Hey! This post isn’t related to NaNoWriMo, this month’s defining project, but if you want to know how that’s getting along you can read my daily updates over on Patreon.
Back in the youthful years of the yesterlands, I had a blog dedicated to book reviews, TV reviews, and long descriptive essays on my family holidays to Welsh cottages. I was poring over some of my old posts recently, on a bit of a nostalgia trip, when I came across a reponse I’d made to this meme – a challenge list of 100 books to read before you die, inspired by the BBC’s Big Read survey all the way back in 2003 (the distant past). The original meme claims that the average person has only read six out of the 100, though I’m not super confident on the legitimacy of that statistic.
At the time of that original post – 7th November 2011 – I had read eight books out of the 100. I thought it would be fun to come back to this list eight years later, and see how much further I’ve progressed towards going to the grave satisfied with my choice of literature. The list works like this: bold books are texts I had read at the time of the original post, whereas the books bolded in blue are new additions to the list. Italicized books are books I’ve partially read, but never finished (something which I abhor doing and yet still, frequently, do).
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
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 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
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 – C.S. 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
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’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 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
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 Shaskespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor HS
This update tells me I’ve now read 17 books from the list, which means I’ve read nine new Big 100 books over the last eight years! This is incredibly upsetting. If I had read one fewer, we could’ve had some really fun 8/8/8 symmetry going on, but it seems that isn’t to be. Once again, the universe thwarts my attempts to divine its patterns and logic.
Having said that, remembering and reflecting on this list is reminding me how many great and influential works of literature there are that I’ve never even picked up. How have I still never even started To Kill a Mockingbird? Like, what’s up with that? So I’m going to set a ceremonial deadline – I’ll return to this list, another eight years down the line (I’ll be 31. Christ) and, by then, have read another 10 books at least from the remaining selection. Can it be done? Yeah! Will it be done! I’ll probably forget! But it’s nice to at least think about making an attempt.
That’s all from me today – hope the world is treating you kindly! Let me know your thoughts on the Big 100 if you’re so inclined. Or don’t. Just do whatever!
-Alex xo
