MEME: The BBC Thinks You Don't Read the Classics

[campylobacter]

Stolen from myeverlovinmind  

How do your reading habits stack up? [bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish]

The BBC allegedly believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen [and Pride & Prejudice & Zombies!!!]
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien [and The Silmarillion]
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible [and The Rig Veda and The Quran and the Tao Te Ching and the Torah]
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell [and Animal Farm!]
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
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 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 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 [repeats #33]
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 OH PLEASE YOU CANNOT PAY ME TO READ THAT PIECE OF!!!
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 Confession: I started to write slash fic for this 'verse, then I got bored.
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 - lost my copy in the middle of reading it... must get another copy
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon I have never heard of this book.
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov [and Pnin and Bend Sinister!!!!]
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 [OMG it should've been titled "The 5 People You Meet in Purgatory and the 1 Book You Read in HELL"]
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad [Please kill me I FUCKING HATE THIS BOOK]
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 [keep getting stalled on the 3rd chapter]
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas [en francais pour l'ecole]
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare [repetition with #14]
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

31 completed, 26 abandoned.

I should be ashamed -- I minored in English. But to my credit, if you'd asked me about dramatic literature (Chekov, Sartre, Restoration drama) I've read a lot there, plus massive amounts of fantasy and science fiction.

Comments

[mslogica.livejournal.com]

Omg I want to do this meme RIGHT NOW but I'm on my phone!!! I need to go get my comp!

In the mean time, I have never tried to read Brave New World, but it is on my Reading list! I've tried Heart of Darkness twice, but I just couldn't get into it. I just didn't care what happened!

[campylobacter.livejournal.com]

I've tried Heart of Darkness twice, but I just couldn't get into it. I just didn't care what happened!

>.< How any reader could identify with Kurtz or even care what happens to him is beyond me. Maybe it's a guy thing?

There was also a serious lack of Edith Wharton and Henry James on that list, too. I wonder if I copied a vandalized meme?

[mslogica.livejournal.com]

I think it's an edited version of the original BBC 100 greatest books list (which was made in 2003 and thus didn't accomodate things like the Da Vinci Code or the HP series in completion). I think the original list was compiled by the British public voting along with academics etc., so it's bound to be a little odd!

[magnavox-23.livejournal.com]

I've read The Da Vinci Code and I'm half way through Moby Dick *weeps*

In my defence I'm not much of a fiction reader. :P

[campylobacter.livejournal.com]

I've read The Da Vinci Code

Did you like it?

I'm not much of a fiction reader

Yeah, right. We oughtta compile a fanfic meme!

[magnavox-23.livejournal.com]

I did like the Da Vinci Code, it's that fun sort of historical trashy novel that can draw you in. However inaccurate, Dan Brown is good at drawing you in to the mystery.

Yeah, right. We oughtta compile a fanfic meme!

Touche! lol. I'm too lazy to read fiction where I would have to met new characters. Already having an investement in the ones in fanfic has its benefits.

[campylobacter.livejournal.com]

How cool would Gate!Cracking The DaVinci Code be?

Robert Langdon = Daniel Jackson (debunking all the historical inaccuracies)

Sophie Neveu = Vala

Opus Dei = Ori

Sir Leigh Teabing = Ba'al

Silas = Repli!Merrick

Weird how I know enough about this story without having read the book or seen the movie. Blame it on Mr. campylobacter.

[bcfan.livejournal.com]

Of all the books on your 'not yet tried' list the one I'd recommend most is To Kill a Mockingbird. It's so very good.

[campylobacter.livejournal.com]

OK, OK! I'll put away the Stendahl -- which frankly, is putting me to sleep -- and grab a copy of Mockingbird. I'll be taking a road trip to San Francisco, and need some reading material.