BBC Believes You've Only Read 6 of These Books (says someone...)

Sooo... I'm up to my elbows in fun stuff preparing for LOWC week (and also bird cages and fish tanks that need to be cleaned today -- not quite so fun, though rewarding ;P), but I just ran across this on a very old blog post from a now retired blogger and thought it looked super fast and actually rather interesting.

The story goes that BBC made a list of classics of which they don't believe people have read more than 6. I did a little quick research and I guess BBC never made any such claims *hmmph, never mind, that actually makes me happy ;)*, but it's still a highly interesting proposition.

So here goes!

The Rules:
1. Be honest.
2. Put an asterisk next to the ones you have read all the way through. Put an addition sign next to the ones you have started.
3. Tag as many people as these books that you have read.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen* (actually all 6 of her major works, and of course)
 2. Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte* (also Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte)
4. Temple of the Golden Pavilion - Yukio Mishima
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee*
6. The Story of the Eye - George Bataille
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte*
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. Adrift on the Nile - Naguib Mahfouz
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens* (and David Copperfield, Little Dorrit, etc.)
11. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott* (plus almost everything else she wrote)
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Rhinoceros - Eugene Ionesco
15. Baron in the Trees - Italo Calvino
16. The Master of Go - Yasunari Kawabata
17. Woman in the Dunes - Abe Kobo
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot (have read Silas Marner and Adam Bede)
21. Gogol's Wife - Tomasso Landolfi
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (have read all his short stories, I think)
23. Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy+
25. Ferdydurke - Gombrowicz
26. Narcissus and Goldmund - Herman Hesse
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky* (yessss, top favorite!)
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. The Jungle - Upton Sinclair
33. Tom Sawyer / Huck Finn* - Mark Twain (started TS, read HF)
34. Emma - Jane Austen*
35. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe*
36. Delta Wedding - Eudora Welty
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Naomi - Junichiro Tanizaki
39. Cosmicomics - Italo Calvino
40. The Joke - Milan Kundera
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. Labyrinths - Gorge Luis Borges
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. Under My Skin - Doris Lessing
46. Anne of Green Gables - L. M. Montgomery* (OF COURSE <3, plus all the others and tons of short stories etc.)
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy*
48. Don Quixote - Miguel Cervantes+ (ummm... I made it a long way in, but gave up when he started doing cartwheels in the nude -- as I recall it was some sort of penance and I just got sooo annoyed with the whole thing)
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Absalom Absalom - William Faulkner
51. Beloved - Toni Morrison
52. The Flounder - Gunther Grass
53. Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen*
55. My Name is Red - Orhan Pamuk
56. A Doll's House - Henrik Ibsen
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens* (really can't remember, but major scenes are really vivid, so I might as well have)
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Idiot - Fodor Dostoevesky
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman
64. Death on the Installment Plan - Celine
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas*
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Pedro Paramo - Juan Rulfo
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville+
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens*
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Metamorphosis - Kafka
74. Epitaph of a Small Winner - Machado De Assis
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Inferno - Dante* (the entire Divine Comedy in all three parts)
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome* (loved this entire series! well, as many as I could get my hands on ;))
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. The Light House - Virginia Woolf
80. Disgrace - John Maxwell Coetzee
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Zorba the Greek Nikos Kazantzakis
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Box Man - Abe Kobo
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. The Stranger - Camus
88. Acquainted with the Night - Heinrich Boll
89. Don't Call It Night - Amos Oz
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad* (another top favorite so like three times for sure -- also Lord Jim and some of his short stories)
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pychon
94. Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare* (and quite a bit more Shakespeare)
99. Faust - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
100. Metamorphosis - Ovid

Results:
22 read out of 100 (plus all the italic notes, i.e. more or lesser known works, so if that counts as something)
5 started

There're quite a few more I'd add to this list that I have read like Les Mis and stuff from Hemingway, Pearl S. Buck, Spenser, etc. Oh, and there're things like Pilgrim's Progress which I would've thought would be on here. (And if Anne and Alice are listed, I think Tolkien and Lewis -- and actually a bunch more of the gang like Stevenson, Collins, Doyle, Burnett, Baum, Milne, Gaskell, Wodehouse, etc. -- should be too, but that's how it goes, no list is ever complete. ;p)

~     ~     ~

Ha! And I just found the current version of this challenge on Goodreads and they've updated it to include a bunch of the ones I was just complaining about. So now I don't know whether I should feel pleased or foolish. But... on there (and sometimes counting instead a more obscure work I've read by a given author -- that's ok right? these are all fluid lists anyway ;D) I got 37 out of 100. So all in all, I'll decide I'm pleased.

I'm not tagging anyone, but if you'd like to grab it and leave a link in the comments I'd enjoy seeing your answers! And if you'd like to check out the other Goodreads one here's the link.

Ta ta for now!