Bookreading Savages

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. So how do my reading habits stack up? Am I really an uncooth boor after all?

1 The Bible-

2 The Lord of the Rings- X

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte -

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - X

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee -

6 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen -

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - X

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - X

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - X

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 - X

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks -

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger- X

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 - X

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy -

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - X

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh -

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky -

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - X

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - X

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Gahame -

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy -

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - X

33 Chronicles of Narnia - X

34 Emma - Jane Austen -

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen -

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - X Wait, who wrote this list?! The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a part of the Chronicles of Narnia! Stupid BBC, don't you know anything?

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - X Honestly, what is this book doing here? It was fine (execpt for the incredibly lame ending), but top 100 books?! You've got to be joking!

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres -

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - X

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne -

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell -

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - X

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - X

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving -

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery -

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood- X Yeay! Can-con.

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding -

50 Atonement- Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - X Yeay, even more Can-con.

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 - X

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley- X

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon -

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - X

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 - X

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding -

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie - X

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville -

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - X

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - X

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 - X This book should get way more props than it does!

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 - 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 - X

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- X Since they've already produced several versions of Hamlet, I thought the BBC would be well aware that the Prince of Denmark is, in fact, included in the complete works of Shakespeare (#14)... I call shenanigans on this list!

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - X

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo -

From the Philosopher’s Stone to the Deathly Hallows and back again

I’m 150 pages away from finishing Harry Potter and I’m not sure I like it.

Admittedly, I was quite sceptical when the series first came out. “Children’s books” I dismissed them as. “Not my cup of tea” I said. But after some light badgering in the Micronesia Mall, Jase convinced me to buy a cheap paperback copy of The Philosopher’s Stone to read on the plane coming back from Guam. I was an instant convert.

Five years and thousands of pages later, it’s almost come to its end and I’m having trouble coping. I even decided that I wanted to reread all the books before starting the last book in the series. Then, to draw out the task even more, I decided to reread the series in French. This certainly slowed me down a bit, and introduced words like “barn owl” and “cloak” into my French vocabulary. But nevertheless I persevered and in less than a year enjoyed reading À l’école des sorciers, La Chambre des secrets, Le Prisonnier d’Azkaban, La Coup de feu, L’Ordre du Phénix and Le Prince de sang-mélé as much as I did the first time around. I even debated reading them all in Spanish as well, but I knew full well I was just trying to buy time.

I have to recognise Ms Rowling for being an exceptional authoress. She imagined a world out of nothing. She created characters you identified with and then had them change and develop. The plot is highly complex, almost every element and detail becomes significant at a later point, yet the whole thing seems effortless. Without trying to be overly smaltzy, I have no choice but to call Harry Potter a masterwork of contemporary literature.

And in a few hours of reading, it will all be over. The characters won’t embark on new adventures. I’ll never know what happens after. It’ll be time to let go. Sniff.

The Moor's Last Sigh

This book was a re-read, so it's not quite the fairest review, but still an amazing book. Five pepperpots out of five for this Rushdie classic. (His best maybe?). Moraes Zogoiby spills his family secrets in fast forward reverse fashion from the Jewish expulsions of Spain and the steamy spicehills of Cochin to the glittering glass of the Bombay highlife.

I've heard through the rumour mill that a film is being made from this book, which has super-high, visually stunning potential. It would be a movie I would love to watch – but it would also be a movie that was about five-hours long. I'm not sure how this could be cut or edited to fit the silver screen, but if they can find a way to make it work, I'd be the first in line to buy my ticket.