In 2003 the BBC Website began a program they called the BIG READ. Their mission was to find out that nation’s best loved novel, so they asked people to nominate their favorite books. They discontinued monitoring that page after one year, but the list or a list, continues to make the rounds on the internet, though the focus seems to have changed from “favorite novel” to “100 books everyone should read”.

The list I have here seems to be the latest in circulation, but  who knows how accurate it is. I confess I’m a sucker for reading lists, however, and I like to compare my book choices with those of others. I’m notoriously behind, however, being born in the deep south and only privy to an extremely small country school that had a smaller library to service all 12 grades than the one I have in my own “library” today. To my knowledge there was no city library at the time, and had there been it would have been of little use since I grew up 13 miles away on a farm in the country. There would have been little or no time to avail ourselves of a library, even if the family had considered it important enough. Be that as it may, I’ve wasted little time over the past years trying to catch up.

Turns out I’ve only read 28 of them, if I’m perfectly honest, but I’m very familiar with most of the others having been exposed–despite my poor country upbringing–to my older brothers’ collection of Classics Illustrated comic books (which I read voraciously), plus the myriad of movies based on many of them. When Hubby went through the list, he counted 35 reads of his own. How many for you?

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee      (This one rates high on my favorites list!)
6. The Bible (much of what I know of the Bible I got from my cousins’ bible stories for children, scary enough to make any child bow and yield I tell you!)
   
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 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 Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot      (I tried, I really did, and I’m sure it was a great story but it was a boring read.)
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell       (I read this as an adult, and as much as I loved the movie, the book was–in my opinion–not very well written and would never have been published if it were submitted today. It excelled as a good story though, as well as a period piece on the antebellum South.)
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
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
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 – LM 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       (This was a fascinating read, for–just as life for Pi must have been surviving the shipwreck–it was not the easiest to finish. I felt devastated but stuck it though to the end and felt somewhat cheated at the end. I keep hoping M. Night Shyamalan will make it into a movie and tie the loose ends for me! It does provide lots to talk and ponder.)
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       (Steinbeck became my favorite writer in the 1960’s because of this book and Cannery Row.)
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold     (A true psychological mystery! Not as an easy feat as a writer.)
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    (I confess this was a real reach for me, but I stuck it out and thought it was brilliant.)
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    (Somehow I’m drawn by these tortured artist type books, and this was one of the best to me.)
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 Mitchel
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker    (Loved it! Loved it! Loved it!)
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert      (Ok, I admit, I read only the titillating parts just because it was banned. Don’t remember how I came to have it.)
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry    (I wonder if it helps to be a mathematician, as Mistry is or was, to write such a delicately “balanced” novel that I loved so much during the reading.)
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White       (I only discovered this when my youngest was in kindergarten, but that didn’t stop me from loving it!)
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      (I gave it a scholarly try, honest I did!)
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
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Although I’m not offering it as such, it does occur to me this would make a great theme for a  meme. If any of my blogging friends are interested, consider this an invitation but be sure and let me know about it so I can stop by. Or–if you’d like to see other reading lists–look online. Canada has one too, I discovered.