BBC Book List Challenge

[VladtheImpaler]

Facebook is one site we block here. Can someone post the list?

[Sliver]

Originally Posted by Cecil Terwilliger

Well didn't just make up a number at random.

I went through the list quickly and counted but I didn't check and recheck to ensure that the number was exact.

Would it matter? Are you that interested in my number?

I was more interested in why you wouldn't just give the correct number instead of an approximate number when it would basically take the same amount of time either way.

But I'm over it already.

[Cecil Terwilliger]

Originally Posted by Sliver

The Great Gatsby is the only novel I've read more than once and I've read it three times. It's my absolute favourite book. There's a new movie coming out, too.

Brave New World is awesome, too - you'll probably like that on a second read.

On The Road is one of my favourites on that list as well.

Yeah I saw Leo and Toby McGuire have been cast.

Directed by Baz Lurhman though. Not too excited about that.

[getbak]

Originally Posted by VladtheImpaler

Facebook is one site we block here. Can someone post the list?

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 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 Traveler’s Wife
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot – maybe
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
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
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 – 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 – 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 Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad started but never finished
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adam
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

[dissentowner]

I got 20.

[BigBrodieFan]

I actually went to the bookstore about eight years ago with a list similar to this and bought a ton of classics I hadn't read yet and made it a goal to read them. I really enjoyed some of them, and hated others. I have a few to go. I have read 52 books on this list, but I don't have any aspirations to read the ones I've not yet read. Not sure why Bridget Jones is on the list, maybe because of the parallels to Pride and Prejudice. The book, (Bridget Jones) however 'chick lit-ish' it was, was a fantastic read though.

Probably the ones I most enjoyed were the female-themed ones like Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Rebecca (which is a fantastic old Hitchcock black and white movie), The Secret Garden, The Colour Purple, Memoirs of a Geisha,etc. And, my favourite of the list would have to be Dracula.

[VladtheImpaler]

37. Mrs. Impaler is probably at ~60.

[Kybosh]

I've read 25.

How can they count the complete works of William Shakespeare as one? Have you ever seen it compiled? It's a fricken tome.

Ulysses should count as more than one because if you can read it all the way through you deserve a cash prize.

[BigBrodieFan]

Originally Posted by Kybosh

I've read 25.

How can they count the complete works of William Shakespeare as one? Have you ever seen it compiled? It's a fricken tome.

Ulysses should count as more than one because if you can read it all the way through you deserve a cash prize.

I was wondering about that- there are 7 books in the Harry Potter series as well, all of them were fantastic. Shakespeare shouldn't be counted as one, I agree.

[peter12]

I've read 41.

And most of the books on that list are shameful. Da Vinci code??

[getbak]

And - of course - as always, never believe anything you find on Facebook: http://www.kith.org/journals/jed/2010/11/28/13453.html

This is not the original BBC list, which was compiled in 2003 and contained all of the Harry Potter books (up to that point) in the top 25.

The original BBC list was compiled from votes from the general public in Britain with the purpose of finding "the nation's best-loved novel of all time". An original list of 200 novels was created based on an open submission process, then the voting was held to rank the top 21: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml

The BBC never made any claim as to how many of them people have likely read.

Among other alterations, the original list contains no works of Shakespeare because he was a playwright and not a novelist.


Here's the BBC's original top 21:

1. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
7. Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
10. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
18. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernières
20. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

[BigBrodieFan]

Originally Posted by peter12

I've read 41.

And most of the books on that list are shameful. Da Vinci code??

Maybe it's on there because Da Vinci Code is one of the top selling books of all time..

When you look at this link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books

many of the ones on the list correspond.

Bridget Jones though, still don't get. And I really hated Life of Pi, although I know a lot of people who loved it.

[getbak]

Originally Posted by Kybosh

How can they count the complete works of William Shakespeare as one? Have you ever seen it compiled? It's a fricken tome.

Oops, it looks like the list I posted isn't the same one in the original link. I couldn't get the Facebook list to format easily, so I just posted a list I found somewhere else that seemed to look the same.

Obviously, someone has been changing the list every time it gets posted again.

The list from troutman's link does separate out Romeo and Juliet (14) and Hamlet (96) as its two Shakespeare entries, but as I said above, the "real" list didn't include any Shakespeare because he didn't write novels.

[bizaro86]

I had 20, and I would definitely agree that Margaret Atwood's work doesn't belong on a list of that nature.

"Writers most likely to form a revolutionary political party thereby destabalizing a small country."

or

"People who believe they should get to decide who gets to vote."

might be lists where she'd reside, but not a best books type list.

[Kybosh]

Originally Posted by BigBrodieFan

Maybe it's on there because Da Vinci Code is one of the top selling books of all time..

When you look at this link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books

many of the ones on the list correspond.

Bridget Jones though, still don't get. And I really hated Life of Pi, although I know a lot of people who loved it.

I thought Life of Pi was ok but it gave the impression of looking smarter than it really was.

[GreenLantern]

I am at 14, and there are 4 or 5 extra that I can't remember but I am pretty sure I read in school at some point.

So could be as high as 18 or 19.

Ninja Edit, never saw Da Vinci code, makes it 15 with a possibility for 20.

[Kybosh]

Originally Posted by peter12

I've read 41.

And most of the books on that list are shameful. Da Vinci code??

How they can forgo Greek and Roman classics yet include Da Vinci code and Bridget Jones' Diary is a mystery to me.

[Dirty Mr. Clean]

12.

[Burninator]

24

There are a couple more on there that are on my to read list.

[peter12]

Originally Posted by BigBrodieFan

Maybe it's on there because Da Vinci Code is one of the top selling books of all time..

When you look at this link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books

many of the ones on the list correspond.

Bridget Jones though, still don't get. And I really hated Life of Pi, although I know a lot of people who loved it.

No, I know that idiots read books, I was just hoping the original compilers of the list would have had more dignity.

Plus, holy jeezus on the Jane Austen.