If you spend as much time here on the Internet as I do (which, let's face it, you probably don’t), you may have seen the BBC Book List Challenge circulating around Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and various other Social Media hubs. If not, it is essentially a list of one hundred famous, popular, classic or otherwise special books, compiled by the BBC and appearing on a website called Goodreads. You can find the original list here in its natural habitat. The BBC has estimated that the average person will have read just six of these one hundred books.
Being an avid reader and determined to prove myself ‘above
average’, I thought this would be a great way to start off my book blog – it
should give you an idea of the kind of books I like to read1,
and we can compare scores. I’ve made a link to a downloadable version of the list as a Microsoft Word
file, so you’ll be able to save a copy, or even
print one out and tick the books off with a pen! How quaint! Click here to download a copy.
Needless to say, the books that I have crossed off are the ones that I have read. Let’s get cracking!
Well that was fun! Altogether, I have read twenty-five of the books on the list, which is a quarter, so definitely better than six. I would have thought I had read more, but the biggest surprise was finding a couple that I’d never even heard of! I guess I have some catching up to do!
Needless to say, the books that I have crossed off are the ones that I have read. Let’s get cracking!
By
J.K. Rowling
|
By Philip Pullman
|
By
Dan Brown
|
By A.A. Milne
|
By Harper Lee
|
By L.M. Montgomery
|
By Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
|
By Leo Tolstoy
|
By
George Orwell
|
By Jane Austen
|
By
J.R.R. Tolkien
|
By John Irving
|
By
Paulo Coelho
|
By William Makepeace Thackeray
|
By
George Orwell
|
By Mark Haddon
|
By
Jane Austen
|
By William Shakespeare
|
By Douglas Adams
|
By Anthony Burgess
|
By Emily Brontë
|
By Thomas Hardy
|
By J.R.R Tolkien
|
By Victor Hugo
|
By Alexandre Dumas
|
By Louis de Bernières
|
By Joseph Heller
|
By Charles Dickens
|
By J.D. Salinger
|
By Rohinton Mistry
|
By Frances Hodgson Burnett
|
By Sylvia Plath
|
By Roald Dahl
|
By Charles Dickens
|
By Daphne du Maurier
|
By Leo Tolstoy
|
By Yann Martel
|
By Kazuo Ishiguro
|
By William Golding
|
By Gustave Flaubert
|
By Charles Dickens
|
By Vladimir Nabokov
|
By Arthur Golden
|
By Kenneth Grahame
|
By Margaret Mitchell
|
By Arthur Conan Doyle
|
& Through the Looking-Glass
By Lewis Carroll
|
By Jack Kerouac
|
By Charles Dickens
|
By Herman Melville
|
By E.B. White
|
By Jane Austen
|
By Louisa May Alcott
|
By Donna Tartt
|
By Helen Fielding
|
By Thomas Hardy
|
By Audrey Niffenegger
|
By Margaret Atwood
|
By Charlotte Brontë
|
By Neville Shute
|
By Anonymous
|
By David Mitchell
|
By John Steinbeck
|
By Enid Blyton
|
By Ian McEwan
|
By Sebastian Faulks
|
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
|
By George Eliot
|
By Aldous Huxley
|
By Charles Dickens
|
By Khaled Hosseini
|
By Evelyn Waugh
|
By Bram Stoker
|
By A.S. Byatt
|
By Mitch Albom
|
By Wilkie Collins
|
By Gabriel García Márquez
|
By Frank Herbert
|
By Carlos Ruiz Zafón
|
By Stella Gibbons
|
By John Steinbeck
|
By Richard Adams
|
By Joseph Conrad
|
By Vikram Seth
|
By Gabriel García Márquez
|
By Thomas Hardy
|
By Salman Rushdie
|
By Bill Bryson
|
By C.S. Lewis
|
By James Joyce
|
By Jane Austen
|
By Arthur Ransome
|
By Alice Sebold
|
By Èmile Zola
|
By Alexandre Dumas
|
By Alice Walker
|
By Fyodor Dostoyevsky
|
By Iain Banks
|
By Charles Dickens
|
By John Kennedy Toole
|
Well that was fun! Altogether, I have read twenty-five of the books on the list, which is a quarter, so definitely better than six. I would have thought I had read more, but the biggest surprise was finding a couple that I’d never even heard of! I guess I have some catching up to do!
Clare Has Opinions!
Top 5
books2 I’ve read from the list:
Any big reader knows how impossible choosing a favourite book is, and even choosing from a list this small is way too hard! I think these are the five that I most enjoyed reading, but I reserve the right to change my mind. A lot.
Any big reader knows how impossible choosing a favourite book is, and even choosing from a list this small is way too hard! I think these are the five that I most enjoyed reading, but I reserve the right to change my mind. A lot.
1.
The Harry Potter series
2.
Wuthering Heights
3.
Pride and Prejudice
4.
The Da Vinci Code
5.
The Time Traveler’s Wife
Top 5 books I want to read from the list:
1.
Catch-22
2.
Dune
3.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
4.
Atonement
5.
Life of Pi
Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed this beginning to my blogload of
ramblings. Share your score in the comments below and hopefully we can all
celebrate being above average together!
1. Although, it is worth noting that I was forced to read some of these books for
English in high school and therefore may not have enjoyed them. Heart of
Darkness, I am looking at you!
2. This was originally a list of my top 3 books on the list, but then my head
nearly exploded, so I had to make it bigger. The list, that is, not my head.
i only have 28 and i'm 33, so you're off to a better start than i. catch 22 has had more influence on my life than any other book i have read.
ReplyDeleteAwesome! I'm really looking forward to reading Catch 22, I've had lots of people recommend it to me, especially while I was learning programming.
DeleteI have read 24 and I must say I'm pleased to be above average! Are we friends on Goodreads Clare? I want to see all the books you've read!
ReplyDeleteWell done! I don't actually have a Goodreads account, but I've just been poking around and I'm thinking maybe I should make one!
DeleteOh yes, you really should, it's so fun adding all the books you've read, and the first thing I do when I finish a book these days is go and add it to my 'read' shelf and give it a star rating. I adore it.
DeleteI have read 19 but the internet has taken control of my life and I doubt that I will ever reach much higher than that. I already love the look of your blog :D
ReplyDeleteI have read 30 so I too am above average. YAY, happy dance :-) Love your blog.
ReplyDelete