Everybody has probably seen the BBC list by now. 100 books chosen in some way obscure to me (but that seems suspiciously weighted toward Dickens, doesn't it?) to tell you how well read you are. The rumor is most people have read 6 of these books. Book bloggers are naturally scoring much better than this. I just wanted to know one thing--have I read more books on the list than my husband?
Well, the results are in. My books are in bold. His are in italics. Ones we've both read are in red. We only counted books we completed, not books we started but never finished. The funny thing is, we both totaled 33. Marital harmony reigns.
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 M. Alcottt
12. Tess of the D’Ubervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. The 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 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 - A.A. 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 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. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexander 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 Inferno - Dante
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 Color Purple - Alice Walker84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert 86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - E.B. 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 Dahl100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Saturday, December 11, 2010
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That's so weird that you both read the same! This is a pretty good list BBC put together. No list is perfect but most of these are book I'd like to read sometime. I don't remember exactly but I think read 22...something like that.
ReplyDeleteThat's a sweet idea :) You haven't read The Time Traveler's Wife? Please do, it's amazing!
ReplyDeleteYes, funny you both got 33. It's a fascinating list I think. Definitely a British skew (and that's fine, that's where the list came from- it was a poll of 2000 people for World Book Day 2007, still it's a good list, and I'm sure we could do worse than read more of it- I'm going to try and read a couple of the books next year on purpose- Lord of the Flies which I've never read, and The Wasp Factory, coincidentally keeping up the insect theme)
ReplyDeletehttp://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/mar/01/topstories3.books
It's interesting that you and your husband have read everything from 73 down. Not sure what, if anything, that means!
Whoops! Louise, it means my font change got stuck. It looked right on the screen but I posted before checking preview. And I only proofread halfway down. It should be right now. Some of the books bunch up and don't go to separate lines toward the end, but I left that. The post takes up enough space!
ReplyDeleteJust returning your hop! Very funny that you have each read 33...that must be a good sign! :D I think I've read about 26 of these - not bad, all in all :)
ReplyDeleteAh that makes more sense, I was surprised that your husband had read The Faraway Tree books!
ReplyDelete