> The Things You Can Read: 100 Books Suggested by the BBC

The Things You Can Read welcomes you and thanks you for your readership. We, here at The Things You Can Read, ask your help, if you visit our site regularly, please follow us either via email or Google Friend Connect.  Launched on June 7, 2012, our site has already attracted a great deal of attention.  One of the goals of the site is to feature reviews of Children's Picture Books, Young Adult novels and Adult Literary Fiction/Nonfiction.  A second goal for the blog is to be a resource for teachers of English and writing--with examples of student created writing, writing tips, resource links, and the opportunity to pick the brain of a seasoned English teacher.  To spice things up...every now and then, we'll also include random quotes and thoughts on education and life in general, but our ultimate goal is to reach out into the blogosphere and be a "Book Whisperer" and "Writing Whisperer" to children and adults of all ages.   Thank you for your readership.  Here is to a lifetime filled with reading and writing.

Saturday, March 16, 2013

100 Books Suggested by the BBC




The BBC Book List Challenge
The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books on this list. How many have you read?
According to Goodreads.com, "The average Goodreads member has read 23 out of 100 books on this list..."  Once again, how many have you read?  We have marked the books we've read with an asterisk *.  Two asterisks ** means we have read the book more than once.  Our grand total thus far is twenty-seven and a half (271/2) because we have read only three of the Harry Potter series.  However, many of the books listed here are on our list of TBR (To Be Read) books on our Classics Challenge Page, which means we will be ticking them off by 2017!  Don't forget to visit our  Classics Challenge Page.  Now here is the list...
The BBC Book List Challenge
Vintage Image Pink Rose Leaf Clip Art
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien-currently reading
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte* 
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (read first three) 
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee** 
6 The Bible-currently reading 
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell 
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X
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 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 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 - Aleandre 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-Eupery 
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 

Again, let us know what you think of the list  Give us your grand total.  We'd love to know where you are in making it through this list.  Granted, not all the books on the list are books we might want to read, but most are.  


Happy Reading!
Things You Can Read
Believe In Truth, Beauty, Freedom, Love, and the Power of Books!

6 comments:

  1. I read 40 and have seen many in movie form in addition. Does that count?
    Johanna van Zanten

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. 40, Wow! If you want to count movies, I don't have a problem with it. I need to get busy and start reading more!

      Delete
  2. I've got 49. I did better than I thought...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Amazing, 49 out of the 100! I hope I can get with it, and start ticking some of these off my list, pronto! You should be really proud of yourself.

      Delete
  3. I have seen "Life of Pi" movie which was based on a novel. It was an ultimate piece of work. I want to read many books listed on this blog. I have bookmarked this site for the future reference.

    Thanks,
    Henry Jordan
    The Equation game

    ReplyDelete

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