The Top 100 Classic Books - How Many Have You Read?
Posted: Wednesday, February 18, 2009
by Stephany Springer
A while back, the BBC published a list of the top 100 books that have been published.
According to the article, the average person has only actually read six of these novels.
How well do you fare in this list? The following is their list of the top 100 books of all time.
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 (just parts, not in entirety)
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 (some titles, not all)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
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 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 Meany - 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 X,
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 Alborn
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
Most of these books are required reading for most schools at different levels so the number being at only six is kind of disturbing.
Add to that, the fact so many books that weren't listed in the top 100. Where is Hemmingway, Faulkner, Camus or Hawthorne?
This is the problem with these lists. They are so subjective and random. Why does the media continue to do them?
What are your thoughts? What book shouldn't of made the list or what book should be on the list? Be sure to leave your thoughts in the comment section below.
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More commentsI'm only 17 and I've read 12...double the number of the average person...
That's...really sad.im 12 and ive read bout 8
I'm proud to say I'm only 15 & I've read 10 of thes books & the majority of them were for pleasure and not for school.
I'm only 12 and I've read 142 out of 100 of these books. God, people suck. Where are the Norse Sagas? The Greek epics? The Chinese mythos? No Thomas Pyncheon, Nietzsche, Aquinas, Hobbes, Dafoe, Johnathon Swift, Milton, Fowler, Marlowe, Sade, Chaucer or Brothers Grimm?That is what I am wondering.
Note #s 33 and 36.
Way to go, Aunty Beeb.PS to the above...
Note #s 14 and 98 as well, courtesy of the BBC Department of Redundancy Department.
If you give points 1 - 100 for places in the top 100
The Author ratings are:
No. 1) Charles Dickens 326
2) Jane Austen 277
3) George Orwell 151
4) Leo Tolstoy 145
5) John Steinbeck 111
6) Sheakspeare 88
6? What's wrong with people!?!?!
I've read way more than that, (I'm too lazy to count, but around 20, give or take.) and I haven't even graduated from high school yet!
And where's Robinson Crusoe? Call of the Wild? Bambi? A Wrinkle in Time? I love all of those books, and they totally deserve space here.
im 12 i've read 25, but HP really?
Harry Potter? Narnia?. Is this a joke?
I find it strange that such books as Harry Potter are on this list when The Jungle, Red Badge of Courage, or As I lay Dying would have done better on a classics list. Don Quixote, The Scarlet Letter, and House of the Seven Gables isn't even on this list, but Winnie the Pooh is? The Color Purple Instead of The Prisoner of Zenda? Memoirs of a Geisha and not Old Man and the Sea or even A Farewell to Arms? When you think classic literature, you think well written literature. When you think classic literature you don't children's books either. As far as most people reading only six books on this list I highly doubt that, I read 27 of these book listed for a single year of school.
I've read at least half of this list -- I LOVE reading and ALWAYS have a book with me. I've also read an incredible amount NOT on the list. As with everything, it's a signpost but not an accurate gauge of people's reading. Self help books? How to books? Textbooks? Horror? History? These weren't on the list.
It is most observant of you to find this list and comment about it. Most enlightening. Perhaps you should have your own list of recommended reading!
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