Pretentious book meme

I thought I’d continue the book meme found at Nullifidian’s site…

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here, though the closest BBC reference I can find to it is The Big Read from 2003. Either way, it’s time to find out:

Instructions:

1. Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read ENTIRELY (and not just seen the film!)
2. Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3. Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4. Tally your total at the bottom.

The BBC reading list:

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien x
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling x
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee x
6. The Bible x
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell x+
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 x
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare *
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier x
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien x
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger x
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 x
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams x+
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky *
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll x
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame x
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy *
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis x
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis x
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 x
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell x+
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown x
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
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy *
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding x
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan *
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel x
52. Dune – Frank Herbert x
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 x
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley x+
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 x
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 x
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie *
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville x
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens x
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker x
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 x
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Alborn
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle x
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 x
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas x
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare x+
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl x
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

If I’ve tallied correctly, that’s: 34 x / 5 + / 15 * I’ve not read nearly as much as I’d have liked in recent years, but amusingly I have a number of those “want to read” books sitting in a pile in my living room. So much to do, so little time…