My brother-in-law posted this on his blog. I thought I would pass it on.
According to a recent study done by the BBC the average person has only read six out the one-hundred books on the list below. Most are classics but a few modern literary works are included.
The titles highlighted in ORANGE are the ones I have read.And PURPLE I may have but I can't remember for sure.
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (More times than I can count)
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (Honestly I am not quite done the series, but close enough to say I have done it)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (Listen to Q debate about the over hype of this book here)
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 (I haven't read them all, but I have read
All's Well That Ends Well, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Taming of the Shrew (I really liked this one), The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Hamlet (many times), King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet (Also more than once).
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (Again, more times than I can count)
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
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 (Do I need to even say that I have read all of them repeatedly, sometimes a whole book in one day).
34. Emma -Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis (Why is this here... see #33)
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 - A.A. Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (HIGHLY overrated)
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
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
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 (I think this is one of Dicken's best).
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 (I've started it, but never finished. I think that is about par for the course).
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker (Also stared but never finished).
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Inferno - Dante
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 - E.B. 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 (not sure if I have read this)
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 (one of my all time favorite books)
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (I can't remember if I have read it or not)
In the end I have read 28, with a few more (like the Shakespeare's books) and a few that I can't remember if I have actually read it or not. There are a couple here that I would still like to read, and a few that are actually some of my all time favorite books (Three Musketeers, Tale of Two cities, Brave New World, 1984 to name a few). I do have to admit though, that much of this is my mother's doing. I am as well read as I am because of her. A number of these books (read anything that sounds girly or is by Dickens) I have not actually "Read" as much as my mom read them to me. But that reading to me sparked a love for books and good stories that I have continued on my own.
