All the books!

Here we go - a slightly happier blog post :)

I'm not exactly sure where this list of books came from, but judging from the title, it had something to do with the BBC. Apparently, statistically speaking, on average a person will have only read six of these books. A few years ago, I set myself the rather enjoyable challenge of finishing half of them before my 25th birthday (which is still 18 months away). Of late, my efforts have been stalled slightly, by a combination of a ridiculously busy few weeks and a rather large book that has taken me a while to get through. However, I took a sick day today (a little bit unwarranted, but I really needed the day off) and managed to catch up on a bit of reading. So after my school reports are done, I think it might be time for another trip to the local library.

If anyone reading this loves books as much as I do, I'd really appreciate your feedback as to which eight of the 58 books I haven't read I should make it a priority to read before I'm officially a quarter of a century old. (Speaking of readers - shout out to the Russians! According to blog statistics, the country with the second highest number of page views of this blog is Russia. Go figure...)

BBC reading list

[x] 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
[x] 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
[ ] 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
[x] 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
[x] 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
[x] 6 The Bible - God (the whole thing)
[ ] 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
[x] 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
[x] 9 The Northern Lights- Philip Pullman
[x] 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

8/10

[x] 11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
[x] 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
[x] 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
[x] 14 Romeo and Juliet – William Shakespeare
[ ] 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
[x] 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
[ ] 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
[x] 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
[ ] 19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
[ ] 20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

14/20

[x] 21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
[ ] 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
[x] 23 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
[x] 24 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
[ ] 25 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
[ ] 26 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
[x] 27 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
[x] 28 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
[ ] 29 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
[ ] 30 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

19/30

[x] 31 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain

[ ] 32 Emma - Jane Austen
[ ] 33 Persuasion - Jane Austen
[x] 34 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
[x] 35 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
[x] 36 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
[ ] 37 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
[x] 38 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
[x] 39 Animal Farm - George Orwell
[ ] 40 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

25/40

[ ] 41 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
[ ] 42 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
[x] 43 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
[x] 44 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
[ ] 45 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
[x] 46 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
[x] 47 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
[x] 48 Atonement - Ian McEwan
[x] 49 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
[ ] 50 Dune - Frank Herbert

31/50

[ ] 51 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
[ ] 52 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
[ ] 53 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
[ ] 54 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
[ ] 55 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
[ ] 56 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
[x] 57 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
[ ] 58 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
[ ] 59 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
[ ] 60 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

32/60

[ ] 61 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
[x] 62 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
[ ] 63 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
[ ] 64 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
[ ] 65 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
[ ] 66 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
[ ] 67 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
[x] 68 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
[x] 69 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
[ ] 70 Dracula - Bram Stoker

35/70

[x] 71 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
[ ] 72 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
[ ] 73 Ulysses - James Joyce
[ ] 74 The Inferno - Dante
[ ] 75 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
[ ] 76 Germinal - Emile Zola
[ ] 77 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
[ ] 78 Possession - AS Byatt
[x] 79 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
[ ] 80 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

37/80

[ ] 81 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
[ ] 82 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
[ ] 83 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
[ ] 84 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
[x] 85 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
[ ] 86 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
[ ] 87 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
[x] 88 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
[ ] 89 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
[x] 90 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

40/90

[ ] 91 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
[ ] 92 Watership Down - Richard Adams
[ ] 93 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
[x] 94 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
[ ] 95 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
[ ] 96 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
[x] 97 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
[ ] 98 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

[ ] 99 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

[ ] 100 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

total 42