Pretentious Book Meme

‘Alfinched from Psychodiva.

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

Instructions:

1. Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read ENTIRELY
2. Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3. Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4. Tally your total at the bottom.

My reading list:

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien X
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte X
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling X
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X+
6. The Bible X
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte X
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell X
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman X+
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens X
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy X
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller X+
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare X
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
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 X
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald X
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy X
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams X+
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh X
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky X
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck X
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 X
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis X
34. Emma – Jane Austen X
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen X
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 X
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood X+
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding X+
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel *
52. Dune – Frank Herbert X
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen X
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 X+
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas X+
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy X
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
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 X
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome X
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens X
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert X
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 X+
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad X+
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery X+ (one of my favourite books ever)
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks X
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 X

60/100.

Some of these I’ve never heard of, and some I have absolutely no interest in reading (Brigitte Jones being an example).

Admittedly, a number of these (occasionally considered “classics”) I probably wouldn’t have read if I weren’t expected to at school (notably Austen and Brontë — I find them dry and uninspiring) but that alone would easily have put me over the six the BBC would have.

Saying that, I’ve not read much in the way of fiction of late, most of my reading (list to be updated with my most recent holiday reads soon) has been popular science or other reality-based tomes. The fiction I have been reading is mostly things that I’ve previously read and really enjoy re-reading, Stranger In A Strange Land (Robert A Heinlein) and The Launching of Roger Brook (Dennis Wheatley) being the latest ones.

If you’ve read thus far, consider yourself tagged (if you like).

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