My good friend Tzuen posted the BBC booklist; 100 books which they say the average person has only read six of the books. I’ve read 47 but I don’t agree with their list. Here is theirs:
1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone – J.K. Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible – Various
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. 1984 – George Orwell
9. Northern Lights (the Golden Compass) – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Ubervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Romeo and Juliet – William Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Nifenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
23. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
24. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
25. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
26. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
27. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
28. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
29. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
30. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
31. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain
32. Emma – Jane Austen
33. Persuasion – Jane Austen
34. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
35. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
36. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
37. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
38. Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
39. Animal Farm – George Orwell
40. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
41. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
42. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
43. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
44. Anne of Green Gables – L. M. Montgomery
45. Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
46. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
47. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
48. Atonement – Ian McEwan
49. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
50. Dune – Frank Herbert
51. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
52. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
53. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
54. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
55. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
56. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
57. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
58. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
59. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
60. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
61. The Secret History – Donna Tart
62. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
63. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
64. On the Road – Jack Kerouac
65. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
66. Bridget Jone’s Diary – Helen Fielding
67. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
68. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
69. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
70. Dracula – Bram Stoker
71. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
72. Notes From a Small Island – Bill Bryson
73. Ulysses – James Joyce
74. The Inferno – Dante
75. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransom
76. Germinal – Emile Zola
77. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
78. Possession – A.S. Byatt
79. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
80. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel
81. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
82. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
83. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
84. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
85. Charlotte’s Web – E. B. White
86. The Five People You Meet in Heaven – Mitch Albom
87. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
88. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
89. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
90. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
91. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
92. Watership Down – Richard Adams
93. Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
94. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
95. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
96. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
98. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
99. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
100. Brideshead Revisted – Evelyn Waugh
Here is my own list, although it only goes up to 75; I wanted to leave room for growth. Most of these books I’ve read multiple times and have stayed with me over the years. Others are newer books, but when I read them the first time, I knew that I would be rereading them.
2. Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card
3. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
4. L’Œuvre (The Masterpiece) – Emile Zola
8. Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
9. American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
10. Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
11. Against Nature – J.K. Huysmans
12. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
13. Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
14. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
15. The Metamorphoses – Ovid
16. Bright Lights, Big City – Jay McInerney
17. Romeo and Juliet – William Shakespeare
18. Another Roadside Attraction – Tom Robbins
19. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
20. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
21. McTeague – Frank Norris
22. Death on the Installment Plan – Celine
23. The Beautiful and the Damned – F. Scott Fitzgerald
24. The Stranger – Albert Camus
25. Ulysses – James Joyce
26. On the Road – Jack Kerouac
27. Pale Fire – Nabokov
28. Fight Club – Chuck Palahniuk
29. Painter of Battles – Arturo Perez Reverte
30. Reading Lolita in Tehran – Azar Nafisi
31. Beyond Good and Evil – Friedrich Nietzsche
32. Filth – Irvine Welsh
33. Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis
34. Perfume – Patrick Suskind
35. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna – Umberto Eco
36. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Gertrude Stein
37. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
38. The Price of Salt – Patricia Highsmith
38. Slumdog Millionaire – Vikas Swarup
39. The Maltese Falcon – Dashiel Hammet
40. The Ground Beneath Her Feet – Salman Rushdie
41. Among the Thugs – Bill Buford
42. Maus – Art Spiegelman
43. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
44. The Odyssey – Homer
45. 1984 – George Orwell
46. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
47. Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
48. The Divine Comedy – Dante
49. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
50. Paradise Lost – John Milton
51. Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
52. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
53. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
54. Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safroen Foer
55. Censoring an Iranian Love Story – Shahriar Mandanipour
56. Lady Chatterly’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
57. Almost Dead – Assaf Gavron
58. Dracula – Bram Stoker
59. Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka (short story, but it’s so great)
60. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
61. White Noise – Don DeLillo
62. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
63. Women – Charles Bukowski
64. As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
65. Shopgirl – Steve Martin
66. Tess of the d’Ubervilles – Thomas Hardy
67. Neil Gaiman – American Gods
68. Nana – Emile Zola
69. The Queen of the South – Arturo Perez Reverte
70. White Teeth – Zadie Smith
71. Interview with the Vampire – Anne Rice
73. How to Buy a Love of Reading – Tanta Efan Gibson
74. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – J.K. Rowling
75. About a Boy – Nick Hornby
Goth Grammarist 