The People’s Republic of Mortimer published “A Whole New Way With Memes.” Like Alix, the blog’s author, I am not tagging anybody. If you like to participate, just copy and paste this list of books into your own blog, and follow the instructions below, or add up the books you’ve read.
This list was compiled in the U.K. by the BBC. The average adult has read only 6 of the books on the list. I’ve read 59. (62)
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own blog. (This list in no way represents the top 100 books. It’s missing the Iliad and Odyssey by Homer. For shame.)
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 The 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 – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
As you can see, I’ve struck out no books, as they are all readable – eventually.
Jane Austen's World 
What an impressive reader you are! I’ve joined in too at Bygone Beauty.
You have perhaps heard of M J Adler & Y C Van Doren’s ‘How To Read A Book’ – a classic guide to reading and critical appraisal?
I’d like to become a better reader and have been perusing this little volume with interest. I have a long way to go.
~Kalianne
Kalianne, thanks for playing along. Jochristiesmith at blogspot has racked up an impressive 72 out of 100. Does anyone top her?
I’d like to add that if one could count seeing the movies based on these books, my list would shoot up by 20 or more.
Now see, if they’d included the Iliad and the Odyssey, I would have got 74! Amazing what an ‘A’ level in Classics can do for you!
What a great blog…Pride & Prejudice is one of my tip top favourite books! Jane Austen rocks…I’ve read every one of her books, including her unfinished novel!
By the way, read A Town Like Alice! i read it years and years ago but it was absolutely great…read it next!
Vic, if we could could count movies my list would sky rocket! *blush* And if we were ‘allowed’ to add individual books from Shakespeare’s Works I’d do a little better as I’ve read The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth and Othello as well as the odd sonnet! Surely I must get some credit for these? ;) Jo Christie- Smith is an inspiration.
I’ve only read 45 of these listed—but there are so many of them that I’ve never heard of, so how can they be the “greatest books of all time”? It was curious to see that The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was listed in addition to The Chronicles of Narnia (duplicate) and that Hamlet is listed in addition to the Complete Works of Shakespeare (duplicate).
Kaye, I agree. These aren’t the greatest books, which is why I titled my post 100 books. I could not bear to place “great” in front of some of those titles. (The Da Vinci Code? Memoirs of a Geisha? Huh?) This list reads like books that won a popularity contest.
Some friends and I were debating the term “great” books last night, and one made a distinction between the classics we were assigned in school and “great” books. Frankly, I would debate any list that does not include Ivan Turgenev and Homer. I’m sure I should include more, but those are my most glaring absences, since I count Fathers and Sons and the Iliad and Odyssey among my favorites.
Vic, you will love Cold Comfort Farm. If you’ve ever seen the movie, it’s just as fun as that.
Jo Christie-Smith, whoa!
Generally, maybe a new meme’s in order. “Great” could probably be qualified by genre, maybe, or canonized stuff (I’m pretty sure Atonement wasn’t in my highschool’s AP Reading List! – but I dug the movie).
I frankly would like to see a 100 Top Graphic Novels!!! – but I’m, um, a dork.
Vic, you beat me by far… I think I’ve only read about 35 of these titles. Growing up in another country with English as my second language, I missed a lot of “required reading” in schools here in N. America. But I’ve been trying to catch up as an adult all these years. Thanks for an interesting post!
Ah, it was fun, but its a shame there are so many current ‘popular’ books on the list at the expense of some real classics. I’m surprised they didn’t have ‘the works of Jane Austen’ as a set for one thing. And so many children’s books but no Famous Five!
What great comments! I say, let’s create a meme of our own and make up our own lists. Any list that does not include Oscar Wilde, Chaucer, Turgenev, Homer, Vonnegut, Jack London, or Edith Wharton is WRONG.
Thanks for commenting on my blog and thanks for letting us ‘geeks’ use your post on the top 100 books ;)
[…] 28, 2008 by Janeite Deb I am a lover of booklists, and here is one from Ms. Place on Jane Austen’s World Blog (taken partially from the Big Read on the BBC, and several other blogs)… I repeat this […]
I have updated the list, having read (and seen) Vanity Fair since. The updates are bolded in navy.
We have recently made an exciting discovery–three years after writing the wonderfully expanded third edition of How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren made a series of thirteen 14-minute videos on the art of reading. The videos were produced by Encyclopaedia Britannica. For reasons unknown, sometime after their original publication, these videos were lost.
When we discovered them and how intrinsically edifying they are, we negotiated an agreement with Encyclopaedia Britannica to be the exclusive worldwide agent to make them available.
For those of you who teach, this is great for the classroom.
I cannot over exaggerate how instructive these programs are–we are so sure that you will agree, if you are not completely satisfied, we will refund your donation.
Please go here to see a clip and learn more:
http://www.thegreatideas.org/HowToReadABook.htm
[…] Jane Austen’s World published an interesting list of The Big Read’s top 100 books. If you like to participate, just copy and paste this list of books into your own blog, and follow the instructions below. […]