Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. the top list is the original bbc list, the list below is the one that’s circulating on facebook.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.
1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien [X]+
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen [X]
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman [X]+
4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams [X]+
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling [X]+
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee [X]+
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne [X]
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell [X]+
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis [X]+
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë [X]
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller [X]+
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë [X]
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier x
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger [X]
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame [X]
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens [X]
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott [X]
19. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy [X]
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling [X]
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling [X]+
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling [X]+
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien [X]+
26. Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck [X]
30. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll [X]+
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez [X]+
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl [X]+
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson [X]
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert [X]+
40. Emma, Jane Austen [X]
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams [X]
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald [X]+
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas [X]
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell [X]+
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens [X]
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett [X]
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck [X]
53. The Stand, Stephen King [X]
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth [X]
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl [X]
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell [X]
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer [X]
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden [X]
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens [X]
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough [X]
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett [X]+
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton [X]+
67. The Magus, John Fowles *
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman [X]+
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett [X]+
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding [X]
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind *
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett [X]+
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl [X]+
75. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding [X]
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins *
78. Ulysses, James Joyce *
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl [X]
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake *
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy [X]
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley [X]
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo [X]
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel [X]
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett [X]+
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer [X]
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez [X]+
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot [X]
100. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie [X]+
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen [X]
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien [X] +
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte [X]
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling [X] +
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee [X] +
6 The Bible- [X]
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte [X]
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell [X] +
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman [X] +
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens[X]
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott [X]
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller [X]
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien [X]
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger [X]
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 [X]
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy [X]
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy [X] +
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck [X]
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll [X]
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame [X]
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy [X]
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens [X]
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis [X]
34 Emma – Jane Austen [X]
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen [X]
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis [X]
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini *
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden [X]
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne [X]
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell [X] +
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown [X]
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez [X] +
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 [X]
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding [X]
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel *
52 Dune – Frank Herbert [X] +
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen [X]
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth [X]
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens [X]
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley [X]
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez [X]
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck [X]
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov [X]
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas [X]
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding [X]
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie [X]
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville [X]
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens [X]
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker [X]
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett [X]
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 [X]
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens [X]
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker [X]
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert [X]
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White [X]
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [X]
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton [X]
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad *
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery [X]
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams [X]
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole *
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas [X] +
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare [X]
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl [X]
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo [X]
i never found the time to do my Charlie and the Chocolate Factory review and it opened this weekend to lukewarm reviews. it`s kind of saddening that in this summer of remakes and rehashes, the one glowing nugget in the steaming piles of dreck goes unappreciated.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is not so much a remake but a reinterpretation and before you get on your high horse about not messing with a good thing, bear in mind the author hated Gene Wilder`s Wonka and found the movie just a little to bright and cheery. this version may be filled with some bright colours but the tone is closer to the spirit of the book.
in HP news, i realise there is a camp of people that believes it`s cool not to have read the books or feel about the draw of the books, i say more power to them for their believes. i`ve continued to live without having seen Titanic, ever, so who am i to judge them. i`m just thrilled that in this period of tiny attention spans, that not just a single book but a series has ignited the imaginations.
i had my hardy boys and secret seven and famous five growing up, but i can`t recall a series of books that grew with me. each successive book in the HP series not only shows the growth of the characters, but a growth in the writing taking the readers along for the ride. it`s been seven years since the first book came out and the children and adults that started reading then are still anxiously awaiting the next book. because of hype? possibly, but more likely because we`ve become attached to characters we`ve watch grow and mature. if that makes me a geek then so be it, i`ve never shrugged away from that moniker.
when you have as many books as we do, you need a way to keep track of them for our own edification as well as insurance purposes.
for the last three months we`ve been making an effort at creating a definitive catalogue for our insurers, it`s been difficult entering each of books by hand in an excel spreadsheet but this weekend to my great joy, i have discovered a new tool that has made my life infinitely easier.
it`s called Books, it`s a tiny little application that; provided with the ISBN and internet connection; will pull in all the book information from a variety of sources not limited to Amazon, the Library of Congress and the British Library. from title to publication date, original price to current price, books provides an fantastic resource for anyone with a library. you can if you so desire acquire a barcode reader for entering your books into the database. the database itself is proprietary but exports to a number common formats including HTML, XML and tab delimitated text
there is even a lending details feature, you can keep track of who has what, for how long and when it`s due back, keeping someone like me who anxiously loans books out extremely happy.
however, the best thing about this wonderful application is that is it completely free. it is mac only but was created under the GNU Public License which means the code is readily available if desire to port it to another platform.
banned books week is September 25 – October 3 this year. that`s right there are still books that are challenged and banned in public libraries everywhere. my amazon list has been modified to include booksense picks; which are all challenged books.
according to a press release from the ALA the 10 most challenged books of 2003 were:
Alice series, for sexual content, using offensive language, and being unsuited to age group.
