I've read 15 of the original list. Not many but should I feel poorly like I've some how missed out on many of the great works of English literature hmmm Harry Potter, The Da Vinci Code, Dune, The Bible! Perhaps not.

Gats, I suspect that the list of books I have read is longer merely becouse of my advanced years, so not to worry!
I have lots missing from the BBC list , I dont read Stephen King, or Terry Pratchett, and have only read one of Jacqueline Wilson's.

Well I've only read 34 of the books on MaggieG's list, so while above the average total of 6, I guess I still have a bit of a way to go.

I've read 16 of the books on MaggieG's list, so that's a few more than the other one.

So I've read 93 from the first list, 91 from the second...
Erudite but unhealthy. No time for exercise!

I've read 56 from the first list, 58 from the second list.

So many books, so little time.

Looking at the list in a couple of cases I am wondering - have i read it or just seen the TV adaptation?

Lieberkuhn asked:

Quote:

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Do you have a source on where this list came from?

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As stated in the first sentence of my post, I found the list circulating on blogs.
After seeing it in 25-30 blogs, and thinking (with my weird mind ) that it is a very nice list of good books, I decided to share it with you all for a bit of fun or (why not?) as a "guideline" for our younger readers.

So MY source for the list came from one of the many blogs floating out there in cyber space - THIS is the one.

Seeing how my original post raised quite a number of wee problems , I tried to do a more thorough search today (which caused me to fall behind on my work schedule ) and this is the best I could come with:

The list I posted is the result of a poll/survey conducted online last year by World Book Day.

"The 2,000 people who took part in the poll online at worldbookday.com nominated their top 10 titles that they could not live without." - wrote The Guardian in an article published on March 1st. And then they take us to the list - in HERE .

I am sorry I cannot offer more .


**Edited to add: I've read 56 books from Maggie's list .

I've read 35 of those books. Some I remember clearly, others, well I remember reading.

Not sure why "Hamlet" would singled out from "The Complete Works of Shakespeare".

The list did remind me of a book I could've put on the "Hated" thread. "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" by Mitch Albom. The title suggest such a wonderful idea and then the characters he parades through the book are predictable to the point of being stereotypes. I was expecting something a little more well, astonishing, given the hype.

Hopefully I will get the chance to knock off a few more on the list but I find myself reading strictly for pleasure anymore so I tend to get impatient if the book seems tedious.

I doubt I will worry much about choosing books like "Roots" over "Bridget Jone's Diary." What we like is sooooooo subjective.

My goodness. I've only completed 13 off of the original list, although I'd like to take credit for about 15 more that I've started but never finished. Reading the whole list makes me feel torn - I can't decide if I want to try to read all 87 I have left, or if I want to go back and re-read the favorites that I have already read!! On balance, it really makes me want to dig out my copy of Crime and Punishment.

On the BBC list I do about the same, but only because the addition of the Terry Pratchett books balances out the loss of books I read in high school while studying American Lit. :-) I'm a bit embarrassed to admit it, but during the school year it's hard for me to bring myself to read for fun (I have so much to read for school work) - Terry Pratchett is about all I can handle!

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 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
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
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

First list: read 53, intend to read another 24.
Second list: Read 49, intend to read another 12.

Best get started...

Just my 2 cents here... "Life of Pi" is really an excellent book for anyone looking for an endorsement. But where oh where is "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn"?! That was given many kudos on other threads and so I read it and loved it.