After these messages . . .

So today is kind of a cop-out post. Again. But that's okay.

I think I may have done this before, but books and book lists are always worth revisiting. (Like Brideshead, I guess, although I'm not sure since I've not read that one.) But I've definitely read more than 6.

I've seen this list go around several times and it always makes me wonder:

1) Why does the BBC thinks people have only read 6 of these books? Do they really have that low of an opinion of the reading habits of the modern adult? And who came up with the number 6? I even have my doubts that the BBC is actually involved in this at all, but that's another story.

2) Who chose these books? What was the criteria? Why do we have The Da Vinci Code but not Don Quixote? And why include the complete works of William Shakespeare as well as Hamlet, and didn't anyone notice that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is actually part of the Chronicles of Narnia? (Another reason why I doubt the BBC's involvement. Surely they would know better.)

3) So which six of these books does the BBC expect people to have read?

4) What does this say about my book and movie habits?

The answer to these questions is a pretty firm "I have no idea." But it's still fun to look at lists of books, right?

So, without further ado, here's the actual meme with my answers.:



Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES.
Bold those books you've read in their entirety.
Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt.
Put an asterisk after the ones you've seen a film version of.

Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses! Feel free to add comments too.

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 Faulk
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 Bernieres
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 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
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 (I've only seen part of the movie, though.)
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 - Kazu 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


So that makes . . .

44 I've read in their entirety,
13 more I've read excerpts or abridged versions (or just didn't finish), and
42 movie adaptations I've seen. (I've seen brief snippets of several more, but I only included movies I've seen all or nearly all of.)

Which, I guess, makes me not-completely-uncultured. Or something.



Day 20! She could . . . go . . . all . . . the . . . way!!!