Are you an average book reader?

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.