BBC Top 100 English Novels

Cafe Society
21

All of them?

22

One of my FB friends threw this book down with 50 pages to go but didn’t explain why. Is there something aggravating about it that divides opinion?

I’ve read 26. A couple I thought I’d read but turns out I’d seen the movie:rolleyes:

23

Twenty five - mostly the children’s books, which I read as a child, and some that were required reading in school, plus all the Dickens (except Christmas Carol), a bunch of the Pratchetts and a few miscellaneous.

24

I’ve read 40 of them. Or maybe more. I read like, five Discworld novels when my friends were insisting that they were REALLY GOOD and eventually it would click and I would not find them trite and boring. (Eventually I gave up when it became clear to me that no matter how many I read, they were never going to get funny.) I know I read at least one on the list, but I may have read more, as they all kind of melded together in my head.

Overall, it is a pretty silly list.

25

I have read only 31. There’s not a lot that I haven’t read that I want to, however.

What would be more interesting would be a list of top 100 must reads as voted by Dopers.

26

My score is severely hampered by the fact I spurn children’s fantasy tosh, so no Pratchett, Tolkein, Rowling. But to make up for it, my favourite book of all time is* A Suitable Boy*, which must count for five of the others at the very least.

27

I note that this list is a list of the nation’s best-loved books, not best books. There’s some crap on that list. Also, it’s not a list of books in English - there are some translations on the list - but of books loved by the English.

28

Gosh, you’re cool.

29

Finegans Wake counts for 5.
Where’s Gravitys rainbow?

30

On my nightstand, where it’s been for the last 10 years, with a bookmark at page 88.

31

I loved it and read it right away. Pynchon has not been prolific.

32

28, some of them multiple times.
It’s a weird list. There are a lot of others you’d think would be on it.

Read War and Peace. Life is not too short – you’ve probably read the equivalent in number of words, and Tolstoy’s take on napoleon and History is worth the trouble.

33

54

I didn’t count anything I didn’t finish, so no Ulysses or One Hundred Years of Solitude. Hey, maybe I could combine the aborted efforts and make it 55.

34

In what sense is it a weird list? Everyone in the U.K. was allowed to vote (by phone, online, and texting), and three-quarters of a million of them did:

Given that, the choices are pretty much exactly what you would have expected.

Here’s a similar poll in Germany:

Here’s the equivalent in Hungary:

And here’s one for Bulgaria:

This one is for Australia:

http://www.abc.net.au/myfavouritebook/top10/100.htm

This is one for France, although it appears that the books that appeared on the ballot were preselected to make it less purely a matter of popularity:

35

Where does it say that?

I’ve seen the “The BBC says most people have only read six of these books” thing going round on Facebook, but I can’t see where the BBC says any such thing.

36

Hmmm, exact same number as me, and two books I’ve also bailed on. I’m with you on combining them!

37

You’ve never heard of His Dark Materials?

Wow.

It’s brand new, basically.

38

  2. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien

  3. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

  4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

  5. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

  6. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis

  7. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

  8. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

  9. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger

  10. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame

  11. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

  12. Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling

  13. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien

  14. Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy

  15. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

  16. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald

  17. Animal Farm, George Orwell

  18. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

  19. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

  20. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding

  21. Bleak House, Charles Dickens

  22. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

  23. On The Road, Jack Kerouac

39

I’ve read 27 for sure, with a couple of maybes (I don’t remember exactly which Discworld books I’ve read, for instance). I guess if I don’t remember what the book is about, it probably shouldn’t count anyways.

40

I’ve read 23, started 8, never heard of 25, and proofread 4 (including A Christmas Carol, though not, I hasten to add, the original edition…), 5 if you count the novelization of the movie of Great Expectations.