The 100 Greatest books, according to the BBC (fake list)

[Cain]

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (wtf?)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (wtf?)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
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
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
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
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis -
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 -
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown – (wtf?)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
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
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
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
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
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
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

[hooplala]

The complete works of Shakespeare is kind of a cheat.

And, On The Road?  Please.

[Cain]

The Complete Works is doubly a cheat when you realize Hamlet is also in the list, as a stand alone work.  You can at least make a case for a series like LOTR or His Dark Materials or even Harry Potter (as much as it shouldn't even be on the list) in that they are part of a wider story arc, with the same characters and overall plot progression through the series.  But that is certainly not the case with Shakespeare.

[hooplala]

Plus, they're plays... I don't see Death of a Salesman on there anywhere.

And, really... Dracula?

[Thurnez Isa]

I think the BBC is fucking with people

[Cain]

Fucking with their notions of genre? /chainwieldingtransgenderfurry

[Iason Ouabache]

I've read 16 of them which is much higher than I thought it would be.

Also, wtf?

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

[Fuquad]

The real list can be found here.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml

[Cain]

That's the list from 2003.

[East Coast Hustle]

I've got 17 of them so far, and no plans on reading the 83 pieces of schlock that I never wanted to read in the first place.

[Phineas T. Poxwattle]

Nice, I've read 18 of 'em

Though the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe is listed separately from The chronicles of Narnia series. WTF?

this list is pretty fubar, but I'm pleased that it's mostly relatively newer stuff and not all dusty 19th century lit.

[Fuquad]

That's the list from 2003.

yes it is.

And your list comes from where?

[Elder Iptuous]

The complete works of Shakespeare is kind of a cheat.

"The Bible" is also a pretty lousy cheat.  That collection of books isn't even authored by the same person.  Or in the same century.  Or agreed upon as to its composition....

[Cain]

That's the list from 2003.

yes it is.

And your list comes from where?

Internet fakers.  My apologies, I just did some research.  Either way, its an "interesting" list.

[Mangrove]

Route 66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac


Fixed for lame joke