Harry Potter series, for its focus on wizardry and magic.
“Of Mice and Men” by John Steinbeck, for using offensive language.
“Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture” by Michael A. Bellesiles, for inaccuracy.
“Fallen Angels” by Walter Dean Myers, for racism, sexual content, offensive language, drugs and violence.
“Go Ask Alice” by Anonymous, for drugs.
“It`s Perfectly Normal” by Robie Harris, for homosexuality, nudity, sexual content and sex education.
“We All Fall Down” by Robert Cormier, for offensive language and sexual content.
“King and King” by Linda de Haan, for homosexuality.
“Bridge to Terabithia” by Katherine Paterson, for offensive language and occult/satanism.
Off the list this year, but on the list for several years past, are “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou, for sexual content, racism, offensive language, violence and being unsuited to age group; “Captain Underpants” by Dav Pilkey, for insensitivity and being unsuited to age group; and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain, for racism, insensitivity and offensive language.
banned books week is also tied to the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression`s Campaign for Reader Privacy amendment to the Patriot Act. Under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the government can search your bookstore and library records without a court order, the amendment proposes to eliminate that section from the act.
edit
based on some queries here is some excepted info on how books are challenged from the ALA website:
A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group. A banning is the removal of those materials. Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum or library, thereby restricting the access of others…
The American Library Association (ALA) collects information from two sources: newspapers and reports submitted by individuals, some of whom use the Challenge Database Form…
…Research suggests that for each challenge reported there are as many as four or five which go unreported.
last night the good wyf and i sat and sorted out combined cd collections and put them in alphabetical order and as with the books we have more cds than shelving. this after a major culling after i arrived and another culling last night. we have a lot of music, a diverse selection that covers classical, hard rock, new wave, massive amounts of techno, compilations and soundtracks whose variety are quite impressive.
we also combined our mp3 libraries. i culled albums that i still own in their original format to make room on the 25Gb drive for the tunes that were rescued from the dying iMac. It`s interesting to see what compromises our 4800 tracks, some of it would not have graced my collection voluntarily and i`m sure there is some stuff in there that would make vic`s ears bleed if she were forced to listen to it as well but it`s nice to see the stuff there, like the books, it`s one of those signs that we`re one household, finally.
i`m doing the final clean up, with a collection this large it`s easy to miss overlaps, especially when we share musical tastes. when we stopped last night it was close to midnight and when you`re tired it`s easy to miss stuff.
we`ll the moving is done. the beds are up, we have clothes to wear and the kitchen is clear.
now we can start unpacking. the living room area is a sea of boxes. well if you can call boxes stacked 5` high and 8 – 10 deep, a sea. i should be unpacking but i`m a little overwhelmed at the moment, yesterday`s adrenaline is gone and i`m exhausted and every muscle in my body aches.
i`m hoping to catch a second wind momentarily. the boxes are all labelled and they are mostly books, i just need to start putting stuff on shelves, when vic gets home we can rearrange into an order we find amenable, what`s a little frightening is that these are just her books. there is still another 6 boxes of my books sitting in the basement of her mother`s house and we have nowhere to put them
we`re still moving boxes, that`s the plan for the next couple of days. on saturday evening we get the truck and the major items move early sunday. we`ve already moved three carloads of boxes and that`s pretty much the stuff that`s in day to day use. there is still the bookcases, the beds and the attic full of stuff. we have a lot of stuff.
i think when you`re moving you see clearly what your priorities are; the kitchen is pretty much moved and all the books that we had immediate access to. food and food for thought, pretty good priorities i think.
there are a couple things the rental company need to come fix forthwith but the apartment is very liveable. it seems like we have a lot of space now, but once all of our stuff is moved in i sense a lot of reorganisation to accommodate it all.
one of the things i`m looking forward to is combining the libraries. we have four 7` bookshelves which i think we have the ability to fill with ease. i know there is going to be some culling as there is some overlap and with our book buying moratorium in place, we can catch up on what we may have missed in our respective collections.
in other news there i`m also doing some reorganising on the site, i`ve changed some of the categories, so i`m back-tracking to update entries to their appropriate categories, not an easy task with just over 800 entries. next week will be a year since i started here, i have to say looking back over the last 51 weeks, it`s been interesting.
today has been a very relaxing and enjoyable day. finished the ‘his dark materials’ series, just started a gift from my wife – a richard brautigan trilogy, it had been languishing at the bottom of a box of books she sent me. i love discovering new book. the SK has taken a back seat for the moment.
moving on…
it’s hot as hell, it’s night and it’s still in the 30s, is it the end of the world?
i used to worry about the future of the country/planet, but of late, i’ve met quite a few people, young and not so young who have rekindled my little faith in humanity. congrats to all of my new friends. you know who you are.
on another unrelated note…
samauri jack rocks. it’s quite possibly one of the best animated series on television. yes i’m a cartoon watcher. avid too. you have a problem with that?
anyway, i have a good book calling me.
