The BBC challenge

A meme from Book Ends at: http://ravndahl.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-do-you-stack-up-according-to-bbc.html is the same as one I just found on Facebook last week. So, in the spirit of good reading, I'll share it here, too.

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up? Look at the list and put an 'X' after those you have read. Tag other book fans to compare.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - x
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - TBR
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - own, TBR
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - x
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - x
6 The Bible - on page 2
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - own, TBR
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell -x
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman -
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens -x
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott -
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy –x
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller -
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - own, TBR
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier -
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - TBR
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk -
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger -TBR
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger -x
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot -
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell -
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - x
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens -TBR
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy- own, TBR
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - TBR
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky -own, TBR
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck -
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll -x
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame -
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - own, TBR
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens -own, TBR
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - TBR
34 Emma - Jane Austen - own, TBR
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen -own, TBR
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis -TBR
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - own, TBR
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres -
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden -own, TBR
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - own
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell -
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - x
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 -x
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy -
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood -
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding -X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan - 1/3 read
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel -TBR
52 Dune - Frank Herbert -
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons -
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen -own, TBR
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth -
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon -own, TBR
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens -own, TBR
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley -x
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon -TBR
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez -x
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck -TBR
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov -
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt -
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -TBR
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas -own, TBR
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac -
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy -
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding -TBR (watched the movie many times, though)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie –
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville -own
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens -own
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - own
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett -
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson -
75 Ulysses - James Joyce -
76 The Inferno – Dante -
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 -own
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry -
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - x
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom - x
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -own
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 - own
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - x
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl -
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo -own(?)

My score: 17/100

What I personally get from this is that I have the best of intentions but really need to get a move on reading the classics. At least I own a bunch of them. (I added my own's and TBR's but, obviously, didn't include them in the count.)

I'm curious though about the author of this particular list. When I goggled the actual BBC list, it comes up slightly different, as you can see here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml. I found it odd that the above list contained individual books as well as compilations for some authors. (ie. Hamlet/Shakespeare collected works). Whichever list you choose, let us know how you're doing in comparison.

Next list up for me: 1001 Books to Read Before you Die. I'm going to try to find the definitive guide to this one.