Each morning, after the multi-stage marathon that is feeding my children breakfast, I grab my first, and most desperately needed, cup of tea and stumble, bleary-eyed, to the computer to check what the rest of the world is up to. Usually, not a lot. It’s too early for some and too late for others.
One recent morning, I woke to an interesting question: “Have you read more than 6 of these books?”.
What followed was a list of 100 works, apparently compiled by the BBC, the suggestion being that the average person would not have read more than six of them. (Don’t ask me what evidence this bold assertion is based upon. Sounds to me like a fourth pint declaration. But let’s go with it..)
The instructions were to go through the list, bold the books you’ve read, italicise the ones you’ve partly read and mark with an asterisk the ones you own. Then count how many you’ve read, post the marked up list on facebook and invite your book-nerd friends to do the same.
Pointless? Hell yes. But, as far as Facebook memes go, interesting and, for me, irresistible. You get to measure your reading achievements against a random list compiled by anonymous strangers according to ill-defined guidelines and, from that, work out if you’re up to scratch in the committed reader stakes. And you get to nose into your friends’ reading lists.
Of course I did it.
For the record, I scored 53, not counting the Bible and “The collected works of Shakespeare”, which I have counted as incomplete because I can’t be absolutely sure I’ve read the lot. Not too shabby – until you find out the scores of nearly everyone else I know!
But here’s the thing. It’s an odd list. I mean, Jane Austen gets four separate listings and Shakespeare only “the collected works”. Where’s the logic in that?
And the omissions, well, I won’t go into which books I thought should have made it onto the list lest you realise what an unsophisticated, tasteless clod I really am. (Oh, you knew already? Shhh..)
Here’s the list. Have a look for yourself and let me know what you think. If nothing else, it might prod you into reading some excellent books that you might not have remembered or looked for otherwise.
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
6 The Bible
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
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 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 Berniere
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 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 Goldman
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbon
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 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
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
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
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
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
Waxings 
Carina, I totally agree – the list was sorely lacking in some important or just popular books and was far too weighted towards a classical, populist British library – it was a shame…. and no matter how un-put-downable it was, what on earth was a Time Traveller’s Wife doing on the list when Trainspotting or The Godfather were not there and were cultural icons in their day and wonderful books – to name two in a large shortfall. My hubby and I have been debating the list all day and were considering coming up with a list that was more reflective of our reading list – we wont as we have too much to do, but thanks because you created a great conversation by starting it in fb.
Happy reading!
Ainslie
ps – I thought your list was pretty good at 53! Don’t forget lots of mine were italicized, not bold as I start way more books than I ever get round to reading…!
I completely agree with both of you here! I love doing memes like this because they’re just fun, but it was a heavily one-sided list, and it even had repeats on it (both Hamlet and The Complete Works of Shakespeare?). So many amazing books weren’t even on the list.