A Supposed BBC Reading List

I saw this list on a friend's facebook page and thought I'd do it too. Evidently, the BBC figures that most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books (or series) listed. So you are supposed to go through the list and mark which books you've read. I don't know where the list came from or why they picked these books or why Hamlet is listed by itself while the rest of the Shakespeare is lumped together under "Complete Works."

I put an (x) next to books that I have read and a (-) next to books that I read way more than half of but never finished, or books that I know I read all of but don't remember at all so I really shouldn't claim to have read them.

At the end there are some pictures of Alton, so if that's the only reason you check this blog, I've got you covered.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (x)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (x)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (x)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (x)
6 The Bible (x)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (-) two of three
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (x)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (x)
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 Traveller’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 (x)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (x)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (-)four of 7
34 Emma - Jane Austen (x)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (x)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (x)
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 - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (x)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (x)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (x)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (x)
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (x)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (x)
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 (x)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog inthe Night-time -Mark Haddon (x)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (x)
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
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (x)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (x)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (x)
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 (x)
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 - EB White (x)
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 Bank
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
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (x)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I think that's 28 that I've read and about six more if we were playing horseshoes. There are a few in there that I've never heard of like The Faraway Tree Collection. What is that? And what's up with my baby-food cookbook Super Baby Food telling me to mix tahini with yogurt? Sounds gross.

There's an awful lot of Dickens on this BBC list, but I guess they're British, so....

The two books on the list that I'm most proud of reading are Ulysses and Moby Dick.

Brideshead Revisited is in my stack of books to read this year. And I'd like to read Winnie the Pooh to Alton in the next couple of years. We'll see if I read any others.

What are your favorites from the list? What book are you most proud of reading (or most ashamed that you haven't read)? Let me know in the comments. You can also comment on these pictures of my adorable son.

Here's Dad and Alton reading a book — No, David! — and playing a maraca:



This week we took Alton to a playground for the first time. In Golden Gate Park, he had his first ride on a swing, his first slide down a slide, and he got to play in the big boat with Dad.





Alton won't take a bottle. He thinks they are dumb. So we've decided to try and teach him how to drink milk from a sippy cup instead so dad can have a chance to feed him once in a while. Nobody's screaming, so that's an improvement. Of course he's spilling most of it down his front. But that's what bibs are for.



To avoid being pinched on St. Patrick's Day, Alton wore this little leprechaun number. Thanks for the new clothes, Aunt Sarah!



This week we tried the Johnny Jump Up seat for the first time. I'm so jealous. If they had adult-sized ones of these at gyms, I would totally exercise. Alton doesn't quite get it yet. So he kind of stands and swings and twists a little while he watches me cook.