Have I read the “classics”?
You know I can’t say no to lists and statistics.
I originally started compiling this list almost 2 years ago as a blog entry, but since I just got tagged by Andrle on Facebook, I thought I’d finally finish and post it. I’m not sure on the provenance of the list, other than I know it’s from one year of the BBC Big Read project. I found one version of the list on their website, but that differs slightly from the list below (which oddly enough is the same ordered ranking as the version with which I was just tagged).
There are of course numerous quibbles to be had with the exact construction (and ordering) of the list, but it’s a reasonable metric for one’s familiarity with “the classics”. It also appears to avoid the common online book list voting problem where Ayn Rand ends up all over the top 10. This particular list is skewed towards 19th Century British classics, with a few books that were very trendy at the time it was compiled (for example, on a list from about two years ago I would have expected to see Eat, Pray, Love in the Top 100). There are also several books I’ve never heard of, although in some cases I’m familiar with the author.
I’ve read 30 of the entries (some of which are multiple books), started but never finished 3 books, and been exposed to another 13 in various other forms. Not too shabby for an engineer who took effectively one humanities course in college, and that in another language! If anything, it’s a demonstration of the quality of my high school’s required English program, that I was exposed to a number of books I otherwise wouldn’t have elected to read. That all said, I don’t read a lot of fiction these days, and when I do, it’s typically new fiction. That means there’s a good chance I’ll never tackle any of those that I’m missing, or never finished.
Full list below the cut.
Legend
Read in its entirety
Started but never finished
Exposed to in another form (movie, children’s condensed, or comic book version)
[my comments]
List
- Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
- The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien [all three at least 4 times]
- Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
- Harry Potter series – JK Rowling [all 7, some 3-4 times]
- To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee [at least twice]
- The Bible [a lot, but not the more obscure books]
- Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
- Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
- His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman [all 3, at least twice]
- Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
- Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
- Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
- Complete Works of Shakespeare [been in and read various plays, but nowhere near complete]
- Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
- The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien [at least 3 times
- Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
- Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
- The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger [the movie sucked]
- Middlemarch – George Eliot
- Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
- The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
- Bleak House – Charles Dickens
- War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy [gift from mom, too thick for middle school me]
- The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams [twice, first time at the right age]
- Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
- Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky [tried tackling this twice]
- Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
- Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll [read Through the Looking Glass as well, plus multiple movie versions]
- The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame [Just the Disney movie]
- Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
- David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
- Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis [read all 7 at least 6 times]
- Emma – Jane Austen [movie]
- Persuasion – Jane Austen
- The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis [read at least 6 times]
- The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
- Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
- Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
- Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne [various stories, plus the Disney animated and live action episodes]
- Animal Farm – George Orwell
- The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown [never saw the movie though]
- One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- 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 [plus both movie versions]
- 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 [read twice]
- 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 [plus the movie]
- Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
- The Secret History – Donna Tartt
- The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
- Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas [just the recent movie]
- 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 [classic movie version, plus blog reordering, plus kid novel version]
- The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett [’90s movie version]
- 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 [read it, but the Muppet version is the best]
- 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 – EB White
- The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
- Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [read a number of collected stories, but definitely not all]
- The Faraway Tree Collectaion – Enid Blyton
- Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
- The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery [can’t remember why I didn’t finish it – boring?]
- The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
- Watership Down – Richard Adams [plus the trippy movie]
- A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
- A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
- The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas [Classics Illustrated comic book!]
- Hamlet – William Shakespeare
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl [plus both movie versions]
- Les Miserables – Victor Hugo [musical]
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