The BBC’s Top 100 Books List and which ones I will read this year

Today I saw the Top 100 Books the BBC recommends reading before you die. Disappointingly I’ve only read 26 and so many of the novels on this list are ones I’ve been meaning to read. So as a result I’ve decided to challenge myself in 2011 to read ten books on this list, along with my bookclub books I read each month, and increase my number to 36. That means I should read no less than 22 book next year.

Below are the BBC’s top 100 books.

The instructions are to copy the list, bold the books you’ve read and italicize the books you started but ended up never finishing.

====================================

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.
• Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

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 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 Caroll

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 – A.A. 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 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 (In French)

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

======================================

Because of time constraints, I’ve already decided to exclude novels running as a series (Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter.) I do have to think about my working day and social life after all, haha.

My top ten for 2011:

1. Number 86 – A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry: Set in Mumbai, India from 1947 – 1977 during ‘The Emergency’ a time of political unrest and civilian suppression. Four characters from varied background come together by circumstance and create a bond.
   
2. Number 66 – On the Road by Jack Kerouac: A largely autobiographical work based on the road trips of Kerouac and his friends across America in the 1950s. Its considered the defining lifestyle of the Beat Generation, including trends such as jazz, poetry and drugs.
3. Number 62 – Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov: Hailed as one of the all time best of the 20th century, narrated by 37 year-old Humbert and starring his obsession, a 12 year old girl named Dolores.
4. Number 76 – The Inferno by Dante: The first part of Dante’s fourteenth century epic poem, The Divine Comedy, it is an allegory of hell, a story of Dante’s travel through nine circles of suffering located  within the earth.
5. Number 31 – Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: A classic tale of love and adultery in late 19th century, high brow Moscow and St. Petersburg. The novel follows the disastrous tale of the beautiful married socialite Anna, and an army officer Count Vronsky, with dozens of other characters weaved through.
6. Number 100 – Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: The novel focuses on ex-convict Jean Valjean’s redemption and his run from the law throughout his life. The novel follows him and other characters from 1815 to the French Revolution of 1832 examining theories of law and grace.
   
7. Number 21  – Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell: A story of the genteel south during and after the American Civil War. The book focuses on the growing up and romances of spoiled and vivacious Scarlet O’Hara, daughter of a wealthy plantation owner.
8. Number 19 – The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger: A romance novel about a man with a genetic disorder that causes him to time travel unpredictably and his wife who must cope with his frequent absences and dangerous experiences.
9. Number 13 – Catch 22 by Joseph Heller: Set in World War II, and based on the author’s own experiences during the war, the story focuses on the character, Yossarian, who serves as a B-52 bombardier stationed on the small island of Pianosa in Italy.
10. Number 64 – The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold: The story of  girl, who, after being raped and murdered, watches from limbo as her family try to move on in their lives while she comes to terms with her own death.