I recently visited (crossover, hahaha) some blogs at Blogger where I follow some Filipino book bloggers who also belong to my book club, Flips Flipping Pages. Most of them are not my friends but their blog posts about books are a joy to read. For the past six or seven years, I haven’t attended their monthly discussion but I get updated through FFP’s page on Facebook. Then I saw this list somewhere, BBC’s top 100 books you have to read before you die. I wonder why there is that phrase “before you die”, I am not in a hurry to read books just because it is a must to read them before you take your last breath. I read books because they give me that endless joy and discovery about other people and other places. I’ve seen similar list of places you have to visit before you die. I think this is BBC’s latest list because prior to this they have included the titles of the seven Harry Potter books. Blame it on how curious I am if I made a dent on their list. Twenty seven books and if I were to add the other six books of JK Rowling which they have listed as a series, that would be 33 total. Not bad, not bad at all. Here’s the list I copied from a site (I could not remember now) on BBC’s top 100. Some books I have highlighted are mine and some were borrowed from the UST Library and read them when I was still in college. Harry Potter’s hardbound copies are Nissa’s collections.
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 (still reading it daily)
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 – on my TBR list
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 – on my TBR list
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy – on my TBR list
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 Caroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy – in the middle of reading it
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 – 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 – on my TBR list
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery – read three volumes
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding – on my TBR list
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan – couldn’t get further than chapter 2
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel – watched the movie adaptation and was not inclined to read it
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 – on my TBR list
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 – haven’t finished reading it yet
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 – on my TBR list
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 (In French)
– read it several times but not in French
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
If you ask me, I would not even include Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code on the list and Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones would not even make it to the top 500 but that’s me talking.
How many books have you read on this list?
Da Vinci Code is included because the story telling is amazing, just like Harry Potter , Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Dune, And The Lord of the Rings., . JK Rowling is no Shakespeare, but the story telling is so wonderful. These books are enjoyable and a joy to read because of the wonderful plotline.and the great imagination that has been put into words.
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Reading Da Vinci Code is the first and last time I read a book by Dan Brown. The story line was not really my cup of tea, something in the plot of the book did not resonate with me. I enjoyed the Harry Potter series as much as the three books by Suzanne Collins.
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I like the mystery plotline of Da Vinci Code. Maybe you don’t lke the religious aspect of the story ?
You could have enjoyed harry Potter more if you had started reading it when it was first published… then waited for the next one to come. I was 9 years old when I read the first book. The joy of reading the next one to find out what happens was priceless. We always bought the book on the first day , at 12 midnight !
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That’s what we did with the series because every time a book is published, Nissa usually reserve a copy at National Bookstore, gusto niya kasi hardbound copies.We took turns reading a particular volume until the next publication. and we watched all the movie adaptations too. As for the former, it might have been great for fiction writing for some but not for all readers of the book. and yes there is that religious aspect for one thing. When I read it, my initial reaction was, “what’s the hype all about?”.
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6 pa lang ako. Hehe. I tried to read most of them before (10 years ago) pero I failed. I always got sleepy. Ang lalim kasi ng English. Lol.
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Haha, yung mga classics nga ganun.I am reading Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy pero hindi tuloy tuloy. I often get distracted by other books that are short read.
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I would add the unabridged version of Don Quixote by Cervantes.
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Thank you for the suggestion.
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I’ve read 35 of these. Am currently reading Vanity Fair by Thackeray. But some of these on the list, I have no desire at all to read. 🙂
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That’s nice to know. Some of us have our own reading genre when it comes to books. We look for something where we could relate to the story. It’s all a matter of choice. I have no desire to read them all too just like you. Have you read A Tree Grows In Brooklyn by Betty Smith? That’s one lovely classics. I read it when I was in college, borrowed a copy from the university library. I was lucky to find a paperback edition several years ago on a book sale.
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I have not read A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, but that is one that I would like to read.
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One of the best books I’ve ever read!
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I have read quite a few of the books on your list, even the contemporary listings. Being dyslexic, reading is a chore for me, but good literature is good literature!
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Thank you Donna! I am sorry to hear about your being dyslexic.Reading is such a pleasure when you have the time but there are other hobbies that you get to enjoy too. You always take stunning photos of gardens.
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Just checked the list, Arlene. I have read 59 of those. I didn’t count all of Shakespeare, as I haven’t read everything, though I did study the Bible for many years when I was younger, so put that in!
Best wishes, Pete.
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Wow, you’re such a wide reader Pete! The only time I read Shakespeare was when we were studying it in our Literature subject. For me, the Bible is not meant to be read all in one go, it’s savored on a day to day basis.
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I read most of those before I was 30. The majority of the Shakespeare was at school, but I read it outside too. The Wasp Factory is a great modern read.
Best wishes, Pete.
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I haven’t heard of The Wasp Factory Pete. Will try to look for it here. I am in the middle of reading Magonia, a different kind of story and my first book of the author, Maria Dahvana Headley. It’s like reading a Neil Gaiman book.
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