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.
Jay's World 