100 books to get started

Hello there! You can probably tell where this is going just from reading my blog’s title, but I would feel terribly rude if I didn’t introduce myself, so here goes - my name is Clare and as you may have guessed, I read books.

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!

 

☒  1. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone By J.K. Rowling	☐  51. His Dark Materials             By Philip Pullman
☒  2. The Da Vinci Code                By Dan Brown	☒  52. Winnie the Pooh By A.A. Milne
☒  3. To Kill a Mockingbird           By Harper Lee	☐  53. Anne of Green Gables    By L.M. Montgomery
☐  4. The Little Prince    By Antoine de Saint-Exupéry	☐  54. Anna Karenina    By Leo Tolstoy
☐  5. Animal Farm           By George Orwell	☐  55. Persuasion           By Jane Austen
☒  6. The Lord of the Rings         By J.R.R. Tolkien	☐  56. A Prayer for Owen Meany             By John Irving
☐  7. The Alchemist       By Paulo Coelho	☐  57. Vanity Fair            By William Makepeace Thackeray
☒  8. 1984           By George Orwell	☐  58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time          By Mark Haddon
☒  9. Pride and Prejudice            By Jane Austen	☐  59. The Complete Works By William Shakespeare
☒  10. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy By Douglas Adams	☐  60. A Clockwork Orange         By Anthony Burgess
☒  11. Wuthering Heights            By Emily Brontë	☐  61. Tess of the d’Urbervilles By Thomas Hardy
☒  12. The Hobbit           By J.R.R Tolkien	☐  62. Les Miserablés    By Victor Hugo
☐  13. The Count of Monte Cristo            By Alexandre Dumas	☐  63. Corelli’s Mandolin             By Louis de Bernières
☐  14. Catch-22                By Joseph Heller	☒  64. Oliver Twist          By Charles Dickens
☒  15. The Catcher in the Rye    By J.D. Salinger	☐  65. A Fine Balance    By Rohinton Mistry
☐  16. The Secret Garden By Frances Hodgson Burnett	☐  66. The Bell Jar By Sylvia Plath
☒  17. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory By Roald Dahl	☐  67. David Copperfield             By Charles Dickens
☐  18. Rebecca By Daphne du Maurier	☐  68. War and Peace   By Leo Tolstoy
☐  19. Life of Pi By Yann Martel	☐  69. The Remains of the Day  By Kazuo Ishiguro
☒  20. Lord of the Flies By William Golding	☐  70. Madame Bovary By Gustave Flaubert
☐  21. A Tale of Two Cities          By Charles Dickens	☐  71. Lolita       By Vladimir Nabokov
☐  22. Memoirs of a Geisha        By Arthur Golden	☒  72. The Wind in the Willows By Kenneth Grahame
☐  23. Gone With the Wind        By Margaret Mitchell	☐  73. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes By Arthur Conan Doyle
☐  24. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass      By Lewis Carroll	☐  74. On the Road        By Jack Kerouac
☒  25. A Christmas Carol              By Charles Dickens	☐  75. Moby Dick By Herman Melville
☒  26. Charlotte’s Web By E.B. White	☐  76. Emma     By Jane Austen
☒  27. Little Women By Louisa May Alcott	☐  77. The Secret History             By Donna Tartt
☐  28. Bridget Jones’s Diary        By Helen Fielding	☐  78. Far from the Madding Crowd By Thomas Hardy
☒  29. The Time Traveler’s Wife               By Audrey Niffenegger	☐  79. The Handmaid’s Tale        By Margaret Atwood
☒  30. Jane Eyre              By Charlotte Brontë	☐  80. A Town Like Alice               By Neville Shute
☐  31. The Bible By Anonymous	☐  81. Cloud Atlas           By David Mitchell
☐  32. The Grapes of Wrath       By John Steinbeck	☒  82. The Faraway Tree Collection         By Enid Blyton
☐  33. Atonement          By Ian McEwan	☐  83. Birdsong                By Sebastian Faulks
☒  34. The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald	☐  84. Middlemarch By George Eliot
☐  35. Brave New World              By Aldous Huxley	☐  85. Bleak House         By Charles Dickens
☐  36. The Kite Runner By Khaled Hosseini	☐  86. Brideshead Revisited       By Evelyn Waugh
☐  37. Dracula   By Bram Stoker	☐  87. Possession           By A.S. Byatt
☐  38. The Five People You Meet in Heaven By Mitch Albom	☐  88. The Woman in White       By Wilkie Collins
☐  39. Love in the Time of Cholera          By Gabriel García Márquez	☐  89. Dune       By Frank Herbert
☐  40. The Shadow of the Wind                By Carlos Ruiz Zafón	☐  90. Cold Comfort Farm           By Stella Gibbons
☐  41. Of Mice and Men              By John Steinbeck	☐  91. Watership Down                By Richard Adams
☒  42. Heart of Darkness             By Joseph Conrad	☐  92. A Suitable Boy     By Vikram Seth
☐  43. One Hundred Years of Solitude By Gabriel García Márquez	☐  93. Jude the Obscure              By Thomas Hardy
☐  44. Midnight’s Children          By Salman Rushdie	☐  94. Notes from a Small Island              By Bill Bryson
☒  45. The Chronicles of Narnia By C.S. Lewis	☐  95. Ulysses  By James Joyce
☐  46. Sense and Sensibility       By Jane Austen	☐  96. Swallows and Amazons   By Arthur Ransome
☐  47. The Lovely Bones By Alice Sebold	☐  97. Germinal               By Èmile Zola
☐  48. The Three Musketeers   By Alexandre Dumas	☒  98. The Color Purple By Alice Walker
☐  49. Crime and Punishment   By Fyodor Dostoyevsky	☐  99. The Wasp Factory              By Iain Banks
☐  50. Great Expectations           By Charles Dickens	☐  100. A Confederacy of Dunces            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.

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!

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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.