I’d first like to thank Nancy at Spirit Lights the Way for posting the BBC book list. The BBC list was created in 2003 after a poll of their readers/listeners favorite books. The rumor circulated on Facebook was that the BBC believed that most Americans hadn’t read more than six of these titles. After searching the BBC archives I couldn’t find mention of this rumor. Here are my results:
Bolded = Read
Italisized = Read part
- Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
- Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
- Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
- Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
- To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
- The Bible
- Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
- 1984- George Orwell
- His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
- Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
- Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
- Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
- Complete Works of Shakespeare
- Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
- The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
- Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
- Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
- The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
- Middlemarch – George Eliot
- Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
- The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
- The Moonstone -Wilkie Collins
- War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
- The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
- Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
- Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
- Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
- The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
- Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
- David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
- Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
- Emma – Jane Austen
- Persuasion – Jane Austen
- The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
- The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)
- Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
- Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
- Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
- Animal Farm – George Orwell
- The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
- One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
- The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
- Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
- Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
- The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
- Lord of the Flies – William Golding
- Atonement – Ian McEwan
- Life of Pi – Yann Martel
- Dune – Frank Herbert
- Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
- Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
- A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
- The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
- A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
- Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
- Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
- Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
- The Secret History – Donna Tartt
- The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
- Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
- On The Road – Jack Kerouac
- Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
- Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
- Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
- Moby Dick – Herman Melville
- Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
- Dracula – Bram Stoker
- The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
- Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
- Ulysses – James Joyce
- The Inferno – Dante
- Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
- Germinal – Emile Zola
- Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
- Possession – AS Byatt
- A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
- Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
- The Color Purple – Alice Walker
- The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
- Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
- A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
- Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
- The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
- Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
- Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
- The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
- The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
- Watership Down – Richard Adams
- A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
- A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
- The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
- Hamlet – William Shakespeare
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
- Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
My total? 28 full reads, 6 part reads. Not too shabby. I plan on reading more, there are several on the list that I have always wanted to read and haven’t gotten around to.
How did you do?
Jodi, with your schedule and busy life, might I consider acquiring the books on CD or as MP3 files? That way you could listen to them while doing other things… driving or painting the lawn or something. ))
I’ve given it lots of thought – my only issue is I need to hear what the kids are up to. If it’s quiet they have gotten into something naughty. However, I got to listen to two hours the other day when my daughter fell asleep on my shoulder for a rare nap!
17.5 full reads, 14 part reads.
I gave myself 1.5 for reading The Little Prince in french (I had to read it AND the dictionary).
This is a great list, full of classics!
Emily
Love your 17.5 full reads ~ if you read War and Peace or Anna Karenina in Russian . . . give yourself 4 1/2 points for each! 🙂
I read the Little Prince in Spanish, it’s a delightful little book! Definitely earns you extra points.
Wow, I can claim 31 full 6 part, and I have a degree in English Literature. I had to read many of those as assignments. I need to get back to the classics. I can add 7 more if you count seeing the movie ;}
Congrats! You earn yourself a gold star. From the whole list, including those I’ve read, I’ve seen an astounding 23 of them as movies.
Ouch.
9 full reads
3 partial reads (though the half of War and Peace I read is longer than most of my full reads. It must have been a lot more interesting in Russian)
I lose.
In fairness to me, that list is understandably slanted toward classic (18th-19th century) British literature and fantasy, neither of which are my preferred “genres,” if you will. I didn’t see Vonnegut, Hemingway, or even Stephen King.
I’m a bit surpised not to see Murder on the Orient Express or And Then There Were None on the list. I mean, Agatha Christie is only the best selling novelist in history!
Perhpas you can find another list somewhere that’s tilted toward 20th century titles, so I can feel better about myself.
There are other lists floating around. I know I saw King on one. Not sure that I saw Agatha Christie on any . . . that seems rather bizarre.
Yes the list is a bit slanted, remember it was the BBC that published it, by that very nature it would naturally lean that way. Say . . . if you find a list that is more contemporary send me the link and I will be more than happy to post it!
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32. well i surprise myself. A few of my favourites there…
I;m Canadian though, what did they guess for canadians??
lol
great to see how off they were.
Way to go, you beat out Michael. If you want your figurative gold star you might have to peel it off of him. I’d be curious to see what the statistics are for different nationalities.
16 read out of this list.
Why The Complete Works of Shakespeare and Hamlet in the one list?
I prefer the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels or 1001 books to read before you die list
And why, oh why, does it have both the Chronicles of Narnia AND the Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe? Makes no sense whatsoever.
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