish lit. The problem isn’t that there isn’t good American literature, more that it’s all from the same period because, well, the US hasn’t really being up and running that long. And because we don’t really study it at school, it’s not in the public consciousness. Note that the bits and pieces from the US are ‘books with films’ such as ‘Gone with the wind’: yer average Brit isn’t going to read Pynchon because the average Brit hasn’t even heard of Pynchon.

8
  1. Some of those, like To Kill A Mockingbird and Animal Farm, were on my high school’s English curriculum so I’m not certain if I would have picked them to read at my own leisure.
9

Crap. 67. But I did major in English Lit (in Canada), and my parents are English.

Odd list, and in need of an editor. As Hokwongwei said, having Complete Shakespeare and Hamlet as separate works is odd - ditto Chronicles of Narnia and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

That’s a lot of Hardy and Austen.

Is Swallows and Amazons still read at all?! I had the impression that was rather vintage even when my father insisted I read it back in the 70s.

10

I’ve not read it. It looked feckin boring.

11

33 and 2/3 more aborted attempts

You don’t find many girls called Titty nowadays.

12

I’ve read 44 of them (although a couple I’ve read more than once)

13

I’ve read about 25-26 and there’s probably another 15 that I didn’t like enough to finish.

14

I have never put a high priority on reading the classics. I probably have a dozen classics (not necessarily on the list) on my shelf that I could read but put off.

15

I’ve read none. My 3 kids have read none and my wife has read one only because she was told she wouldn’t pass grade 12 if she didn’t. The way she reads I think she is lying. There … the average is back down to 6 almost.

16

I was a voracious reader up to high school, but I’ve only read 18 from this list; I’m not sure why my reading dropped off after my teenage years.

17

Let me guess the 7 you haven’t read.

  1. Harry Potter series.
  2. Captain Corelli’s mandolin.
  3. Dune.
  4. The shadow of the wind.
  5. Swallows and Amazons. (But you said already).
  6. The five people you meet in heaven.
  7. The faraway tree collection.

How did I do?

18

70 or so, the rest I’ve never heard of. OMG Russian novels from 1900 suck.

19

Soops, how are you so awesome-o? Sadly, I have read ‘Captain Bullshit’s Ukelele’, though.
There’s a few hours I’ll never get back. I also read the first Harry Potter but that was because my friend’s kids was into it.

I haven’t read Winnie the Pooh. It looked wank. Talking animals are loozerville.

Urodacus, ‘Anna Karenin’ is amazeballs. All the Tolstoy. And Dostoyevsky but he was a bit of a moaner. And then the Gogol and the Bulgakov. Just aces.

20

Read about 20 of them, and a handful more were read to me by my dad when I was a kid (e.g. The Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland)