Random book-based meme

[awmperry]

Found this one on Facebook just now. And, well, I've got nothing better to do just now, so...

Now, I know nothing of this list's provenance; it's apparently a list of 100 books that the BBC thinks everyone should have read, and that most people won't have. I've rejigged the markings a bit for clarity.

In the box at the start of each line, insert a character as follows:
x - Read
+ - Read and enjoyed/liked
* - In my bookcase but unread / planned
- - Read and disliked
F - Seen the film
(If you've both read the book and seen the film, might as well just mark the book.)

Then tot up the ones you've read, and... well, that's about it.

[F]  1 - Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen  (Tedium on a tape.)
[+]  2 - The Lord of the Rings - J R R Tolkien  (Of course.)
[ ]  3 - Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
[x]  4 - Harry Potter series - J K Rowling  (Yup. Good stories, not so good writing, and the mother of all letdowns in book seven.)
[ ]  5 - To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
[x]  6 - The Bible  (Bits of. I filed it under "fiction".)
[ ]  7 - Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
[x]  8 - Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell  (Yup. Can't remember much of it. Or maybe that's what they want me to think.)
[ ]  9 - His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
[x]  10 - Great Expectations - Charles Dickens  (Read in class. Pretty dull, but has its moments.)

[ ]  11 - Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
[ ]  12 - Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
[*]  13 - Catch 22 - Joseph Heller  (I keep meaning to read this one, if only to find out who bloody Yossarian is.)
[x]  14 - Complete Works of Shakespeare - William Shakespeare  (Not all of them. But quite a few.)
[x]  15 - Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier  (Can't remember much about it, though.)
[x]  16 - The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien  (Long ago.)
[ ]  17 - Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
[-]  18 - Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger  (Pretentious, dull twaddle.)
[ ]  19 - The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
[ ]  20 - Middlemarch - George Eliot

[F]  21 - Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell  (Frankly, folks, I don't give a damn.)
[x]  22 - The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald  (Also dull. Why are the famous, "good" books always dull?)
[ ]  23 - Bleak House - Charles Dickens
[x]  24 - War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy  (Believe it or not. Again, can't remember much of it.)
[+]  25 - The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams  (It never really grabbed me, but rereads have been worthwhile if not revelatory.)
[x]  26 - Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh  (Waugh had some brilliant books, like The Loved One and Scoop, but Brideshead never really caught me.)
[ ]  27 - Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
[-]  28 - Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
[+]  29 - Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll  (Carroll was a nutjob, clearly, but the books had a certain Goonish quality to them.)
[x]  30 - The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame  (Not bad - but the 1980s TV series was better.)

[-]  31 - Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy  (Or maybe I just saw the film. Either way, didn't like it much.)
[x]  32 - David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
[x]  33 - Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis  (Some)
[F]  34 - Emma - Jane Austen
[ ]  35 - Persuasion - Jane Austen
[x]  36 - The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis  (Yup. Again, I enjoyed the TV series more.)
[ ]  37 - The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
[-]  38 - Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres  (Not my thing.)
[ ]  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  (It's by no means great literature, and having this on the list instead of something by Terry Pratchett is pretty ridiculous, but it's good fun.)
[ ]  43 - One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez  (On the whole, I'm unlikely to enjoy books written by people who've won Nobel literature prizes. Fancy that.)
[ ]  44 - A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
[ ]  45 - The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
[x]  46 - Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery  (Many, many years ago.)
[ ]  47 - Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
[ ]  48 - The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
[-]  49 - Lord of the Flies - William Golding  (Ghastly, hateful book. An interesting sociological thought experiment, but I have my doubts about its realism.)
[ ]  50 - Atonement - Ian McEwan

[ ]  51 - Life of Pi - Yann Martel
[*]  52 - Dune - Frank Herbert  (I keep meaning to read it, but it's such a trudging read...)
[-]  53 - Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons  (Had to sit through the radio play too. Again, can't remember anything about it.)
[-]  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  (Great book. Not fun, but briskly written, and with a nice dry sense of humour.)
[*]  59 - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon  (I have Asperger; I really should have read this one, I suppose, but the whole premise always strikes me as rather dull.)
[ ]  60 - Love In The Time Of Cholera  (No, but they talked a lot about it in a film I enjoyed.)

[-]  61 - Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck  (I liked this better than Lord Of The Flies. But not by much.)
[ ]  62 - Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov  (Why is a book glorifying paedophilia on a must-read list?)
[ ]  63 - The Secret History - Donna Tartt
[ ]  64 - The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
[x]  65 - Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
[ ]  66 - On The Road - Jack Kerouac
[ ]  67 - Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
[F]  68 - Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding  (The film was bad enough.)
[ ]  69 - Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
[*]  70 - Moby Dick - Herman Melville

[x]  71 - Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens  (Who hasn't?)
[x]  72 - Dracula - Bram Stoker  (I was ten at the time. I still liked Mel Brooks' version better.)
[x]  73 - The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett  (Can't remember much of this one. Wasn't bad, though.)
[+]  74 - Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson  (I liked Bill Bryson, right up until his review of Stockholm that suggested he hadn't really been paying attention.)
[ ]  75 - Ulysses
[ ]  76 - The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath  (There's no way I'm reading Plath.)
[x]  77 - Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome  (Ages ago. Never liked it much.)
[ ]  78 - Germinal - Emile Zola
[ ]  79 - Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
[ ]  80 - Possession - AS Byatt

[x]  81 - A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens  (The Blackadder version was better. Or more fun, at least.)
[ ]  82 - Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
[ ]  83 - The Color Purple - Alice Walker
[ ]  84 - The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
[x]  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
[x]  89 - Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
[x]  90 - The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton  (My memory ain't what it used to be. It used to be me ears.)

[*]  91 - Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
[x]  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
[x]  97 - The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
[+]  98 - Hamlet - William Shakespeare  (We've already had the Collected Works. But okay.)
[-]  99 - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl  (Dahl was handy with medical shunts. Never liked his writing, though.)
[ ]  100 - Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

TOTAL: 44

Only 44%; that's quite reassuring, really. It means I haven't started thinking things are good just because the critics say they are... ;-)

So, what about the rest of you? Knowing some of you, there's bound to be someone with 100/100 out there...