What I've Read -- and Not

This meme pops up from time to time on Facebook, with the claim that the BBC says people have only read 6 of the following 100 titles. A little snooping turns up that the list probably has little to do with the BBC. A good look at the list also reveals some odd things with two title counted twice... The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe is part of the Chronicles of Narnia; likewise, Hamlet is part of the Complete Works of Shakespeare.

Nevertheless, it's an interesting list and I had to go ahead and play this game.

The rules are to bold what you've read and italics what you've started and never finished. With only 4 italics, this also reveals that I finish everything I read, even if I don't really enjoy it. In a few months this will drop down to three once I finish Anna Karenina.

I've read 28 of these titles and I think I may come back to this list to pick the other three "important" books that I set out to read as a goal for this year.

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. The Bean Trees - Barbara Kingsolver
 19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
 20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
 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
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
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
 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-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
 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 – 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
 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
 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
 98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
 99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
 100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo