Where do you fall in the list? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here.
Look at the list and put an * after those you have read.
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 (The entire thing!) *
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwel*
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Total: 6
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 Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
Total so far: 9
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
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 *
Total so far: 12
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 *
Total so far: 17
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
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
Total so far: 20
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
Total so far: 22
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
Total so far: 24
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
Total so far: 26
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
Total so far: 29
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 - Aleandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare *
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl *
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Total: 33
.I hope that if you decide to take the challenge of answering this please link here so I can read your progress along BBC's list (I say that like it really was a standard of excellence, which it's not--but it's interesting!).
I will say this for a totally secular and in some ways irrelevant list! Some of my most favorite books are found here:
Harry Potter Series
Anne of Green Gables
Pride and Prejudice
Persuasion
Narnia
The Lord of the Rings
The Hobbit
A Christmas Carol
Sherlock Holmes
The Secret Garden
The Bible...obviously!
And some I wish I had never come into contact with:
Heart of Darkness
Rebecca
Lord of the Flies
So even though many of the books I will never read:
His dark Materials
Atonement
The Davinci Code
The five People You meet in Heaven
I am still looking forward to reading many on this list:
The three Musketeers
Crime and Punishment
Catcher in the Rye
Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
Gone with The Wind
Watership Down
But as much as I would love the bragging rights (more proof of the distance I have before I am sanctified) I am not going to read a book on this list unless it suits my fancy. And maybe that will turn out good or it may bomb...either way I will have read some great creative works from God's creatures and will probably learn even more about human nature and depravity and the need for the gospel...because Like it or not most of these authors have impacted the culture and when we meet people and befriend them and start sharing our lives, I want to know this world I live in and why I follow Christ alone.
I truly believe we must live fully in this world in a redemptive sense if we are honestly to convey the amazing truths of the gospel to our neighbors--we cannot do this if we hold ourselves and our heart apart. If we are becoming the image of Christ then we are becoming what He was, what creation was meant to be before the fall. In our redemption from sin God is working many miracles, one of which is making us to look like what He intended us to be at creation, through our redemption and our daily sanctification into the image of Christ. Just some thoughts that really affect the way I read today. I am not one of those people who only reads "christian" books, but I do read them some. I want to be widely read and more familiar with the realities of redemption because of that reading. So Why not make some reading goals and enjoy a look at humanity which you may not have had before and then see what happens to your heart as it expands with a burden for your own nation and the lost who reside within her boarders.
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