Wednesday, November 16, 2011

BBC Top 100 Books List

While I’m away in Seattle planning and prepping, I thought it would be fun to follow in the footsteps of my blog friend Hannah of GatorTales by linking up with the BBC Top 100 Books List. So far, it looks like I’ve only read 21 books out of the 100 listed – including my all-time fave Little Women – and admittedly, many of them back in high school and college.

I have, however, read tons of books that of course aren’t on this list, including biographies and non-fiction works, which are definitely among my favorites. As someone obsessed with theater, I’ve also seen stage and musical adaptations of several, including Les Miserables, DraculaOliver Twist and A Christmas Carol.

Which of these books are your favorites, and which genres do you most like to dive into?  

Image Source: amotherworld.com
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 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 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 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 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 Mitchel
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

18 comments:

  1. Here are the ones I've read so far:

    #4, #5, #11, #16, #18, #28, #31, #41, #42, #43, #51(one of my favorites!), #57, #60, #61, #88, #92.

    Great list, thanks for sharing! Have fun in Seattle!!!

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  2. This is a fun post! I've read about 36 of these, including Vikram Seth's "A Suitable Boy." It's so good, and addresses a lot of themes that are common in Indian literature (arranged marriage, Muslim-Hindu relations, partition, etc.) I read somewhere that it's the longest single volume novel published in the English language (it's about 1400 pages long)!

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  3. what a great list....I'm going to have to look them again and see which ones I actually read! So many more to read too!! Have a great Wednesday!

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  4. I have this list printed out somewhere too - I used to want to read all 100 but I think some may be too boring for me LOL! But it's a great list to have, impressed that you've read so many!

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  5. Looks like I need to get reading! Some of these I've never heard of!

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  6. what a great list of books. catcher in the rye is my favorite but i have many of books to read before i can even get to checking off half of the list.

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  7. I can't wait until we're both out of school and can read whatever we want - whenever!!!!!!!

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  8. Pride and Prejudice is probably my favorite book. I don't care if I've read it a hundred times - it's just so good and never gets old. Hope you're enjoying Seattle!

    xoxo, Nali

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  9. I have read most of these books on this list. They are all good reads.

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  10. Love the list!!! I used to live for the jane Austen books... Should read them again... Little women was the best too!!

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  11. This is cool!

    I am ashamed to admit that many of these books were assigned reading in school but I never actually read them. Several I have read (you do actually have to read a little to obtain an English degree). Lol. But these days reading is not my favorite thing to do. I'll like to change that. I need to get on it.

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  12. I think your blog is just wonderful, so I just wanted to let you know that I gave your blog another award! Check it out here: http://nalimon.blogspot.com/2011/11/another-cause-for-celebration.html.

    Keep up the awesome work!

    xoxo, Nali

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  13. Little Women is also one of my favourites-I think it is actually time for a re-read!

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  14. For some reason I hate reading.... I think all the reading my english teacher made me do in 12th grade burnt me out. I have almost read all of the books on the list... because of him. xo

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  15. LOL I swear I'm not making this up..but I just looked through the list and I've read 21 books out of them too! (though all different than what you've read for the most part)

    This is a great list and lately I've been a voracious reader so I'm going to try and tackle this...As for more current books The best books I've read this year was The Hunger Games Series and THE HELP (seriously the HELP is amaaazing, def. give that a read if you haven't already!)

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  16. I have read 13 of these. I guess I can thank my Bachelor's in English Literature for that one!
    I am so happy to see that Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" made it on the list. It is one of my favorites!

    http://www.glamkittenslitterbox.com/
    Twitter: @GlamKitten88

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  17. What a fabulous list! I am definitely copying this as a model. I've read about 24 of them. READ Memoirs of a Geisha! It is soooo good! Read it in about 3days straight. I loved it that much. :D

    http://sassyuptownchic.blogspot.com/

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  18. I've been looking for some Victorian novels, so I hope this will help me add some to my list.

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