BBC Book List

I absolutely love book lists. I love that I can go down the list and check off the ones I've read and highlight the one's that pique my interest. But it also makes me feel lazy...I mean, how many years have I used the excuse of 'no time' as a measly excuse for not reading? I guess since whenever I started to be overwhelmed by the amount of studying I had to do. I've noticed that I only ever read books during the summer now, and even then, I tend to be impatient and flip to the back before I get through the first three chapters. BAD HABITS DIE HARD. I'm too impatient with books. I haven't read an entire book through from cover to cover since a very long time ago.


I remember I used to get detentions at least every other day in Grade 4 because I'd read during math or something. I sure didn't understand math back then, but I lost myself in the vast worlds within my books, and I was happy during those short periods of time. I'm pretty sure I was depressed in Grade 4. I had no friends because the one friend I'd had had 'betrayed' me...dunno what it was about, but yunno those fights that kids have over stupid things...Anyway, yeah. I had no friends. I was a social outcast. I did really bad in school except in English. English! Loved the stuff. It was the only subject I felt good in, like I was good at it. I didn't really understand math until I went to some classes outside of school in Grades 5 and 6. Science in elementary school isn't really science...and socials was just plain boring. Government stuff. Yucky. But English was good. I liked reading comprehension, writing stories, etcetc. And then Grade 5 started. I was determined to be perfect. A fresh start. And that happened. I found new friends, excelled in school, and made myself the reputation of being a nerd. Oh well. Better than the loser I used to be, right? But during all that, I forgot to leave myself time to read. I'd sneak in a couple hours here and then, but it wasn't then same as having a regular time to read. OH, we had silent reading at school (I loved it), but usually I'd spend it yakking with friends.

And now look at me. I haven't read any classics, nor any Jane Austen, nor The Lord of the Rings. Wasn't there supposed to be some checkpoint before I got to Grade 12, some point I wasn't supposed to be able to cross if I hadn't read this stuff?? No. This kinda thing, you gotta do yourself, and I'm hoping it's not too late to start madly reading through this list.

Oh yeah, the list. It's from BBC apparently, and I stumbled across it a couple days ago. Did you know, Sparknotes has a whole student community called Sparklife, and they're a huge group of kids from all over the Internet, sharing what they know and learning from each other...and you know what? They all sound freaking smart. Because they quote books and movies and are all so into literature, and I feel ignorant whenever I go on and read their stuff. They all sound so much more cultured than me, it's unbelievable. I hadn't even heard of half the stuff they talked about before I did some research. That's one reason I want to read all this. I've repeatedly heard of the titles of these books, and most of their general plotlines, but you really don't know a book until you read the inside. Yeah, I know, this is common knowledge, but I seem to have forgotten this VERY IMPORTANT FACT for the past few years of my life.

My goal is to read at least 12 books a year, one a month minimum. They say most people will only have read 6 out of the 100 books listed here...hmm. Let's see. I'll bold the ones I've read completely and italicize the ones I either have and haven't read yet, or the ones I haven't finished.

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 (The Golden Compass)
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 (Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Twelfth Night)
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
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
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
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 – 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 – 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 Adam
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I think that's around 10 items I can check off. Hmm...only 10%! Not too good.
These days I'm reading The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje) and just recently finished Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury). I was so happy when I was done 451, because it had been so good and I had finally figured out how to read properly again. The trick, for me at least, is to keep forging on ahead even if it doesn't make sense in the beginning, because it's like any other subject; at first you don't know any of the 'terms' (ie. names, places, things) at all, but once you keep reviewing and seeing the same names repeated over and over, you get used to them and feel as if you're actually in their world. It's a good feeling, to be in someone else's world for a few moments; it's different from a movie plot, because you get to figure some things out yourself, and you actually gotta do a bit of work to know what's going on whereas in movies all you do is sit there and stare at a screen for two hours. Also, it's so much easier to curl up with a book at school or in a little corner, and not be noticed by anyone. With something on a screen, people tend to crowd around you and watch with you. Yech. I don't really like people looking over my shoulder at what I'm doing. Guess it's because they tend to breathe down your neck...which is awkward.

Anyhow, I gotta run now, but I think, after reading these books, I'll start doing mini-reports on them here! Fun stuff.

PS. On Sparklife, there's a girl doing a column called 'One year, one hundred books' and that's where I got this idea. Although I don't have time to read a hundred books per year, I'll make do with just 12 and see how that goes. Who knows, I might become faster after a while!

Update: Okay, so a couple months has passed since I posted this, so I'm going to go down the list again and see what other books I can check off now!

Also, the teachers at my school decided to have boxes of free books out during exams, which made exam week much better, at least for me...I managed to get an entire box home! Granted, it was quite a bit of an arm workout. My bookshelves are now just about bursting at the seams.

Update Sept 2014: Well, I think this time around I can check off around 17 books. Not much improvement, but it's a start. I think I'll make it a personal goal to read at least 80% of these before I graduate from university.