BBC 100 Books – My Progress
As part of my 30 Before 30 challenge, I’m working my way through this list of 100 books, of which the BBC reckons most people have read just 6. I’m posting this now to give me somewhere to record my progress and cross them off as I go along.
NB: My initial intention was to read all the top 50 on the list below, but, having studied it in more detail and noted that the tomes that are War and Peace and Crime and Punishment are both in the top 50, I’ve now decided to be more realistic and merely take the number of books I’ve read out of the total 100 to over 50 – i.e. I can choose books out of the second half of the list to up my total. I’ve also added a list at the bottom for other books I feel I ought to have read, but that are not in the BBC’s list. I’m not going to feel too guilty about substituting some of these for some of the entries on the BBC list (e.g. the Bible), so these can count towards my total too.
1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
2. Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series (all), J.K. Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee – finished 16/4/15
6. The Bible [probably not going to read this – will substitute for one on my own ‘must-read’ list below]
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 May Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
13. Catch-22, Joseph Heller – finished 19/2/15
14. Complete works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
16. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger – finished 14/5/15
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 Hitchhiker’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 Graeme
31. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy – CURRENTLY READING
32. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
34. Emma, Jane Austen
35. Persuasion, Jane Austen
36. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis
37. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Berniere – PARTIALLY READ
39. Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden – FINISHED 1/8/15
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, L.M. 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, Alexandre Dumas
66. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
68. Bridet Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens – finished 18/3/15
72. Dracula, Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson
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 Thackeray
80. Possession, A.S. Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
83. The Colour Purple, Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary, Gustav Flaubert – finished 26/6/15
86. A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web, EB White
88. The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Alborn
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan DoyleT
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, Neville Shute
97. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet, William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
Top 50: 33/50
Top 100: 50/100
Other books I need to read
I’m putting these here too as I think they should have been on the above list. Some are taken from this list of top 100 from the Telegraph. I’m letting myself substitute some of the books on the list above for some of these.
101. The Beach, Alex Garland
102. The Man in the Iron Mask, Alexandre Dumas
103. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
104. Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee
105. Dr Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
106. Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
107. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
108. The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle
109. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
110. Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
111. The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
112. A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
113. Brighton Rock, Graham Greene
114. The Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse
115. Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
116. To Let, John Galsworthy
117. Enigma, Robert Harris
118. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde (partially read)
119. Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
120. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte
Let me know if there are any novels you think I should add to this list!