The BBC test: how literary are you? (Based on a somewhat skewed reading list compiled from British listeners & viewers)

 This list had been making the rounds among my Facebook friends, one of whom actually read more than 80% of these titles.  How much of that is his own inherent brilliance (which he has in spades) and how much of that is chalked up to the fact that he's always on the prowl for English-language books whilst living in Germany, I couldn't possibly say.  But here's the list...

 The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions:

• Copy this list.
• Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.
• Italicise the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.
• Tag other book nerds.

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

The King James Bible

Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte  

Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) – George Orwell

His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 
Little Women – Louisa M Alcott 

Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

Complete Works of Shakespeare

Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk

Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger 
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

Middlemarch – George Eliot

Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

The Great Gatsby- F. Scott Fitzgerald

War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll 

The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

David Copperfield – Charles Dickens 
Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
Emma -Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis 

The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden  

Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne

Animal Farm – George Orwell
The DaVinci Code – Dan Brown

One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (God knows I TRIED!)

A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving 

The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery  

Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Atonement – Ian McEwan

Life of Pi – Yann Martel

Dune – Frank Herbert

Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

On The Road – Jack Kerouac

Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Dracula – Bram Stoker

The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett 

Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

Ulysses – James Joyce

The Inferno – Dante

Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

Germinal – Emile Zola

Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

Possession – AS Byatt

A Christmas Carol- Charles Dickens  

Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte's Web- E.B. White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 
The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Watership Down – Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Considering I'm a bookseller, and therefore practically a professional reader, I'm disappointed by my showing;  on the other hand, this is one of the most bizarre compilations of 100 Books I've ever seen.  Really, BBC?  I get that you're trying to get a mix of classics and modern fiction, and that you're trying to represent literature for both adults and children, but how did Dan Brown, Helen Fielding, and Mitch Albom end up on this list?  Were you otherwise afraid that the average responder had only read 3 of the titles?  And what's with the redundancy with Shakespeare and C. S. Lewis?   

Still, I'm surprised with so many of my omissions on this list.  I've read very little Hardy and none of Eliot and it shows here.  Dickens, mezzo-mezzo, but just not the ones on this list for the most part.  1984, anything by the dead Russians-- I really should have read these and more.  Alas!