Archive for January 11th, 2007

Jan 11 2007

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M. D. Benoit

The British most beloved books

Filed under Books and Reading, Commentary, English and Editing

BBC has come up with what they call The Big Read, the result of a survey of people’s favourite reads. Here’s the list below. I’ve put those I’ve read in bold. I read 48 of the 100. How many have you read?

  • The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
  • Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
  • His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
  • Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
  • To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
  • Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
  • Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
  • The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
  • Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
  • Catch-22, Joseph Heller
  • Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
  • Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
  • Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
  • The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
  • The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
  • Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
  • Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
  • Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
  • War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
  • Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
  • Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling
  • Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
  • Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowlin
  • The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
  • Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
  • Middlemarch, George Eliot
  • A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
  • The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
  • Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
  • The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
  • One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
  • The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
  • David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
  • Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
  • Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
  • A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
  • Persuasion, Jane Austen
  • Dune, Frank Herbert
  • Emma, Jane Austen
  • Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
  • Watership Down, Richard Adams
  • The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
  • The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas (in French)
  • Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
  • Animal Farm, George Orwell
  • A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
  • Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
  • Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
  • The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
  • The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
  • Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
  • The Stand, Stephen King
  • Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
  • A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
  • The BFG, Roald Dahl
  • Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
  • Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
  • Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
  • Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  • Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
  • Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
  • A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
  • The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
  • Mort, Terry Pratchett
  • The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
  • The Magus, John Fowles
  • Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
  • Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
  • Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
  • Perfume, Patrick Süskind
  • The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
  • Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
  • Matilda, Roald Dahl
  • Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
  • The Secret History, Donna Tartt
  • The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
  • Ulysses, James Joyce
  • Bleak House, Charles Dickens
  • Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
  • The Twits, Roald Dahl
  • I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
  • Holes, Louis Sachar
  • Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
  • The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
  • Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
  • Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
  • Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
  • Magician, Raymond E Feist
  • On The Road, Jack Kerouac
  • The Godfather, Mario Puzo
  • The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
  • The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
  • The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
  • Katherine, Anya Seton
  • Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
  • Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
  • Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
  • The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
  • Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

And of the next 100, I read these:

  • Les Misérables, Victor Hugo
  • The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
  • Shogun, James Clavell
  • The Day Of The Triffids, John Wyndham
  • The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
  • The Hound Of The Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle
  • Possession, A. S. Byatt
  • The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
  • East Of Eden, John Steinbeck
  • The Color Purple, Alice Walker
  • The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan
  • All Quiet On The Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
  • Papillon, Henri Charriere
  • One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
  • Moby Dick, Herman Melville
  • The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
  • The World According To Garp, John Irving
  • The Far Pavilions, M. M. Kaye
  • The Name Of The Rose, Umberto Eco
  • Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, Richard Bach
  • The Little Prince, Antoine De Saint-Exupery
  • The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
  • The War Of The Worlds, H. G. Wells
  • A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry

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