I saw this on another blog. It is a list of 100 classics that was said to be from the BBC with the caveat that most people would have only read 6 of them. In actuality, it isn't. But I love lists and reading, so I thought I would do it anyway.
The books I have read are bolded.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (definitely really good, although I prefer Persuasion myself)
2 LOTR - JRR Tolkein
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (excellent)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (entertaining though hardly in the same class as some of the others)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (I have always thought this was really trashy if fun)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (I like his other books better, especially Down and Out in Paris and London)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (I love these so much!!
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (One of Dickens' best)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (My favorite as a kid)
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (no, so sad!!)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (I much prefer this to LOTR, which is boring and pretentious)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (I thought this was incredibly boring. I deserve a medal for finishing it.)
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (this is both extremely trashy and racist. I liked it when I read it in middle school though)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens (+ for descriptions of English legal system, big - for the character of Esther, who has no spine or gumption)
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (Funny!)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Brilliant of course. But I like the Brothers Karamazov best)
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 (My favorite by 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 (why the repeat w. 33?)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
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 (This is terrible in writing style and characterization, and peddles flagrant historical inaccuracy. But it's kind of exciting to read. Definitely trashy)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins (Victorian trashy: I liked it though!)
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (My other favorite as a kid)
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 (Bad.)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons (Very funny! I liked the movie too)
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (Wow, a lot of Austen on this list.)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (Not his best by a long shot. The descriptions of Madame de Farge are cool though.)
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 (strange choice since this is modern trashy, something usually excluded. Fun though)
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (Boring but enjoyable all the same. Be prepared for pages-long asides on whaling techniques though)
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 (This is a really obscure one in the US. I guess it's a British list)
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 (I do not like this book at all.)
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 (I love this one: the images really stay with you)
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (So sweet!)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams (One of my all time favorites: it has everything: rabbits, war, adventure, storytelling, leadership. It is incredibly awesome in almost every way.)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (Funny!)
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (Two by Dumas seems pretty generous, as he is not actually a good writer.)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (Boring and overly sentimental. I was not impressed. I like the musical though.)
I don't really like the list on second thought. It seems like a weird mix of books, with many of them being not especially good. Also, many of my favorites are unjustly excluded (Balzac, Gogol, Hoffmann, Mark Twain...Also, no Don Quixote or the Odyssey? Robbery!) I guess it's supposed to be somewhat popular books, not the best.
My results: 72 I think. It was hard to count correctly. I am mostly lacking in the modern fiction section (and Marquez. I have never really gotten into magical realism or South American fiction. Maybe I should give it a shot).
I wonder if there's a better list elsewhere...
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