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  • irishtimes.com - Posted: November 29, 2010 @ 9:07 pm

    Read seven books and feel superior to your fellow man

    Laurence Mackin

    We’re a bit slow on the uptake on this, but a lovely little meme (is that what this is called online savvy people?) has being doing the social-network rounds of late.

    Incidentally, doesn’t that make it sound glamorous? Except instead of drinks at an opening night and people dressed to the nines, it’s people in bed, wrapped up against the cold with just the warmth of a laptop screen and the wit of Twitter to keep them going, face lit up milkily by artificial light while the tea cools to a sludge and the biscuits migrate from plate to crummy, duvet existence.

    But I digress – the BBC came up with a top 100 books of all time, in it’s Big Read survey, and as to be expected it’s packed with bilge. Oh alright, it’s actually quite high brow, this being the BBC (and anyway how does one pack bilge?), but there are still a decent handful of stinkers in there to make the literary snobs (ie me and probably you) feel nice and smug, which warms us up quicker than any laptop screen. And, by the by, the list doesn’t even include the greatest book of all time. Then, in a follow-up survey, the BBC found that on average people had read only six books from the list.

    So many have you read? Go on, boast a little. That list in full:

    1. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
    2. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
    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
    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. 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
    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 – Alexandre Dumas
    66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
    67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
    68. Bridget Jones’ 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
    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 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


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