The BBC claims that the average reader in Britain has read only six of the following 100 books. I am horrified if this is at all accurate. I am ashamed to say I have not read 56 of them, and most of those I have read were in the first 25 years of my life probably…
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 (one of the first “chapter books” I ever read :-))
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 Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
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 –
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 Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. 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 (One of the best)
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 (Read the sequel too! Not nearly as good as the original)
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 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
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. 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
Boadicea's Chariot 
I have definitely not read 36, and possibly haven’t read 38 (the questionable two I may have only read in précis). There were quite a few that I didn’t enjoy, though! They were ‘required reading’. 😕
6 The Bible
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
Considering I get through a book a week sometimes more as I am an avid reader I only managed 10 from that list. A lot of them hold no interest or are just to infantile. I would put Dan Brown under the infantile category and JK Rowling. I began reading Harry Potter and thought it was too childish, though I have enjoyed the films
I have read 11 of those.
I do not count the Shakespeare I was forced to endure in school.
To be fair there are a billion better books than a lot of those. Honestly, I would rather read the phone directory than a good 40% of that lot. 🙂
Sorry Rick, but your condemnation is a tad over the top, in my humble estimation (although I wholeheartedly agree that Dan Brown’s scribblings are only fit for Americans).
Only one a week? Boadicea and I both finished all three volumes of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” in roughly five days! Now there’s an excellent trilogy. 😎
It’s a weird mixture. hands up who has akshully read the ALL the Bible, complete works of WS, Ulysses or Dante’s Inferno! Quite a lot are children’s books which some adults choose to claim have grown-up value. Others are faddish frippery that came and went – like BJ’s Diary. Personally I have never liked Tolkien and therefore JK Rowling – I had enough of myths as a student. So of the rest I’ve probably read about 70% – but not all with pleasure!
Hear, hear! Pity Stieg can’t write any more!
Like Janus, probably about 70 per cent, not many recent works, but a lot outside this very limited selection – Flemming, Wheatley, Ransome, for example.
Janus, I didn’t like the first and haven’t bothered with the rest of that ‘excellent trilogy’
I’ve seen the BBC list recently and I think I counted I’d read 47, though many years ago.
I’ve read 64 from the list, the majority of them I read before before my mid-twenties as well, CWJ.
Bearsy, my entire schooldays were without television ’54-’65. Of course it had been invented, but it was considered a distraction from learning. If found in possession of comic magazines and books, there was some draconian penalty involving a cane and the lowering of trousers, and as a consequence reading “proper” books proved a relatively painless, indeed enjoyable, experience!
A level English in the mid-sixties ivolved the study of eight books over two years, as did A level French, so 16 are accounted for my what was hardly voluntary reading. A lot on the list is aimed at the juvenile market, and probably put there to allow those assessing themselves not to become so depressed they jump out the window of their College of Higher Learning!
Maybe we should produce our own list of which 100 books should be on such a list?
Yup, Janus, I’ve read the Bible all the way through, from cover to cover, many times.
Know thine enemy! 😎
John Buchan is not on the list, nor Jules Verne, H G Wells, Kipling, – some list!
I agree with Zen, the list is just elitest box ticking, what about books you return to time and time again, that surely would define a favourite book.
Go for it – compile a NotMyT list! What do all those left-wing luvvies in the BBC know about literacy in any case?
I’ve read about 40 of the above list.
I have to say I’m also a bit surprised by the titles – some of them, like The Faraway Tree Collection, are children’s books that have not been ‘fashionable’ for many years and fantasy books, like Tolkein and Potter, do not appeal to many readers.
As Zen says, there are many excellent authors who have been omitted from the list – so I wonder just who decided that reading this particular selection is an indication of literacy – or illiteracy. Much as I enjoyed the Faraway Tree Collection , Tolkein and Potter I’d hardly call them anything other than ‘light reading’. But I’ve always believed that reading is all about enjoyment and not about ticking a ‘have-read’ box on any list at all.
I was amazed at how many of these “best books” I have read, though the Enid Blyton was a long time ago.And then she was considered totally non-PC by self-righteous librarians for quite some time. I don’t particularly like Hardy and find Zola’s “Germinal” totally depressing. I would add Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet. Wouldn’t “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” be part of the “Chronicles of Narnia”?
I do agree with you, Boadicea. Enjoyment is paramount. I’ve been obliged to read a fair number of books in English, French and German and there are several authors whose names still make me shudder. Just last night, however, I was rereading Dorothy L. Sayer’s “Strong Poison” and enjoying the writing as much as ever.
OMG – re- books read and re-read – Right Brain thinks it is very funny that I date and initial in pencil inside the back cover of many of my books. Thus I can track how often I have re-read so many of them, but only when I reach the end!
63, bizarre list. Harry bloody potter? who are they kidding?
If you think Germinal is depressing try L’Assommoir!
Where are all the 16th and 17th century authors?
Agree with zen, re #13, and a lot more.
BBC as usual have their head up their arse whistling dixie to their prostrate.
The fact that the BBC thinks that this particular list is significant tells you a lot.
What about Graham Greene and Eric Ambler?
I’ve read 42 of that list, but I agree with many of the comments about the significance. No Kipling*? Twain? Scott? Conan Doyle?
* None of the old, ‘Do you like Kipling?’ Slap! ‘Cheeky thing, I’m sure good girls don’t Kipple.’
Bearsy perhaps I mis-stated my thoughts, by interest it was to my interest and infantile some of the books are poor or aimed at young audiences so I probably would not want to read them now.
On the whole any reading is better than no reading and this list is really not the best of what is available
I would agree, CO, that “L’Assommoir” is even more depressing, but it’s not on the BBC list. I’ve had to read too much Zola. Do you suppose “Germinal” was chosen because it was made into a film a few years ago with Gerard Depardieu?
More than likely sheona, very few have read the whole Rougon Maquart series by Zola, too ‘f’ing depressing by half!
I read them at Uni on behest of what would become incumbent no 1! Should have realised and dumped him straight away. I do own three of them, (books besides husbands). The Debacle is particularly cheerful too! A real bag of laughs. Bloody BBC.
I’ve read far too many of the obscure Russians too! Blimey, nowadays I’d rather do killer sudoko!
Throat cutting in another genre.