An icon I use on social media – no idea where I found it but I photoshopped it quite a lot.

A friend posted about the BBC book meme – subtly altered since its inception in 2003. She tweaked it further and I thought I’d see how I did. Apparently people are considered not to have read (and finished) more than about six of the list. What schools did they go to??

Anyway, from the list I got:-

• Read – 81/100
• Started but not finished – 4/100 including complete Shakespeare and the bible
• Intend to read – 0/100. There are too many good books turning up all the time and series to finish!
• Loved – 17/100
• Hated – 7/100

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read AND finished.

2) Italicize those you intend to read.

3) Underline the books you started to read, and then gave up on – for whatever reasons! WordPress doesn’t approve so I’ve put them in brackets instead.

4) Highlight in purple the books you LOVE. WordPress won’t let me so I’ve given them five stars.

5) Highlight in red the books you HATE. Again, not possible so I’ve given them one star.  


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1 Pride and Prejudice – JaneAusten*****  

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien***** 

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte * This was shoved down our necks constantly at my boarding school – the one the Bronte sisters went to.

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling I read the books with students and found them flat though I was impressed that they got teens reading long text without illustrations. I only fell for the series when I saw the films, which reminded me of my own boarding school

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee*****

6 (The Bible) Well, most of it. Probably all but maybe not the Songs of Solomon. Church of England boarding school made it unlikely any of us would escape the bible.

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte* I just got cross with the main characters.  Also, it was another that was pushed at school.

8 1984 – George Orwell 

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – 

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott – 

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy Not sure whether to go for purple or red… This was a study for A level English…

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14 (Complete Works of Shakespeare)  Most but not all.  

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 * I dislike time travel and find it too difficult to suspend disbelief. So I am distanced from the content.

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot***** Up there in my top twenty.

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell As with Harry Potter I preferred the film.

22 (The Great Gatsby) – F. Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy*  Overstuffed account of idiots and war.

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams *****

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh***** 

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky Required reading at uni but I didn’t particularly enjoy it.

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* Maybe I just don’t like Tolstoy, period.

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens 

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis***** – I loved these but was vaguely disturbed when I realised they had a religious agenda.

34 Emma – Jane Austen *****

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen***** 

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis***** – why is this here separately if it’s already above at 33 as the Chronicles of Narnia? Presumably because a lot of kids read this but don’t tackle the rest of the series.

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.* In my opinion, rubbish. I much prefer Umberto Eco’s take on the same subject.

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez OK but I’m not keen on books where the place is the main character.

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 Another one where I preferred the film.

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood At the time I read it I took it as sci fi. Now, I’m not so sure!

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel * When I was teaching I used to criticise kids who wrote fascinating stories that ended with ‘and then I woke up and it was all a dream’. Likewise with this.

52 Dune – Frank Herbert 

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen 

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth***** Up there in my top ten novels of all time.

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 The play is even better than the book.

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 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 – why is this here when the Complete Works are further up the list? Again because some people might read this and very little other Shakespeare.

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl 

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Now feeling reasonably well read.